The Seattle Art Museum presents the renowned conceptual artist, Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957), in his first US retrospective in over a decade. This survey highlights Ai’s artistic strategies for questioning forms of power, disrupting artistic canons, and challenging political authoritarianism. It features 130 works from the 1980s to the 2020s—across performance, photography, sculpture, and video. On view are iconic works such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Study of Perspective (1995-2011), Sunflower Seeds (2010), Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Gold) (2010), and Illumination (2019). There are large-scale installations made from deconstructed bicycles and images constructed with LEGO. Several works are making their international debut, including Shells (2022), The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in Green (2020), and The Cover Page of the Mueller Report, Submitted to Attorney General William Barr by Robert Mueller on March 22, 2019 (2019). In this show, organizing curator Foong Ping evaluates the visual and material hallmarks of this artist’s multifaceted practice to identify some principles that span the decades.

Zoom Webinar by FOONG Ping, Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum and Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Dr. Foong received a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and her experience spans the academic and curatorial realms.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies