Ai versus AI – Prospect Magazine
3 February 2025
On one wall hangs an old American military tent from the Second World War. Flattened, the tent looks like a paper party hat that is yet to be opened out. Positioned diagonally across this unlikely canvas, from bottom left to top right, are a series of brightly coloured letters; it is only when you are standing close up that you realise they are made from hundreds of stitched-in buttons. Together, the letters make a phrase: Go fuck yourself.
It might not seem like it, but with this work—as with the many others on display at London’s Lisson Gallery this February—we find ourselves in classic Ai Weiwei territory. The irreverent defacing of a historical object; the elevation of mundane and mass-produced objects; profanity as political statement. These are the themes upon which Ai has built his reputation, the constants in a body of work now spanning more than four decades and encompassing installations, architecture, opera, films, books and more.
“I like to use historical objects for other purposes,” Ai tells me one sunny winter’s day at the Heong Gallery, part of Downing College in Cambridge. These objects, he says, are like his version of the readymade. Designed for a specific purpose and at a specific moment in time, they couldn’t be further from a blank slate; already latent with so many assumptions about how they are meant to be used and what they are supposed to mean, they are instead a known quantity on to which other ideas—“a construct or a strong, sometimes even contradictory argument”—can be imposed.
At Lisson, the objects Ai has appropriated or reinterpreted range from Second World War paraphernalia and Chinese porcelain artefacts to works by Gauguin and van Gogh. But perhaps the most pervasive readymade in his recent work is something much more discreet. “ I often buy materials which I associate with our human history,” he tells me of his collection of buttons, which he acquired from the A Brown & Co factory in Croydon when it closed down in 2019. Buttons, he says, hark back to the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, evidence of the repetitive perfection that could now be achieved at scale; as parts of our clothing, they are also more intimately related to our bodies than other mass-produced objects. By sewing them to fabrics other than clothes, Ai hopes to create narratives that might not otherwise have been possible or obvious—between words of this period with the connotations of another, for example. (The phrase on the tent, it turns out, is a reference to Elon Musk.)
It took Ai many years to grasp the true scale and meaning of what he had acquired from A Brown & Co. “The buttons stayed there as a problem for a long time,” he says, “but I often create a problem before I know how to solve it.” After employing two people to individually categorise them—30 tonnes of them in all, taking up 60 cubic metres of studio space—Ai discovered he had around 9,000 unique varieties, made from bone, mother of pearl, plastic, metal and wood. Slowly, we begin to get a sense of the paradoxical nature of this unassuming object: something that is both diminutive in form yet collectively monumental, made by machine yet stitched by hand.
Read more of Ai Weiwei's interview in Prospect Magazine here.
