Ai Weiwei

I just went to Ai Weiwei's show. As much as I have heard about the guy I had never seen his art. A lot of a mixture of materials and forms. Like one piece was completely made of legos. But generated from a picture of him dropping and smashing a very old chinese vase. Others are sex toys made from Jade, or a chinese take away box made of marble. He takes ancient materials, and reworks them to make things we use today, but usually making things we don't really want to talk about. He is famous I think around the world for his pictures of himself flipping off the white house and Tiananmen square. He is now an artist exiled from his home country China, and his studio is constantly monitored and raided. But he still continues to make work, recently he started also living in Cambridge. So he even came to openings and you can see him around once in awhile. What amazes me is how much he continues to make. How he combines symbols and just how much he has made. Certainly not alone. But it is extensive and impressive. At the exhibit I picked up his memoir, as I have read a lot of scientist memoirs, or autobiographies it will be interesting to read this, a person whose work is different but maybe creative process the same. 

One bowl he made that really caught me was a sort of fruit bowl that inside was an image of his brain taken after he was beaten by the police. His injury was so bad his brain swelled. And this whole process now is capture and contained in a fruit bowl. I don't know why I like it but it is a strange object that changes the more you know about it.