Ai Weiwei Citizen's Investigation Installation, Remembering and Snake Ceiling

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Ai Weiwei Citizen's Investigation Installation, Remembering and Snake Ceiling are artistic installations by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei .

background

The Sichuan earthquake

On May 12, 2008, a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck China at 2:28 p.m. local time. The epicenter of the quake was 95 kilometers northwest of Chengdu , the capital of Sichuan . The tremendous tremor was felt even in Beijing and Shanghai . Due to the shallow depth of the earthquake, the destruction was immense and claimed 80,000 victims. 5.8 million people were left homeless. Among the victims were thousands of children buried under their schools while state buildings withstood the earthquake. In public, especially in the press, there was an allegation against the Chinese authorities in the affected regions of not having built the school buildings, also known as “ tofu schools ”, to be earthquake-proof. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei traveled to Sichuan to get an idea of ​​the destruction and its effects on site.

Installations

The Citizen's Investigation Installation 2009

On his own initiative, Ai Weiwei started a Citizen's Investigation in 2008 with 200 helpers he had chosen himself to collect the names of the deceased children and later put them on lists so that their names would not be forgotten. Together they managed to collect more than 5000 names of the deceased children and to document them in the form of lists. The lists they made refer to the name, gender, date of birth, age and school address of each child who died. Out of this concept, the Citizen's Investigation Installation emerged, on display until February 24, 2013 at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington on the occasion of the exhibition, “Ai Weiwei: According to what?”. The installation, which is made up of the lists of names and transferred to the walls of the museum using a special printing process, is located in the entrance hall of the Hirshhorn Museum. Written in Chinese characters, it documents in chronological order the name, year of birth and school class of each individual child who died. It is the abridged version of Ai Weiwei's list of names. Nevertheless, it does not lose its meaningfulness due to the fact that more than 5000 names have been registered. Accompanying this installation, the names of the children, by different people, are recorded from a tape. The recording, "Remembrance", is 3 hours and 41 minutes. The Citizen's Investigation installation is really appalling because of its mass of names that have been structurally arranged and which once again illustrate the tragedy of the earthquake.

The Remembering Installation 2009

The installation “Remembering” from 2009, which was attached to the facade of the Haus der Kunst in Munich for Ai Weiwei's exhibition “So Sorry”, caused a sensation. The installation, which is 100 meters long and 10 meters high, consists of 9,000 children's backpacks arranged systematically in a row. Each child's backpack stands for a life. The rucksacks are each provided with a letter and a number and inserted in a row of numbers that can be found numbered in a steel frame. They are in bright, lively colors, such as blue, red, yellow and green, a little white in the middle of the installation can also be seen and, according to Ai Weiwei, should reflect the psyche of a child, their joie de vivre and innocence. In addition, the colors have been used after the Toys'R'Us logo and are formed into Mandarin characters , the result is a sentence: “She lived happily in this world for seven years.” This comment by a mother of a deceased child is supported the statement of the installation additionally. Due to the mass of rucksacks, as well as the mass of names of the Citizen's Investigation installation, the installation gains emotional depth.

Snake Ceiling 2009

Snake Ceiling consists of a 90-meter-long, flexible sculpture made up of 600 black and white backpacks with neon green backpack buckles and which, like Ai Weiwei's installation Remembering, also represents the deceased children of Sichuan. The backpacks consist of different sizes, as they represent "elementary school students" and "junior high students" , their patterns are also different. They form a snake that was attached to the ceiling of a museum room at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The sculpture should stand as a requiem for the souls of the children. Due to its high proportion of gray and black, the installation appears subtle and dreary in its colors, so Snake Ceiling reflects the mourning from the beginning, but there is also something treacherous about it, caused by the symbol of the snake.

Symbolism of the snake and the Chinese dragon

The symbol of the snake is ambiguous, it stands for wisdom and enlightenment, as well as for death and destruction, since its bite can kill, but also for life and resurrection, since it sheds its skin. In Christian countries it is often associated with evil, with lies and the fall of man . Snake Ceiling embodies a snake, but its structure is very similar to the Chinese dragon, also called Long . In China, dragons are revered as deities, as magical beings that are able to take on other forms of life, including human form. Quite typical for China, it often appears in the color red, which represents the color of life in this country and at the same time is a symbol of joy, happiness and love.

literature

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