Ai Weiwei hits Los Angeles: 'I cannot accept anything which is not precise' — theguardian.com

In the immense Theater Gallery of LA’s Marciano Art Foundation (MAF), Ai Weiwei’s 2010 installation Sunflower Seeds stretches across the polished cement floor like a high-pile carpet. The fuzzy grey mass is made of millions of tiny porcelain sculptures, an allusion to old Mao Zedong propaganda that depicted the people as sunflowers, and therefore the late chairman as the sun. The more essential fact of the work, however, is that it took 1,600 artisans from China’s home of imperial porcelain more than two years to make these seeds. To know this is to understand how the monumental relies on the miniscule, on hundreds of millions of single brushstrokes applied by human hands. The care and attention the artisans paid to each seed, despite the sheer number of them, extolls the value of the individual.

Read More