Basically Ai Weiwei does a lot of protest art against the Chinese government, so he gets put under house arrest a lot which means he has even more time to make art I guess. A lot of his art involves taking an object that is pretty meaningful, and giving it a new meaning. Like he has this one piece called Straight, where he took metal rebar pieces from collapsed schools from the 2008 earthquake and then turned them into this sort of map of a division symbolizing both the earthquake, and also the division in society. It's pretty cool looking.
A lot of his art, at least in this exhibit, was influenced by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It killed a lot of people, many of them children. This was because many of the schools had been really badly constructed so they just fell down pretty much. And other buildings nearby hadn't just fallen down like that, so that pointed to cutting corners and really bad construction where that shouldn't have happened. And then the one-child policy meant that a lot of families lost their only child. So basically it was a really big, terrible horrific thing. Something like 5,000 children died due to the terrible schools. One of Ai Weiwei's most moving pieces, for me at least is this one giant snake that he made. At first you're like oh wow that's pretty cool it's a giant snake. But then you see that's it's made out of backpacks, one for each child who died in the earthquake. And it's a really big snake, too.
Well those were some of the newer Ai Weiwei art pieces. Of course there was the one where he drops the ancient Ming vase, and all the other Ming vase desecration pieces (they're really cool). If this art sounds interesting to you, I would recommend the documentary "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry". It's on Netflix instant.
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