If you've heard of Ai Weiwei the Chinese dissident lately tho' arrested 2 whole news moons
ago be sure that many are toiling to plant and nurture that seed and keep it growing with the competition. Our political minds have been washed clean by meltdown fears, fire and flood and tornado and a reset on the Peace Tower clock in Ottawa. Is there too much freedom going on to care for the one who dared raise his voice for China? 4 more years of business is good for business, let's not annoy our new friends with talk of human rights, let him drink his artist champagne under house arrest??? Speaking of freedom, when unknown foreign powers spend our middle class on swinging elections, exactly what do they consider success? How does it work on the ground, is it more like cloud-seeding or more paper folding magic? Is it manifest during elections, in many ridings, mostly or only in the ones Conservatives labelled "very ethnic"? Arrested April 3rd, 2011; why during an "Arab spring" - we in the West are distracted? It was summer 2008, the Beijing Olympics, perhaps when you first heard of the visionary architect while the camera zoomed out from the track & field to get a bird's eye view. Whose eyes do you suppose he wove that Bird's Nest for? "Why aren't you arrested?" a British reporter asked when he was opening his Sunflower Seeds at London's Tate, fall 2010. His arrest doesn't seem to have anything to do with any political action of his: or were these sunflower seeds what cost him his freedom, his crime to offer to feed you? Please do take 15 minutes to really chew on the video, get the taste. For foreign freedoms do know an other palette. Enjoy his imprisonment for days as I have, nourish yourself with nuances of Confucian sunflower as painted by a village of traditional porcelain artisans. 100,000,000 seeds to paint 1000 km from Beijing, the whole village has work. Mao bade his artists to paint him surrounded by sunflowers: in his political landscapes he was the sun, father knows best and warrior demigod - I like many who were politically conscious in the '80s have a nostalgia for the heady, nutty air of a prairie field of ripe sunflowers, Indian Summer baked into our best propaganda. I loved the super-real reds of flags furling and earthen yellows, Mao and Nixon posing for posterity in their personae but I was more impressed by what the Chinese artists could do with human work for perspective in the '70s. The two towering figures of 20th Century geopolitics looked small, grey and of common metal in the foreground of mighty tractors and radiant proletariat in fields of sun-kissed sunflowers. Emperors buried with 10,000 full size figurines, Mao as the photo-synthesist, all of a great people's philosophy and history of struggle are regenerated in Weiwei's seeds. Bookmark the YouTube page, think of this Tate video as Side One of this novel rock star's DSOTM. You will find these perfectly roasted and cleaned seeds good enough to eat right off the factory floor. Andy Warhol was beaming from a healing New York sky last weekend, witness to both Osama's afterlife judgement and the shimmering image of Ai Weiwei illuminating the silent wall of the Chinese Embassy in NYC, maybe you read it in the Wall Street Journal and followed the links. Green Party sunflowers bathe in the flickering of our YouTube communal fire, here you will find some real soul food that will have the endurance 10,000 terra cotta funereal soldiers of the emperor didn't. In 3,000 years these sunflower seeds will fire the imaginations of our descendants.
YouTube - Ai Weiwei, A Conversation
YouTube - Ai Weiwei: Sunflower seeds
One of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s better-known works is “Study of Perspective,” a series of first-person photographs in which the artist gives the finger to various landmarks around the world. Read more about artistic protests again Ai’s detention in WSJ’s China Real Time blog.
scenes from the video:
