Lot #43A - Ai Weiwei
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Auction House:Bonhams Australia
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Sale Name:Sherman | 100
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Sale Date:11 May 2022 ~ 5pm (AEST)
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Lot #:43A
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Lot Description:Ai Weiwei
(Chinese, born 1957)
Untitled (refugee plate), 2018
Porcelain, edition: 5/10
diameter: 34.5cm (13 9/16in).
RELATED WORK: Other examples of these plates are held in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, United States of America
ESSAY: Ai Weiwei had his first ever major solo exhibition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) in April 2008 – the year of the Beijing Olympic Games (held in August).Exhibition planning went back to 2006, at which time the artist's work was included in Charles Merewether's Zones of Contact Biennale of Sydney and in QAGOMA's Asia Pacific Triennale. The Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR) cottage hosted Weiwei for several weeks with his wife Lu Qing, whose 2.5-metre-long painted silk scroll she continued to paint daily at the Art Gallery of New South Wales throughout the duration of the same Biennale. Brian and I had come to know the soon-to-become mega star artist rather well – although of course in 2006 we could not have foreseen his stance on China's Olympic Stadium, the deliberate destruction of his Shanghai studios, the beating he was subjected to as a result of his citizen investigation into the Sichuan earthquake corruption scandal, (which lead to the death of thousands of children, mostly from single child families), his subsequent 81-day arrest in April 2011 and his final exile to Europe. At the time of our meeting, all of the above still lay in the future. We met happily during those weeks for coffee and meals à quatre in Paddington cafés and intimate restaurants – sharing, on our side, experiences of dissident life in Apartheid South Africa an on the artist's side, listening to revelations about his father Ai Qing's Chinese Communist Party-enforced exile in Xinjiang with his family, (including babe in arms Ai Weiwei), in the far reaches of the Taklamakan desert. Ai Qing, the once lauded national poet, had become a designated enemy of the Party and the People. The family lived in a dug-out and Ai Qing cleaned latrines as per the Party's orders.During his visit for those precious-to-us weeks, Ai Weiwei and Lu Qing visited our family's Voiceless offices, leading to the compassionate Lu Qing gently offering her services to help alleviate the suffering of factory farmed animals. Sadly, her limited English made the idea impractical. However, we were deeply moved by her interest and their heartfelt gesture of support. Later the artist offered a major work to a Sherman Galleries-organised Voiceless fundraiser and, following a trip to Weiwei's Berlin studio by Ondine, her husband Dror and me in 2019, the artist agreed to become a Voiceless Ambassador, circling back to our earlier conversations on Voiceless and his desire to become involved.Fast forward to Weiwei's refugee investigation, his subsequent film Human Flow and his Law of the Journey (2018), a 60-metre-long inflated boat filled with more than 300 faceless refugee men, women, and children, installed as a centrepiece in Mami Kataoka's highly successful 2018 Biennale of Sydney. Having been connected to Mami for a number of years, Brian and I decided to help financially facilitate the presentation of Law of the Journey in Sydney via the commissioning of a series of porcelain plates. Offered here for sale via Private Treaty, the work (number 5 of an edition of 10), relates directly to the aforementioned monumental piece and to Ai Weiwei's concerns regarding the 60 million plus stateless people who continue to live in crisis conditions worldwide. The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection retains the first edition of this special treasure – linking, as it does, the centuries-long illustrious history of Chinese porcelain making to current world events. Dr Gene Sherman -
Notes:Estimate upon request
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Estimate:A$0 - 0
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Realised Price:
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Category:Art
This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.
