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History has repeated itself throughout Ai Weiwei’s large-scale sculpture exhibition in Manchester. The flags of long-lost nations hang from the ceiling, the bronzes taken by the dead empires have been re-hung and restored, the ruined ruins have been rebuilt. Everywhere you look here, you’ll find death, exploitation, greed and suffering from throughout human history, brought to life and displayed in horror. The first thing you see is a black glass chandelier made of skeletons – The Human Comedy – and a wall covered with pictures of the most powerful bombs ever made. As a price tag, it has the ability to act as a warning.
This big, ambitious show is a Chinese artist at his very best, and the results are very impressive. His story works best on a large scale, blown up, magnified, shoved in your face. On the back wall of the warehouse is a large inflatable boat, 100 meters long, filled with life jackets. Do you think you can ignore the migrant crisis? Not now you can’t, because Ai has taken an everyday, routine tragedy and turned it into a monument. He spent many years interviewing hundreds of refugees, meeting people who are looking for protection and a new life and he made a great career out of it. This is the end of the job. Is it a beautiful work of art? Not really, but it makes a point, and it makes it loud.
Which he does over and over again. Hanging from the ceiling is his latest work: large indoor flags sewn using heavy buttons he bought from a bankrupt English factory. The flags represent a coalition of eight countries – including Britain, the US, Japan, France and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire – that invaded China in 1900 in an effort to reopen its ports. He has combined the issues of industrialization, colonialism and historical violence into a complex picture of modern history. Look at these kingdoms, look at what they have done to each other, see who rose, who fell and try to calculate their value. Flags look heavy, they are heavy, burdened by history and its continuing effects.
It’s not just history that he’s trying to keep alive here. The most interesting project is the Wang Family Ancestral Hall, a real temple that was found falling apart in the countryside of Jiangxi, and is slowly being assembled here. It is a long window into the past, to a long-lost era, to a time before development and the spread of capitalism, when China was vulnerable and open to attack. Under the pillars of the temple, boxes contain pages of Chinese history – inaccessible and hidden stories.
In the middle of the temple, three dollhouses sit on a bed of brown mulch. All of these are made from pu’erh tea, a tight, dark leaf that gains value as it ages and ferments. They are symbols of Chinese culture, of community and Daoist values, and of wealth and accumulation. “Drinking a cup of tea,” we learn, has now become a byword for questioning by the Chinese police. It is the best work here, so far – filled with contradictory, fascinating images of the past and the present, combined into something beautiful, fragrant, strongly symbolic. Simple things turned into something destructive.
Not everything here is good, sadly. When Ai takes Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Napoleon, swaps his horse for a zebra and hangs him upside down, the sign is so heavy it almost feels like Banksy did it. It’s the same when Ai sets up Hokusai’s immigration boats. We get: colonialism is bad, the world is bad, immigration is bad, but you’ve already made a point, and you’ve made it well. His re-use of Lego – both images are made of toy bricks, as is the History of Bombs – just feels plain, basic, sloppy and silly.
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But when Ai is at his best, his work has an emotion that few artists can match. He sees history as a warning and a road map: all the injustices of today can be explained and traced back to the past. If you want to understand the plight of immigrants, or the fall of late capitalism, or the rise of authoritarianism, you need only look at the endless horrors our ancestors faced. This whole show is a plea, perhaps in vain, to listen to the lessons before it’s too late.
