Transcript:

By 1993, after 12 years in the United States, I made a final decision to go back to China. I went back and immediately my brother brought me to the antique market. That's why I have to come back to these vases. So I started collecting. I'm so drawn by so many antiquity in the flea market. That time, maybe it was the last chance so many antiquity ever being in flea market because the whole of China started digging and building highways and households. A lot have since been discovered. 
 
Yeah, we did the photo. I asked my brother, I said, I'm going to drop this one, can you catch it with my F3 camera, Nikon. So I said, are you ready? He said, yes, so I started to drop it. You hear the crack and you have to clean up the dust. Ironically, this later being seen as some kind of iconic image of me. They call me some kind of, I don't know, icon against authority or culture, which is okay, but that's the story.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn

Transcript:

My name is Ai Weiwei. I'm 67 years old,, nationality, I'm Chinese.  I live in Europe. This work is probably one of the most popular impressionist works by Monet and surprisingly, he spent his last 20 years painting about 250 works like this. About this water lily pond. So it's really a kind of epic type of work. To structure it, I need 650,000 Lego pieces.
And my relation to it is , one, we live in Xinjiang. My father was exiled in this underground dugout. And you see the image here, the black hole, it's the black hole there. So, I integrated my youth and my father's exiled situation into this, because my father, in that particular time when I was 10, he told me the story. He was in Paris, and his artworks was selected by Monet's independent salon, which was a big deal for a young artist. So, this work, basically, wrapped up my father's tragic life. Studied in Paris, come back to China, joined the revolution, then, being exiled. And I grew up in there. And that experience made me today.

Water Lilies #2 - Seattle Asian Art Museum

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I gave up painting about 20 years. I don't do paintings anymore. I hate the smell of the painting.  And I'm a very good painter. So, I think, okay, Lego may be a good approach. Lego is an interesting media, because it relates to human history. Like in Greek time or Romans, they use mosaic. And, today, actually, all our images from the computer is a pixel, it's digitally dots. So, I think it connects our modern technology to the variation of the way of expression. I just designed... I don't even have to physically touch it. I give to anybody in anywhere, they can structure exactly the same. That's the beauty of it. I think it's perfect for me.

Illumination

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Double stool is a pair of stools connected and through its own logic, its own angle and the craftsmanship and being finely constructed by classic furniture makers. So those stools are Ming or Qing Dynasty stools that are a few hundred years old, very common at that time and have a perfect structure, three legs. 

And that time, of course, I'm very used to understand Marcel Duchamp’s ready made. But I still think I need to go one step ahead of it, so I needed to give a little bit more of my cultural background understanding. So the ready-made is no longer objects, but a cultural heritage. So I take China's culture or Chinese politics as a ready-made. So I restructure it and then make a commentary and very often it's kind of humorous and critical at the same time. So I developed this in more stools with no added elements and developed it into a self formed circle and it's very strong structurally and again, no nails. It takes a profound knowledge about furniture making and only Chinese can do that.

Stool

Transcript:

The bicycle is a few objects when we grew up every household has in China. When I was a child, the whole society is very poor. To have a bike is a very luxury item. And the Forever bicycle was the best brand at that time.  It's very durable and it's very practical matter and build very strong for the countryside. But in China, it's changing. More cars are being bought and the air is very polluted. So it's really related to people and citizens. And today, when I started architecture to teach the students how to build, I tell them you can build with any material, not just bricks and concrete. I said let's use daily objects to build a structure. So, after discussion, we managed to use bicycles, because you see everywhere. But you never think to use bicycles to structure something else. It's very much like the stools, same kind idea. Use its own logic to destroy itself to become something new.

Forever Bicycles

Transcript: 

Well, this is Rubens' work. My father loves Rubens. I think he just loves those very strong physical muscles and the nudities of those, you know, beautiful compositions. And for me, it's the perfect piece to structure a Lego work, but I have to add some personal touch on it. So, I put a panda behind this, a horse. Panda in China, nickname of the secret police. So, we will say, oh, he's a Panda, that means he works undercover. So, I use that to describe China and Europe's relations. It's just, with some personal, even family influence of classics, of the western art, and also, with modern China's connection.

The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in Green

Transcript:

It started around 2019. So I want to do a set of zodiacs which relate to every viewer in Chinese understanding. The background of zodiacs is the Qing Dynasty in the Imperial Palace. Actually, it's kind of fixtures in the garden. By 1840, the British has twice invaded China, second time with the French, so they looted the palace and took all those sculptures back to Europe. Years later, about 7 of them appeared in the market. So, China said we will buy it back. You know, it's basically, it's not a Chinese treasure, it's really made in Qing Dynasty by an Italian minister and I think a casted by French. So, it's such a colorful story. I think because there's no complete set, I have to create the other five: dragon, snake, lamb, dog, rooster. So I made those in the same style, then a set of zodiac comes out.

Circle of Animals

Transcript:

Snake Ceiling is a product after my deep involvement with one earthquake. 2008, right before Olympics. May 12th, Sichuan had a devastating earthquake, which made about 80,000 people dead. Among them, there's a lot of students. So, I questioning the government, first, how many students are dead? Second, school building are built by government. It should pass a regulation of earthquake.
So, how come so many school building collapsed, but the building next to it, residential are not collapsed, and the hospital not collapse. But just school buildings. So, I really think there's a huge corruption among these contractors and government officials. Because nobody give us clear answers, so we go through a very basic research to go to the location to find out who was killed, and what's their name, birthday and location. Gradually, with a long, very difficult research, we found 5,219 students' name and birthdays. I post it on my blog. The whole nation was surprised, this guy is crazy. Because nobody can ever question the government. So, that really is become a live social, political movement.
This Snake Ceiling we used these kind students' backpacks, because when I visit those locations, I see everywhere is students' backpacks. So, I used that as a symbol, structured snake, which, in China, means unpredictable danger.

Snake Ceiling

Join Chris Jeffries and Sarah Rudinoff for performances of repartee and song, October 16, 7 pm, and October 17, 2 pm.

The first two Genius Award winners in Theater, Chris Jeffries (2003) and Sarah Rudinoff (2004) will present a night of scintillating repartee and song, created especially for The Frye Genius / 21 Century / Seattle exhibition. Composer/lyricist Chris Jeffries and performer Sarah Rudinoff have 50 years of experience between them in every kind of medium from camp to the avant-garde. The performance will include original music, interpreted classics and as much truth and lies as can be held in one evening.
—Chris Jeffries and Sarah Rudinoff

Chris Jeffries and Sarah Rudinoff in Conversation

Scratch sample of the beginning of the book ONE CHERRY DEEP by Paul Mullin

One Cherry Deep - Home of Tomes - 4Culture

Scratch sample from a story "The Kerouac" which appears in Paul Mullin's ONE CHERRY DEEP

One Cherry Deep - The Kerouac - 4Culture

Free public art museum located on First Hill in Seattle, Washington exhibiting historical and contemporary artwork.

Chris Jeffries and Sarah Rudinoff in Conversation

Frye Art Museum

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