Ai Weiwei: Everyday Monuments

Previously recreated by Ai in bronze, for Everyday Monuments the Zodiac heads return in LEGO bricks. In Ai’s hands, these humble toys—loved by both children and adults—are elevated in the service of a greater artistic project with layered implications. Presented here in a more contemporary iteration, the Zodiac heads remain a potent trigger for conversations about nationalist sentiment, provenance, authenticity, and cultural exchange.

With their rich, contrasting colors and square shape, these works evoke Warhol’s celebrity portraits, while simultaneously referring to Ai’s first use of LEGO bricks for Trace, the enormous installation depicting political prisoners that was integral to the FOR-SITE Foundation’s 2014 exhibition @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz.

While the LEGO Zodiac works reproduce historic monuments with everyday materials, additional works in the exhibition cast everyday objects in marble, a stone associated with permanence and public memory. Four such marble sculptures on view in the exhibition exemplify the fusion of art and activism that characterizes Ai’s best works.

Persecuted for his ongoing efforts to shed light on such corruption and human rights abuses, Ai was brutally beaten by police and ultimately disappeared — taken into extrajudicial custody by the Chinese authorities for 81 days, leaving the world and his loved ones to wonder about his whereabouts and safety. Following massive public outcry for Ai’s release, in the summer of 2011 the artist found himself free from imprisonment, but stripped of his passport and the subject of constant surveillance. The Lantern (2014) is a testament to Ai’s mocking response to the video cameras that once surrounded his Beijing studio, which he defiantly festooned with red paper lanterns, traditionally associated with festivals. The exquisitely carved form appears to blow in the wind despite its marble girth, as if free from the oppression of gravity.

Nearby, the Ceiling Lamp with Stars (2014) represents a light fixture common in Communist China during the 1950s and 60s. Adorned with five-pointed stars, the marble sculpture is a symbol of the Communist Party, and speaks to an era of Soviet-inspired modernity—a bygone utopia whose legacy is still strongly felt today.

Throughout the exhibition, a surprising play of materials and forms, the monumental and the mundane, invites audiences to question authority and the construction of our shared histories. Talking about the role of the individual in relation to those in power, Ai explains: “I call on people to be ‘obsessed citizens,’ forever questioning and asking for accountability. That’s the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.”