Ai Weiwei - Micayla

Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” (1995)

This photo series by Ai Weiwei, titled “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” is part of the artist’s “Urn” series that is meant to highlight the impermanence and lack of value of supposedly highly valuable material objects.  The photo series is made up of these three images in which the artist holds an ancient urn and then lets it go.  The action is captured across the three shots from left to right.  I assume that Ai Weiwei used a tripod and set a timer on the camera so that the camera would take many consecutive shots as the urn smashed to the ground.  The images are nearly identical in each of the three shots as the artist stands in the exact same place against the background of a brick wall, with the only difference the motion of his hands and of the urn itself.  Even the artist’s face does not move as he destroys an object precious to his culture.  There are two contrasting directions within this series.  There is the horizontal movement from left to right that follows the action temporally, and then there is the vertical action of the urn actually falling within each shot.

I thought this series was appropriate to share because on this past Sunday a local artist went into an Ai Wiewei retrospective in Miami and smashed one of the painted urns on display in front of a large scale print of the photo series.  After his arrest, the protesting artist stated that he wanted to emulate Ai Weiwei’s action, and that he was unaware that the vase he smashed was worth $1million.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-26233909