Ai Weiwei and the hidden lives of objects

AI WEIWEI IS a master of spectacle. In 1995 he produced three black-and-white photographs in which he smashed what looked like a 2,000-year-old urn; it was not clear whether the ceramic was real or a fake. In 2010 he covered the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with 100m handmade porcelain sunflower seeds—a reference both to Chinese Communist Party imagery, wherein Mao Zedong represented the sun, and a symbol of brighter times to come. A huge sculpture at the Royal Academy in 2015 was designed to evoke horror as well as awe. Mr Ai arranged 90 tonnes of steel reinforcing bars in one gallery: they had been retrieved from schools destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which had killed more than 5,000 children.

A new show, “Making Sense”, which recently opened at the Design Museum in London, includes several large-scale works. (Mr Ai stores his materials between his vast studios and warehouses.) The artist persuaded the museum to strip out the internal walls from its ground-floor gallery space so he could lay out five “fields” of collected artefacts, among them Neolithic tools and the spouts of broken teapots. One installation is a collection of porcelain cannonballs dating from the Song dynasty, a period part of China’s “Golden Age” (pictured below). Porcelain is evocative of wealth and refinement in the country, but here the material was put to bloodier purpose; some of the pieces still smell of gunpowder from their previous use in the weapons. Such duality, evident in the sunflower seeds, is typical of Mr Ai’s work.