Hong Kong’s M+ to display work by dissident mainland Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, but curator insists no political message involved
- Ai’s A Ton of Tea, a cube-shaped sculpture of tea leaves and wood, was created to highlight the drink’s major role in Chinese culture
- Curator Wu Mo says ‘Another Story’ exhibition designed to feature quality in modern Chinese art
A single artwork by dissident mainland Chinese artist Ai Weiwei will be shown as part of a contemporary art exhibition focused on the country at Hong Kong’s M+ museum from Friday.
The work, A Ton of Tea, is a cube-shaped sculpture made of Puer tea leaves and wood created to highlight “how important tea is in Chinese people’s lives”, M+ curator Wu Mo said.
But Wu stressed the sculpture was not intended to push a political viewpoint.
“It’s quite a common interpretation … when seeing a work of contemporary Chinese art [that] it’s always connected or attached to a sociopolitical context,” Wu said. “But this is not the key point of our show.”
She explained the exhibition, called “Another Story”, was designed to showcase a new curatorial approach at the museum which emphasised visual language and quality in contemporary Chinese art.
The show features more than 120 artworks from the museum’s 1,500-piece Sigg Collection and were chosen to be in line with the theme of how artists have responded to significant social change in China from the 1990s, when the country started to become increasingly consumerist as the economy developed rapidly.
Another piece by Ai, acquired by M+ through donation and purchase from Uli Sigg, an art collector and former Swiss diplomat, earlier sparked controversy.
It was decided in the run-up to the museum’s 2021 opening that a photograph from the Sigg collection, Study of Perspective: Tiananmen (1997), which featured an extended middle finger against a background of the Beijing square, would not go on show.
Henry Tang Ying-yen, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority chairman, defended the decision at the time.
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Tang, a former politician, said it was never intended that the work should be shown and that the museum was determined to comply with the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution, and national security legislation.
A Ton of Tea is juxtaposed with another work, Coca Cola Project by He Xiangyu, which Wu said related to consumerism in Chinese people’s lives and made for “a very good dialogue” with Ai’s creation.
Other highlights of the show include Products, by Liu Ding, a series of 40 similar paintings featuring a natural landscape and cranes produced by 13 artists, each focused on one element of the scene, such as the trees or the sky.
Products was designed to underline art as a commodity, one which could be mass-produced and sold in China and internationally.
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Another work, Sinking Mercedes-Benz into Yellow River, by Zhao Bandi uses the luxury car brand that became a symbol of wealth and power when it entered the Chinese market in the 1980s.
The piece shows a scene where China’s communal, socialist spirit – represented by the Yellow River – encounters one of the German cars, an object of consumerist desire.
Tickets for the show, which will run from Friday until January 14 next year, will cost HK$90 (US$11) for general admission, with concessionary tickets at HK$45 until special summer discounts end on September 30.
They will be priced at HK$120 for general admission and HK$60 for concessionary tickets from October 1.
