Ai's Porcelain Smashed at Show Opening

What's left of Ai's Porcelain Cube in Bologna, Italy

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has purposely broken a 2,000-year-old pottery for "art", so it was quite the shock for him when one of his own works was destroyed in Bologna, Italy last Friday during the private opening of the show.

Entitled "Who am I?" shown at Palazzo Fava, Ai's Porcelain Cube was displayed, a cube made from porcelain tubes painted in a blue and white floral design.

Porcelain Cube was made in Jingdezhen

However, a 57-year-old Czech man by the name of Vaclav Pisvejc, snuck into the invite-only event and purposely toppled the porcelain structure by the dissident artist. In a surveillance video shared by Ai, Pisvejc loiters by the work before forcefully pushing the porcelain piece over, and even looks triumphant as he proudly holds a fragment before security tackle him to the ground.

Pisvejc was arrested for "destruction, dispersion, deterioration, defacement, soiling and illicit use of cultural or landscape assets".

In addition he is known to Arturo Galansino, the exhibition's curator and director general of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

"Unfortunately, I know the author of this inconsiderate gesture from a series of disturbing and damaging episodes over the years involving various exhibitions and institutions in Florence."

Ai was concerned that people were injured by the incident and asked that the fragments be removed. They will be replaced with a life-sized print of the cube with an explanation of what happened to it.

Ai is familiar with breaking priceless pottery too

He said the sound of the destruction sounded like an explosion so he thought it could be a terrorist attack.

"Afterward, I felt it's a pity as the artwork had been incredibly difficult to create," he said. "Crafted using the finest blue-and-white qinghua porcelain techniques from Jingdezhen, it required numerous attempts and a lot of experiments to produce."

It took over a year to create Porcelain Cube by using a traditional kiln. "Only true connoisseurs of the Yuan and Ming dynasties' porcelain can appreciate the effort and style behind it," said Ai, adding he would not make a replacement piece, saying these sorts of incidents are "part of the reality" of a divided society.

A Good Dose of Art at M+

Great Criticism: Chanel by Wang Guangyi

The Hong Kong contemporary art museum M+ opened just after I left the city two years ago so it was a place I wanted to visit. However, getting there is a hassle as the signage on the MTR station and in the Elements shopping mall are vague. I had a bit of a run around trying to find out the best exit to take until I looked up the directions on the M+ website. 

Vague directions to get to M+ in West Kowloon

From Kowloon Station, go to Exit C1 or Exit D1 and take the escalator to the 1/F and follow the signs to the Artist Square Bridge on 2/F, Metal Zone (as if going to the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong). However, when you walk through the mall, there isn't enough signage to give you the confidence you are going in the right direction. 

Eventually I found the bridge and from there the giant black building that looks like a massive computer hard drive was in front, and the entrance was signalled with a series of white lamps that echo the shape of those red plastic lamps found hanging in wet markets.

I had bought a ticket in advance, but could have gotten it at the front desk, though the website makes it sound like purchasing it ahead of time was a requirement. When you buy a ticket be sure you get the access to the special exhibitions you want to see otherwise you are not allowed in as the staff scan the QR codes to these rooms. 

Liberty Guiding the People by Yue Minjun

Speaking of staff, the place was crawling with them wearing M+ jackets everywhere. They hung around chatting with each other, or it seemed like they needed an army of people to repair something, or stand around and supervise the repair. They were all trying to look busy, but they didn't seem interested in welcoming visitors to the place and kept to themselves.

In any event, the first place I checked out was the Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman, diplomat and art collector, who donated a big collection of Chinese contemporary art to M+. The pieces run the gamut from paintings to sculptures, and videos. 

Many of the art works either hark back to proletarian China, where idealistic Chinese communists fight for the motherland, inspiring patriotism, or at the opposite end of the spectrum and showing how capitalist the country has become, with propaganda-like paintings with brand names like Chanel on them, like Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism: Chanel.

Old People's Home by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu

Yue Minjun, known for his laughing self portraits, makes his own version of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, with him in a white T-shirt and gray shorts, complete with brown open-toe sandals and gray buildings in the cloudy and dusty background.

