Ai Weiwei: Colored Vases
I visited SFMOMA last week, hoping to see how a traditional art form like ceramics would be presented in a contemporary context. An array of ceramic potteries, covered with glaring colors, caught my eyes.
I was intrigued to find out the artist who made them. The name tag suggested it to be from Ai Weiwei, a controversial Chinese artist and famous human rights activist. But Ai didn’t really create them from scratch, but instead added his own colors upon ancient potteries and gave them a rebirth. Probably not something your typical protective collectors community does, hence the controversy.
Looking closely at the vases, some of them still leave a trace of truth history between the drip dried industrial colors, showing a glance of the authentic texture and naturalistic color of the original pottery. It’s the truly ancient China’s Han Dynasty Urn, painted unglazed grey ware, barely breathing underneath.
My first reaction was uneasiness, and I almost started to feel painful. It is said nostalgia is the most powerful force in the universe. When something gets ages and bear so much history on it, it becomes so fragile, so rare and so precious all at the same time, that it feels like crime to do anything to it rather than to preserve, appreciate and worship. How audacious is it to take the over 2000 years old ancient vases and color it!
As a golden age in Chinese history, Han was the time when the ceramic production were advanced and booming with unprecedented masses and varieties, mass produced identical vases, state controlled workshops emerges.
Looking at the vases again, the paints on them that first looked quite ordinary to me, now seems extraordinary. On one side, more arbitrary and ugly, on the other, more brave and beautiful.
“If you chase for beauty, you don’t get it. When you stop chasing, it comes to you.”
That’s the philosophy of Han Thinkers. They claimed that art had to be natural, or would lose its essence. But what it means to be natural? Does it mean to take the flow, or to break the constrains?
Ai Weiwei’s father one of China’s most important modern poets, himself spent several years detained and in exile because of his political and artistic ideas. Ai Weiwei become an artist and activist so ready to distain the authorities.
While one can show distain to authorities, can one also become audacious enough to distain one’s own history and past, one’s own identity and stands? How brave one needs to be to transform from male to female, from an engineer to an artist, from a Chinese to an American soldier? It certainly challenges what it means to be a person, and what it means to build a culture and a society. Ai Weiwei takes me the roads where the grounds are worth questioning.
Ceramics as a form holds the tradition, it faces the modern challenges no less than other art forms. As the audiences get displaced from the tranquil and peaceful nature that people usually seek of traditional ceramics, and given the tension and conflicts, there came the modern and contemporary.
It breaks, it challenges. You may not hold sure if you want it or need it. But if you go closer, there is a chance it will turmoil and resonate.
