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Lot Essay
Perhaps his most iconic photographic artwork, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995-2004) stands as a powerful example of Ai Weiwei’s entire creative practice. A triptych of black and white stills, almost one and a half metres high, captures the artist dropping a 2,000-year-old ceremonial urn onto the ground. The first shows Ai holding the artefact; the second shows him letting go; the third shows it shattered into pieces before him. The artist maintains a blank, expressionless gaze, staring straight towards the camera throughout the act. As the Han Dynasty is considered a defining period in the history of Chinese civilisation, the urn is an emblem of considerable symbolic, financial and cultural worth. By dropping the urn, Ai breaks down traditional representations of authority and authenticity, radically challenging these ideas of value as anything but abstract, independent concepts. ‘I wouldn’t call it being destroyed,’ he says: ‘it just has another life, you know, it’s a different way of looking at it’ (W. Ai, quoted in T. Marlow, ‘Ai Weiwei in Conversation’, in Ai Weiwei, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2015, p. 20).
Ai grew up in Inner Mongolia where his father, the famed poet Ai Qing, was exiled during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After the family returned to Beijing, Ai moved to New York where he worked as an artist for over a decade. He developed a deep interest in conceptual art, and was particularly influenced by the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp. Returning to Beijing in 1993, Ai’s work became increasingly iconoclastic and engaged with issues of contemporary Chinese culture. Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn incorporates what the artist has called a ‘cultural readymade’. It marks the beginning of a radical conceptual shift in his work, whereby he began to use antique objects in order to explore how, and by whom, cultural values are created. The work encapsulates broader themes covered by Ai across his oeuvre, which forms an ongoing socio-political commentary on the nature of power structures and the cycles of creative destruction necessary for a culture’s growth and development. As Philip Tinari has written, the triptych ‘works as a satire of the ruling regime’s approach to its patrimony and of contemporary China’s curious relation to its past’ (P. Tinari, ‘Postures in Clay: The Vessels of Ai Weiwei’, in Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE – 2010 CE), exh. cat. Arcadia University Art Gallery, Pennsylvania 2010, p. 33). Countless examples of centuries-old craftsmanship were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, as the old made way for the new; more heritage is lost daily as the country amps up its rapid urbanisation and vast industrial output. Recent decades have, ironically, seen a growing trade in mass-produced Chinese forgeries of Han-Dynasty artefacts. Any patriotic outrage at his ‘vandalism’, Ai implies, is mere hypocrisy. Featured in prominent solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, this monumental work illustrates Ai’s continual dedication to the questioning of sovereignty and promotion of independent thought.
Ai grew up in Inner Mongolia where his father, the famed poet Ai Qing, was exiled during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After the family returned to Beijing, Ai moved to New York where he worked as an artist for over a decade. He developed a deep interest in conceptual art, and was particularly influenced by the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp. Returning to Beijing in 1993, Ai’s work became increasingly iconoclastic and engaged with issues of contemporary Chinese culture. Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn incorporates what the artist has called a ‘cultural readymade’. It marks the beginning of a radical conceptual shift in his work, whereby he began to use antique objects in order to explore how, and by whom, cultural values are created. The work encapsulates broader themes covered by Ai across his oeuvre, which forms an ongoing socio-political commentary on the nature of power structures and the cycles of creative destruction necessary for a culture’s growth and development. As Philip Tinari has written, the triptych ‘works as a satire of the ruling regime’s approach to its patrimony and of contemporary China’s curious relation to its past’ (P. Tinari, ‘Postures in Clay: The Vessels of Ai Weiwei’, in Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE – 2010 CE), exh. cat. Arcadia University Art Gallery, Pennsylvania 2010, p. 33). Countless examples of centuries-old craftsmanship were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, as the old made way for the new; more heritage is lost daily as the country amps up its rapid urbanisation and vast industrial output. Recent decades have, ironically, seen a growing trade in mass-produced Chinese forgeries of Han-Dynasty artefacts. Any patriotic outrage at his ‘vandalism’, Ai implies, is mere hypocrisy. Featured in prominent solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, this monumental work illustrates Ai’s continual dedication to the questioning of sovereignty and promotion of independent thought.