‘Everything is art. Everything is politics. You can call it art or non-art, I don’t give a damn’
Ai Weiwei1
Ai Weiwei’s work and reputation have risen steadily from the mid-1990s to his status today not only as China’s Murakami but also, if you believe the critics, China’s Warhol. Fittingly, he is now the latest artist to exhibit at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. I use the word exhibit here but in reviews of previous exhibitors their task has been defined more in terms of filling the notoriously large space. Adhering to this, Ai’s work Sunflower Seeds (2010) consisted of over one-hundred million hand-painted porcelain seeds spread over the Turbine Hall floor. As the documentary videos playing near the work explained: the seeds were created by workers from the traditional porcelain making village of Jingdezhen in China over the course of two years.
As grandiose as this sounds, at first sight the installation was visually disappointing. From a distance the seeds appeared simply as grey pebbles on the floor, as if the space was a large driveway or a useless gravel pit. Walking through the installation was a relatively commonplace experience as well, apart from the fact that the shape of the seeds generated a different feeling under foot to that of regular gravel. In comparison to Olafur Eliasson’s transcendent Weather Project at the Turbine Hall in 2003, engaging with Sunflower Seeds emphatically grounded the viewer in the ordinary.
Over the course of his career, Ai has consistently promoted himself as taking a conceptual approach to his practice, praising Marcel Duchamp and the readymade as his primary precedent. In comparison to Andy Warhol and Takashi Murakami, Ai’s particular brand