My favourite piece this week was by Salman Rushdie who used his great skills as a writer to eloquently comment on the arrest of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: “The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Ai WeiWei’
Things to ponder : 22 April 2011
Posted in Things to ponder, tagged Ai WeiWei, Brad Feld, Salman Rushdie, Terminator, Umair Haque on April 22, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Things to ponder : 8 April 2011
Posted in Things to ponder, tagged A Defense of Poetry, Ai WeiWei, China, Shelley, Tate Modern, Things to ponder on April 8, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Defense of Poetry in 1821. A radical, Romantic humanist, Shelley passionately believed that artists of all stripes could inspire the masses to rise up against oppression. When the Chinese government seized artist Ai WeiWei, they acknowledged the power of Ai’s art [...]
Chinese sunflower seeds
Posted in What I'm looking at, tagged Ai WeiWei, China, sculpture, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern on January 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I recently caught Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in London: Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine [...]
