According to What?
Spectacle and stimulation are never far from the surface in a city like Tokyo. A literal megalopolis that sprawls out endlessly, its sheer scale, magnitude, bright lights and omnipresent city grime render the individual almost lost and forgotten—enveloped by the city and its functions. This is the view from the observation deck that shares the same building as the Mori Art Museum. Unlike our public museum spaces, which are often housed in self-contained buildings, the Mori Art Museum is located on the fiftieth and fifty-first floors of the Mori tower, which is part of the larger Roppongi Hills complex. As you enter the museum you are taken up an escalator with a gleaming chandelier hanging above you illuminating the foyer—pure spectacle in itself. In this context, Ai Wei Wei’s exhibition ‘According to What?’, with its combination of large-scale multi-media works and smaller sculptural objects, inhabited the voluminous spaces of the Mori Art Museum with an overall sense of coherence and purpose.
It is easy to view Ai as the agent provocateur of mainland Chinese art because of his other life as a dedicated political activist; one might situate his oeuvre on a plane that acts purely as a political affront to, or subversive statement against, the policies of the Chinese government. Certainly some of his work has a political edge, as it comments on and critiques these social policies, however to position it as inherently political may be overly simplistic. Ai’s works are as much about the process of exploring history and form, as well as the self within a rapidly shifting social context.
The exhibition was divided into three main sections: ‘Fundamental Forms and Volumes’, ‘Structure and Craftsmanship’ and