On Thursday 12th November the Year 10 Art GCSE students embarked on an exciting trip to the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art.
Ai Weiwei is a contemporary Chinese artist and his often controversial works comment on modern day China and the communist regime through a wide range of media.
Ai Weiwei works across sculpture, installation, photography and video, using materials from ceramics and wood to marble and metal. The size of his works vary from tiny 5 cm sunflower seeds to 4.6 metre high pillars. He transforms found objects such as painted ancient Chinese ceramic vases and also recreates everyday objects like a CCTV camera and a mask carved in marble. Ai Weiwei create large-scale artworks made up of many small elements, such as the huge canvas with thousands of names of children who lost their lives in the 2008 earthquake.
Throughout the exhibition we learnt about Ai WeiweiÂ’s life and his struggle, as an artist, with the Chinese government. I feel that the beauty of his work lies in the way that it is open to interpretation. We all had something different to say about the work and overall I think that we learned something new about the world of art and had an amazing time in the gallery.
By Anastasia, Year 10
