“You call it being destroyed; I just change the form”: Ai Weiwei at the RA

This review was originally published in The Cherwell Newspaper in 2016.

“Dear Ai Weiwei, You have applied for a six month business visit visa, but on this occasion your visa has been restricted,” reads a letter to the artist from the Beijing British Embassy, photographed and posted to his Instagram account. There's a grotesque irony in the reality in the reason given for his visa restriction being an undeclared “criminal conviction” in China: his 81-day detention for crossing “the red line of Chinese law” is traumatically depicted “S.A.C.R.E.D.” (2012), the penultimate piece in the very RA exhibition which prompted his UK visa application. The viewer is confronted with six identical black cuboids, each with two windows. Because of the tremendous popularity of the exhibition, you have to wait in line to look through them, winding your way past pushchairs and school parties. Inside each one is a painstakingly accurate fibreglass diorama, drenched in bright, white light. Fibreglass Ai is scrutinised at close proximity by two guards, and looking from above or from the side, we scrutinise them.

And yet there's so much more here than the ironic shifting of a gaze, or the irony of the situation. This is more than a catharsis or a mockery; in “S.A.C.R.E.D.”, basic human rituals of eating, sleeping, and washing are laid (quite literally) bare in uncannily hyper-realistic form. The permanence of the statuesque figures and the cruel monotony of the unchanging, white room are in constant tension with the movement tracked from diorama to diorama.

Permanence and change wrestle time and again throughout Ai Weiwei's output, most infamously in his triptych “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” (1995) and accompanying “appropriation” of similar vases, which he has painted in garish colours. One, bright red, bears the Coca Cola logo. Some critics have tritely dismissed these intensely political gestures as “posturing”, but Ai's harsh comments on the Western fetishisation of ancient Chinese arts, their high monetary values in conflict with Chinese authorities' seeming lack of care for them, are just one facet of his work with dynasty vases. Here, his activism collides with a snapshot of the split second before the smash, the “vandalistic”, irreversible re-painting of ancient artefacts which once seemed so permanent. These are serious engagements with serious questions about the nature of the work, and the results are both shocking and devastating: in his seeming destruction, he has made something new.

Nevertheless, the garishly postmodern confrontation of the vases is in some ways a disappointment after Qing Dynasty “Stool” and “Table with Two Legs on the Wall” (1997) three rooms earlier. These pieces of seamlessly re-imagined furniture ask all of the same questions as the vases, but the more elegant figures that they cut are testament not only to Ai's interrogative approach, but his immensely effective commissioning of traditional woodwork techniques. The sense of entrapment is achieved by the legs literally pressing against the wall, making another floor of it and decentering the entire room; in “Grapes” (2010), it's impossible to see where one antique stool ends and another begins.

In his manipulation of mundane furniture forms, Ai Weiwei renders them useless: how do you eat off a table with a five-metre pillar protruding through it? How do you sit on a chair with a tree embedded in it? His “useless objects” are mundane (an armchair, a pushchair), sexual (anal beads, a butt plug), and threatening (a gas mask, handcuffs, CCTV cameras on the staircase). In an invocation of permanence strikingly similar to that of Anselm Kiefer's enormous lead books displayed at the RA this time last year, these items carved out of marble. Yet unlike Kiefer, Ai's mockery of these flagrantly modern objects sees a traditional Chinese building material transformed into the whitewashed workaday.

Ai's most moving transformation at the RA this winter, however, is made of a different building material altogether. Ninety tonnes of reinforced steel rods make up the matter of “Straight” (2008-12). For the most dramatic of Ai's “found object” installations, each of these rods was gathered in the wake of the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2012, hammered straight over several years by a team of six, and painstakingly laid into a vast, undulating, tectonic landscape on the floor. The walls of the gallery are lined with the names of children who died at school during the quake, crushed by their poorly constructed classrooms, many of their death unrecognised by Chinese authorities. Along with the screams and cries of the aftermath footage in Ai's film “Little Girl's Cheeks” (2008) which plays in the same room, this staggeringly large grid of names forms a harrowing background to a work of such astonishing proportions and beautifully controlled form, as it tapers off at each end. Within the trauma glaring out of each of the four walls, there is something powerfully moving and cathartic conveyed by this landslide of straight metal lines.

The pace of this exhibition is relentless. Between the dissident and the devastating, the ancient and the new, the moving and the funny, there is a constant discussion here and it is anything but dull or flippant. To cast this artist as an ironist doesn't even begin to do him justice.