Shanghai-London

This past week I spend a few days in London trying to catch a few of all the exhibitions that are up because of the Frieze Art Fair as well as taking the opportunity to meet with friends that were in town for the same reason.

Hu Yun & Biljana Ciric "Stairways to heaven?" 

Meeting up with Shanghai based curator Biljana Ciric (who brought the first ever solo show of Yoko Ono to China in 2008) and artist Hu Yun, I naturally enquired about the Ai Weiwei Sunflower seed installation at Tate Modern since they had been at the preview. One of the first things Biljana mentioned was the incredible sound that was made  when people were walking on the seeds, crushing them and how they eventually would be turned into dust.

Unfortunately I did not see it before the exhibition was closed for entry (for health-safety reasons) and can now only be viewed from the bridge or from about one meter away. The museum gurards did sporadicly offer one seed for a closer inspection to the audience who carefully and admiringly passed this "chosen one" around and  back to the guard who placed it back with the billion others. It was actually quite a symbolic act, but probably not the kind Ai Weiwei intended. 

Admittedly the experience of the piece would have been completely different if I had been able to walk through the sea of seeds but nevertheless the impact of the vast amount of handmade seeds was still striking. There is also an interesting documentary showing the amazing process of how the seeds were made in  Jingdezhen basically employing the whole town for the production.

Artist Hu Yun is by the way currently an Artist-in-Residence at Gasworks in which he is conducting a practice based research in the chinese drawing archives at the Museum of Natural History in London. An interesting project and I am very curious to see what he will create with this material. Someone to watch.