One in all Ai’s most well-known items, a sequence of images titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn(1995), depicts the artist seemingly destroying a 2,000-year-old artefact. The pictures solidified Ai because the prolific iconoclast we all know immediately. “As a part of humanity, artists assemble and deconstruct to create new definitions, continually scrutinising and evaluating our price system and the chances of our existence,” Ai tells BBC Tradition. “That is how I at all times method issues, by standing on the other aspect of the problem, and even the other aspect of myself. I imagine this measure is probably the most reliable one.”
How have your private experiences knowledgeable your work?
To place it merely, every little thing I’ve executed previously, what I’m doing now, and what I’ll do sooner or later is all directed in the direction of one query: “who am I?” It’s normal information that our understanding of ourselves is carefully tied to our life experiences, recollections, and the way we reply to on a regular basis conditions. This generally is a battle since our self-perception shouldn’t be one thing that may be simply indifferent from actuality and recollections.
It was moderately late once I totally realised this. For over 50 years earlier than 2011, I used to be very confused. On 3 April 2011, I used to be secretly detained. It was a vital second for me as a result of this expertise compelled me to re-evaluate my state of affairs, the place I got here from, and who I really was. After 81 days in secret detention, I used to be surprisingly launched. It was then that I realised I wanted to know what occurred previously, why my father, a poet, was exiled, and the way my time with him had influenced me.
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