Ai Weiwei: Making Sense review – horror, playfulness and delight

Design Museum, London
From neolithic tools to Monet in Lego, the artist contemplates the human freight of things made and of use – or useless – in a show that’s at once elegiac and life-affirming

In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 many children died, often as a result of the poor construction of their schools. They are commemorated in Making Sense, Ai Weiwei’s new exhibition at the Design Museum in London: the names of 5,197 of them are printed in red on to framed sheets of paper, using hand-carved jade stamps individually made for each one. There is also Rebar and Case, an arrangement of coffin-like seats around a representation in marble, fragile and ghostly, of the steel reinforcement bars whose faulty or insufficient installation contributed to the collapse of the school buildings.

The compressed anger of these pieces, and their evocation of vanished and unseen lives, pervades the exhibition. People are mostly not visible in the show, except in videos and photographs by Ai of Beijing 20 or more years ago – a fight in a flea market; a 150-hour tour from 2003 of the narrow streets and alleys that were about to be swept away by redevelopment. Instead, there are hundreds of thousands of artefacts, each of which recalls the hands that made them, the hands that used them, and the bodies pierced, nurtured and otherwise served by the objects of war, work, hygiene and pleasure on display.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/FiIunX3