Like it’s not real,” the bemused Uber driver says as we pass through a succession of silent rural villages washed with milky sunlight. He’s right: signs of human life are weirdly absent during our windy journey through the Alentejo. I’m making my way to Ai Weiwei’s secluded farm, nestled deep in the Portuguese countryside, where arguably the world’s best known living artist has quietly lived for the last six years.
When I arrive, I am ushered inside a vast cathedral of a building, a replica of Ai’s erstwhile, and controversially demolished, studio in Shanghai. It’s gridded by huge wooden columns and its dizzyingly high ceilings are webbed with beams. There is no artwork on the walls, nor are there any obvious signs of production or activity.
Maybe it’s for nothing,” Ai tells me with a shrug. And emptiness, people cannot accept.” Ai has been busy filling other vacant spaces: I’m visiting him to chat about the unveiling of his latest work, Mushrooms, this year’s Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission outside Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Characteristically epic, elliptical and urgent, this installation is 40 metres in length, and consists of 500 identical cast iron sculptures of combat helmets on an elevated platform.
The title alludes to the visual rhyme between mushroom caps and the shape of the helmets – as well as the fungal associations with decay, death and the fragility of life, brutally exposed by armed conflict. In 2015, Ai began work on Human Flow, his documentary on the migrant crisis for which he and his team travelled to 23 countries. The process of producing this film led him to reflect more deeply on the causes of these perilous mass movements across the globe: war – or more specifically, the mechanics and munitions involved in contemporary warfare.
Then, when Russia threatened Ukraine and Ukraine asked for help from Germany, the German chancellor offered them 5,000 helmets. So, at the beginning of the conflict, you can say Germany or Europe did not understand the nature of the war.” Last year, Ai also visited Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline four times. He scrolls through his iPhone and shows me pictures and footage he took during his time there: Ai being taught how to use a rifle, the troops sporting uniforms he had embroidered with motifs of sunflowers.
He plans to use these clips in an upcoming film. But he is keen that I do not simply see these experiences and this background as research for the new MCA piece. Mushrooms was also shaped by its future home, “a beautiful location” that he has visited several times, with a dramatic view of the Sydney Opera House.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
