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Lot Essay
Executed in 2013—the year before his solo show at Alcatraz Island, where he became the first artist to exhibit at the prison—Coca-Cola Vase is part of Ai Weiwei’s most iconic and confrontational series. For each of these works, Ai deftly paints the soda’s unmistakable logo onto an antique vase dating from the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), a period of imperial strength in China that helped to institute what thereafter has been considered Chinese culture. Explaining the works, Ai has said, ‘People think that I’m interested in Chinese traditions, which isn’t true. I’m more interested in our past human behaviour and our understanding of values, and I explore this by dealing with some existing readymade concept that everybody accepts as untouchable or fixed’ (Ai Weiwei, quoted in Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds, exh. cat. Tate Modern, London 2010, p. 88, 92). By marking a symbol of China’s heroic origins with the quintessential logo of capitalism, Ai not only strips the object of its original value but prompts viewers to grapple with the ramifications—both positive and destructive—of China’s engagement with the West.
Ai began the Coca-Cola vases shortly after he returned to China in 1993 from the United States, where he had been living for twelve years. It was in New York that he first encountered works by artists including Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. The use of vernacular imagery, the concept of the readymade and the act of appropriation together wholly reoriented his developing artistic idiom. The legacies of all three artists are evident in Coca-Cola Vase, but particularly that of Warhol who had himself repurposed the iconic emblem within his screenprints. ‘Warhol,’ Ai has said, ‘[was] the first artist I felt I could completely understand’ (Ai Weiwei quoted in D. Scheffler, ‘Is Ai Weiwei the Andy Warhol of Our Time?’, Smithsonian Magazine, 19 January 2016). Just as these titans of postwar art had recontextualised the images and signs of their world, so too did Ai confront the way worth is ascribed and established within contemporary culture. In a world where antiquities are venerated and soda cans destined for the recycling bin, Coca-Cola Vase confronts the value systems that we often take for granted.
Ai began the Coca-Cola vases shortly after he returned to China in 1993 from the United States, where he had been living for twelve years. It was in New York that he first encountered works by artists including Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. The use of vernacular imagery, the concept of the readymade and the act of appropriation together wholly reoriented his developing artistic idiom. The legacies of all three artists are evident in Coca-Cola Vase, but particularly that of Warhol who had himself repurposed the iconic emblem within his screenprints. ‘Warhol,’ Ai has said, ‘[was] the first artist I felt I could completely understand’ (Ai Weiwei quoted in D. Scheffler, ‘Is Ai Weiwei the Andy Warhol of Our Time?’, Smithsonian Magazine, 19 January 2016). Just as these titans of postwar art had recontextualised the images and signs of their world, so too did Ai confront the way worth is ascribed and established within contemporary culture. In a world where antiquities are venerated and soda cans destined for the recycling bin, Coca-Cola Vase confronts the value systems that we often take for granted.