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"Cao" means "grass" in Mandarin, but with a shift in the intonation, it can also be an expletive. Such homonyms are a popular workaround for users of the heavily censored Chinese intranet who seek freedom of speech—and a recurring theme in the work of Ai Weiwei, a champion of human rights.

While grass is always being cut and trampled on, it is also ubiquitous, resilient, and quietly beautiful. Comprising 727 tufts of sculpted marble, the installation Cao finds the stone’s implications of nobility concentrated not in a single heroic figure but in its thousands of anonymous blades—each valuable, each possessing dignity and worth.