GREENWICH, CONN.- Recent and monumental works: Ai Weiwei, one of the most significant and influential artists of the last decade, returns to Switzerland. After his very first European solo exhibition at the Bern Kunsthalle in 2004, the Chinese artist has once again accepted an invitation from Bernard Fibicher, director of the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (mcb-a). For this exhibition – the last at mcb-a on its present site, before the move to PLATFORM 10 – Ai Weiwei is throwing a party, with works spilling out of the exhibition rooms into the Palais de Rumine’s public spaces and the museums of archaeology and history, zoology, geology, and money, as well as the State and University Library.

Running from 22 September 2017 to 28 January 2018, the exhibition Ai Weiwei: D’ailleurs c’est toujours les autres is bringing together more than 40 items dating from 1995 up to the present: works in porcelain, wood, marble, jade, crystal, bamboo, and silk, together with wallpaper, photographs and videos, all testifying to the rich variety of the artist’s work and his profound knowledge of his country’s cultural heritage. At the same time – and here we detect a spirit akin to that of Marcel Duchamp – in a playful or iconoclastic way he rechannels his traditional motifs, methods and materials into a critique, overt or covert, of the Chinese political system. His most recent works bear on the troubling complexity of international matters including economic dependency and refugee flows. This mcb-a event hails a true all-rounder: a remarkable visual artist, an encyclopedic mind, a gifted transmitter of ideas and a man coming to grips with the major issues of today’s world. Ai Weiwei may well be the first truly «global» artist.

Some highlights in the exhibition itinerary:

Lobby of the Palais de Rumine
A buoy seems to be floating in what used to be the Palais de Rumine’s fountain, an object both realistic and senseless whose incongruity is underscored by the finely worked black marble surrounding it. Tire (2016) plunges the visitor into Ai Weiwei’s world of irony, references to tradition, aesthetic questing, technical virtuosity and a spirit of contestation. A crusader for freedom – his own and that of others such as the refugees crossing the Mediterranean – he offers an homage at once solemn and caustic.

mcb-a – the heart of the exhibition
Room 1
Blooming abundantly in the first room, the installation Blossom (2015) comprises 22,4 m2 of white-painted corollas: 35 pieces, each 80 x 80 x 5 cm, form a lacy ceramic flowerbed produced by the craftspeople of the former imperial workshops at Jingdezhen. The work has been described as an artistic harking-back to the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China: a short-lived window onto freedom of expression in February–June 1957 that ended in a violent clampdown.

Bicycle Basket (2015) draws on the performance With Flowers (2013–2015): in protest against the confiscation of his passport by the Chinese authorities in 2011, every day for 600 consecutive days Ai Weiwei put a bouquet in the basket of a bicycle parked outside his Beijing studio, earning considerable attention on social media. Here the work takes on a fixed, statue-like form crystallizing several of the artist’s favorite fields of action: protest and poetry, art and craft, publicity and private life.

On the other side of the room the big floral dish of Flower Plate (2014), made by master ceramicists – offers colorful reminiscences of the With Flowers performance.

The walls of the room are completely covered with a repetitive mural work: Finger (2014) uses line drawing to conjure up the finger-flip that has become Ai Weiwei’s trademark for the general public. Slack, bodiless and repeated over and over, the arm is arranged in geometric patterns typical of wallpaper, turning a provocative gesture into something decorative.

The space is given over to 40 photographs from the series Study of Perspective (1995-2011), an emblematic work widely quoted – and copied – on social media. Using his middle finger as a point of reference, over the years Ai Weiwei measures ironically the vanishing points of different landscapes and contexts ranging from Tiananmen Square to the White House to the Mona Lisa.

Room 2
The major work Sunflower Seeds (2009) takes up the whole of this room. Spread across the floor are 13 tons of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds, a sample of the 150 tons commissioned by Ai Weiwei from 1,500 craftspeople at the Jingdezhen workshops – a task that took them two and a half years. China’s favorite snack, these seeds had a universally obvious symbolic value: like sunflowers, the citizens of the People’s Republic of China were turning their heads towards their sun, Mao Zedong. The ironic implications of this installation lie in its making, at the opposite pole from «Made in China» mass production: each seed is hand-painted and thus unique, and the political message is unambiguous.

Overlooking the spectacular Sunflower Seeds installation, the sculpture Surveillance Camera with Plinth (2015) – a copy of one of the cameras set up outside Ai Weiwei’s studio in Beijing – is a masterfully detailed example of traditional artisans’ skill with marble. In addition, the material itself is symbolically associated with wealth and power, and thus with the building of the Forbidden City and Mao’s mausoleum on Tiananmen Square.

In a tie-in with the first room, the walls are completely covered with The Animal That Looks Like a Llama But Is Really an Alpaca (2015). Once again, using the recurring geometrical figures of a stock wallpaper, Ai Weiwei quotes shapes and objects in a dance of connotations: the Twitter logo alongside CCTV cameras, for example, and handcuffs chained together. The work as a whole plays on the trompe l’oeil effect of all this gold, with reflections here and there of intimate personal scenes.

Room 3
Suffused with the caustic ambience of the mural work Finger, 16 wooden spheres are laid out in a rectangular grid. The installation Untitled (2012) offers a poetic resolution of a Chinese puzzle: how to use age-old techniques – in the Ming style – to assemble these multifaceted wooden sculptures without recourse to nails. Ai Weiwei: «It was a technical and artistic challenge and it took a year or two to find the answer. For me this is an equal blend of art and dialogue with my carpenters.»