An eerie multimedia piece is Old People's Home by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu features 13 life-like sculptures who resemble politicians, admirals, generals, bishops, and dictators, but they look old and frail, dozing off in their wheelchairs. All the wheelchairs are supposed to move, but because this piece is pretty fragile, only one was moving.

Controversial works by Ai Weiwei were not shown, in particular the photographs of him giving the middle finger to places like the Gate of Heavenly Peace or Tiananmen Square, or even the photograph series of him dropping a vase. Instead there is a giant brown cube called Ton of Tea, made of pu'er tea leaves and wood. 

Kacey Wong on his floating apartment

Nevertheless, local artist Kacey Wong, who has gone into exile in Taiwan, has his work here. It's a video called Paddling Home, where he is dressed in a white captain's suit and a life jacket and gets into his tiny floating apartment, a satirical critique on Hong Kong's lack of affordable housing. 

Fashion designer Vivienne Tam's black and white Mao Suit from 1995 is also displayed here. She really made her mark with her Mao prints, and I still have my T-shirt of Mao with a bee on his nose that she designed.

Not only did I appreciate the works on the walls, but the building itself, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The large expansive spaces allows a lot of room for the works of art to be exhibited without cramming them, while the views looking out are also panoramic, unlike the Hong Kong Museum of Art that only has one area facing the harbour.

Nice views of the harbour and city from M+

On the third floor is the Korean Michelin-starred restaurant Mosu, and there is also an outdoor garden for visitors to have a 180-degree view of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. I found out about this place thanks to a friendly staff member who encouraged me to go take a look.

More Contemporary Art at LACMA

Striking avian-inspired dress by McQueen

Today we checked out the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, known as LACMA which houses contemporary art.

Elegant and gothic feathery cape 

Here the person who checked our tickets also asked us if we had caught Covid recently or if we were in contact with anyone who had caught the virus in the past 10 days. They even had a box of masks ready to hand out to anyone who didn't have one on hand.

And there were hand sanitizers everywhere, and washrooms where you just waved your hand to open the door.

We first checked out the fashion exhibition called "Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind Mythos Muse".

It's hard to believe McQueen left this world 12 years ago, and he left behind a massive body of work we continue to analyse, understand and cherish.

He was known for his detailed tailoring, but also his fantastic imagination and research, alluding to various periods in European history as well as Asian (mostly Japanese) influences that can be found in his pieces.

This exhibition brings together what informed his collections, from Japanese Buddhist priest textiles to ancient headdresses, birds that led to his cape made of feathers, and the French court of King Louis XIV among the influences.

One of Magritte's famous works

We also saw an exhibition of Impressionist works from the collection of Janice and Henri Lazarof, who was a Hungarian-American composer who later taught at UCLA. 

The couple seems to have amassed an impressive art collection over the years and even more outstanding is that they donated 130 of these pieces to LACMA in 2007; sadly he died in 2013 of Alzheimer's.

Works of art by Degas, 20 pieces alone by Picasso, as well as those by Paul Kee, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, and Alberto Giacometti to name a few.

Was also lovely to see other famous works by Ren Magritte, like "Ceci n'est pay une pipe", or "this is not a pipe" when it obviously is one, Young Woman of the People by Amedeo Modigliani, and Georgia O'Keefe's Horse's Skull with Pink Rose.

Large painting PH-143 by Clyfford Still

Other more modern pieces included one by Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, whose painting PH-143 really is an immersive large work you can't help but be drawn into and then feeling overwhelmed by the size and scale of the piece.

In terms of pop art LACMA had Andy Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup can was there, and an odd sculpture -- Claes' Oldenburg's Typewriter Eraser.

How many still remember using this object it before?!

An intriguing piece by Richard Serra is called Band -- my brother joked that there is no way anyone could steal this art work made of steel. Walk in and feel overwhelmed by the steel that has taken on a corroded rusted colour. It's not menacing by any means, with its gentle curves. You feel invited to interact with the massive statue and are welcome to enter it at any of its openings.

Richard Serra's Band is immersive, interactive

Outside in the museum's plaza by the restaurant and bar is Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads from 2011.

LACMA

5905 Wilshire Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA

90036