Ai Weiwei

Chinese contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei comes to Portugal for the first time with a never-before-seen show: Rapture. Voted the most popular artist in the world in 2020 by The Art Newspaper, Ai Weiwei is known worldwide for blending art with social causes and human rights issues. Curated by Marcello Dantas (Brazil), the exhibition will showcase some of the artist’s most iconic works, as well as original works created in Portugal using traditional techniques.

If Ai Weiwei is a notorious political activist, a symbol of resistance against oppression and an advocate for civil rights and free speech, with an extensive oeuvre that has marked these struggles in recent decades, he is also an articulator of humanity’s deepest cultural roots – especially Chinese traditions and iconography, lost or forgotten since Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976).

Historic works to be displayed include Snake Ceiling (2009), a large snake-shaped installation made up of hundreds of children’s backpacks, in memory of the students killed in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008; Circle of Animals (2010), in which the artist revisits a series of sculptures consisting of twelve animal heads from the Chinese zodiac, which during the Qing dynasty era bedecked a fountain in Yuanming Yuan garden, outside Beijing; and Law of the Journey (Prototype C) (2016) , consisting of a 16-meter-long inflatable boat with human figures, which alludes to one of the most recurring topics in the artist’s oeuvre: the global refugee crisis.

Documentaries on Ai Weiwei’s life and work will be screened during the exhibition.

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