Art Review: Ai Weiwei

Gone to Seed
Ai Weiwei is renowned for being a controversial artist and his new piece exhibited at the most sought after space for installation artists, The Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, is no different. Being nicknamed China’s Warhol, Weiwei filled the Tate with over 100 million hand painted ceramic seeds and suitably named his art ‘Sunflower Seeds’. Although on the surface Weiwei’s new creation appears to be a simplistic concept, it in fact has many layers to its complexity. Each seed is representative of a brand new life and the fact that each ceramic seed has been individually painted represents the uniqueness of just a small percentage of the world’s population.
Sadly, the initial photos taken at the unveiling of his art work, images of children playing in amongst the work, the crunching noise of people walking over it, are to be no more. Weiwei’s ‘Sunflower Seeds’ has been temporarily cornered off pending further investigation due to the potentially hazardous dust that has been churned up from the public being allowed to walk on the work. The work is still on show but strictly on a ‘do not touch’ basis similarly to the majority of work exhibited in the Tate Modern which somewhat takes the individuality out of Weiwei’s art.