Tang Contemporary Art, on view through April 22
An exhibition by Ai Weiwei, one of the most influential artists in the world, is on view through April 22 at Tang Contemporary Art Seoul.
Ai Weiwei made a strong impression on Korean audiences with his solo exhibition Human Future, held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in December 2021. The artist is renowned for observing the phenomena of the times and making powerful aesthetic statements that stir social empathy around the world. Working across a wide range of media—from architecture to installation, social media, and documentary—he offers audiences new ways of examining society and its values.
This is the fifth exhibition presented in collaboration with Tang Contemporary Art, featuring the LEGO series begun in 2007 alongside the Zodiac sculpture series.
LEGO serves as both a new language for the artist and a means of conveying personal messages. His LEGO works embody stories connected to him, his childhood, and the education he received. Qualities inherent to LEGO—such as pixelation, digitalization, segmentation, fragmentation, and disconnection—bestow an original freedom for new creation, forming distinctive images that differ greatly from commonly used sequences, methods, and compositions, and thereby achieving both quantitative and qualitative breakthroughs. The exhibition presents his representative LEGO works, from ‘Self-Portrait’ to ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn’ and ‘Tianan Men.’
The Zodiac series is especially compelling, reinterpreting the animals of the twelve zodiac signs—one of Asia’s oldest cultural traditions—as both LEGO and sculptural works. The series originated in the artist’s reproduction of parts of the fountain clock destroyed at the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) in Beijing during the Second Opium War in 1860, and it addresses the issue of international looting that occurred during the war as well as the essence of cultural heritage. It has been widely praised for harmonizing traditional Chinese craftsmanship with contemporary artistry, and for encompassing cultural themes spanning from the past to the present.