An artist notorious for smashing ancient vases may not seem the most reliable custodian and curator for our collective material heritage. Ai Weiwei’s 2011 detention without trial by the Chinese authorities made him an international celebrity and a major art world player. Yet the artist gained almost equal infamy when it emerged that he had dropped and smashed a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn in a 1995 artistic action – entitled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn – designed to question the value and power we bestow on certain cultural objects.
If that gave the impression of an artist actively hostile to history, we now know this is very far from the case. Since the 1990s, Ai has created a vast archive of China’s artistic and architectural past, including ceramic works numbered in the millions and entire buildings, alongside vast numbers of valueless modern mass-produced objects.
