Video: A sea of Chinese porcelain seeds
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Do not think that only dishes and small sculptures can be made from porcelain! In China, porcelain is one of the most beloved materials. And the Chinese do not care what to make of it. Even exquisite teapots, even figurines of local deities, even toilets. This is what the Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei tried to show with his installation Sunflower Seeds.
Every year, London's Tate Modern gallery hosts art exhibitions from The Unilever Series, all of which go to charity. This year, The Unilever Series featured an installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei called Sunflower Seeds.
This installation is a huge hall filled with hundreds of thousands of sunflower seeds. You can walk on them, you can feel them, you can wonder at them, you can admire them. After all, these seeds are not real. They are made in life size from Chinese porcelain and painted by hand by specialists from one of the firms that manufacture products from this noble material.
The purpose of the Sunflower Seeds installation is to show that the range of applications for porcelain is huge. You just have to not be afraid to experiment, learn to think in an original and unconventional way.
Moreover, these porcelain seeds, despite their apparent fragility, are quite strong. Chinese porcelain, after all! So Ai Weiwei is not afraid that people who walk on them will destroy them. And he is also not worried about the safety of all the seeds. There is a whole sea of them. Even if visitors steal some of the seeds, there will be no less of them.
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