Video: 1200 bicycles from Ai Weiwei
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Famous contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (Ai weiwei) uses Chinese themes and Chinese motives in almost every work. But each time he does it in a new way, reveals them from new, unexpected angles. Here is his new work, which has a title Forever Bicycles, also applies to the Celestial Empire, namely, the bicycles on which most of the inhabitants of this country move.
The world famous dissident artist Ai Weiwei has repeatedly become the hero of materials on the site Kulturologia. Ru. We talked about his vision of the signs of the Zodiac in the work of Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads, about the glowing anti-bourgeois cube Cube Light, as well as about the sea of Chinese porcelain seeds in the installation Sunflower Seeds. Today we will tell you about his new work called Forever Bicycles.
Exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan, Forever Bicycles consists of 1,200 bicycles fastened together to create a maze of vehicles.
It's no secret that bicycles are the main vehicle for both urban and rural transportation in China. In this country, according to statistics, there are 470 million bicycles - that is, almost every second inhabitant of the Middle Kingdom has them.
However, the bicycles in Aya Weiwei's installation, contrary to their main purpose, do not move. They are frozen in place, they are static instead of being mobile. The artist made them motionless, and therefore useless.
Thus, Ai Weiwei shows the clumsy, static nature of the state machine in China, which does not keep up with the rapidly changing social landscape of the country, does not keep up with the needs of its population. Just as bicycles have turned from a cheap and very mobile means of transportation into a standing useless construction, so the state apparatus in the Celestial Empire, controlled by the Communist Party, ossified and ceased to perform its functions effectively.
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