Little jewels: Ai Weiwei remembers quake’s child victims in intimate scale

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist whose works are often as supersized as his reputation, has created new works to commemorate the schoolchildren who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake - but this time on a more intimate scale.

Ai, currently in Germany as a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, has made a series of 24-carat gold jewellery pieces patterned to look like miniature rebars used to reinforce buildings. He says he hopes the wearers will remember the children who perished under fallen, poorly constructed “tofu” schools that lacked precisely the reinforcement that could have saved young lives.

The May 12, 2008 earthquake was one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit China in recent years, killing nearly 90,000 people and permanently displacing countless communities in the mountainous region. But what angered activists like Ai and Tan Zuoren, a lawyer jailed for five years for speaking out on the issue, was the fact that endemic corruption had resulted in schools so badly built that they killed those inside.

These schools were defenceless against tremors of magnitude 7.9. As a direct result, thousands of schoolchildren were killed, according to an online crowd-sourcing project launched by Ai in 2008 to independently assess the scale of the tragedy.

“The problem was not just about building safety. It’s about a respect for lives. China was in a pretty bad shape for more than 100 years. All those wars, famines and other struggles mean that there haven’t been enough moral and philosophical discussions about what life is,” he says by phone from his Berlin studio.

Despite a nationwide crackdown on corruption under President Xi Jinping, the country’s culture still doesn’t respect lives, he says, which is why he goes on reminding people of what happened seven years ago.