Sunflower seeds -- Ai weiwei

I have never paid too much attention to any art work or artist. I was kind of stunned when I heard we all have to write blogs about various artists and their works. Since I don't really know how to 'read' an art piece, I decided to start with the culture I'm familiar with and the artists who are from the same culture background as I am. So here we go, I was reading the Twitter of one of the most influential Chinese artists, Ai weiwei, where I saw this picture of two sunflower seeds with the Chinese name and Pinyin in the background. Then I said to myself: Artists are indeed strange, two pieces of sunflower seeds?? Art?? What's the point? The two sunflower seeds I saw on twitter

Despite my despair, I kept on researching on google, where I saw some pictures with random people walking in a huge hall carpetted with some sort of gray material, like small rocks or sand. At first, I thought the idea "random people walking in a huge hall" might be the artists' intended disign of the art piece. Then I found more and more pictures of similar scene, those sandlike materials are NOT rocks or sand, they are tiny little sunflower seeds! One hundred million of them! All made out of porcelain! Every single one of them was handmade and painted in China in a Town called Jing de zhen (I've been there a few years ago). I was immediately impressed and fell in love with the whole concept! I love the idea; it's a vibrative scene consisting of countless tiny little individuls, every single individual is different and characterized. They look so real that people would put them in their mouth and test if they are really made out of porcelain. I also love the idea how everybody can just go ahead and take a walk on the sea of sunflower seeds, listening to the popping sound as you move your feet. It is an art piece you can see, you can feel, you can mingle yourself in and feel so strongly the sensitivity of the artist. Sunflower seeds ( Exhibition in Tate Modern, London), all seeds together weigh 150 tons and took more than 1600 workers to make

But what is the deeper message the artist wants to tell? During the culture revolution of China, Chairman Mao was represented as the sun, all the chinese people were represented as sunflowers, as sunflowers always face the sun. I think in this art piece, Ai weiwei used numerous sunflower seeds standing for millions of chinese citizens, from a distance, they look like sand, inconspicuous and not important. But when you pick them up, examine them one by one, you can see that every single one of them has a character, every single one of them is different, just like every individual Chinese citizen. The sun looks from afar, he may ignore the freedom and social rights of the seeds. Ai weiwei here again claimed for the human rights he's been fighting for for a long time. People can feel so freely the impact of this tremendous art piece

Kids happily playing on the field

Another fact the artist wants to show is the exquisite skills Chinese workers have, to refute the prejudice foreigners have towards the label "made in China".

Ai weiwei with his sunflower seeds

Other works

For more information about his work "Sunflower seeds", you can watch this video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PueYywpkJW8