In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 many children died, often as a result of the poor construction of their schools. They are commemorated in Making Sense, Ai Weiwei’s new exhibition at the Design Museum in London: the names of 5,197 of them are printed in red on to framed sheets of paper, using hand-carved jade stamps individually made for each one. There is also Rebar and Case, an arrangement of coffin-like seats around a representation in marble, fragile and ghostly, of the steel reinforcement bars whose faulty or insufficient installation contributed to the collapse of the school buildings.
The compressed anger of these pieces, and their evocation of vanished and unseen lives, pervades the exhibition. People are mostly not visible in the show, except in videos and photographs by Ai of Beijing 20 or more years ago – a fight in a flea market; a 150-hour tour from 2003 of the narrow streets and alleys that were about to be swept away by redevelopment. Instead, there are hundreds of thousands of artefacts, each of which recalls the hands that made them, the hands that used them, and the bodies pierced, nurtured and otherwise served by the objects of war, work, hygiene and pleasure on display.
It’s fair to ask why Ai, primarily an artist, should be exhibiting in a museum of design – of graphics and furniture and practical objects – but the question is answered by the installation: its subject is the human significance of things made and of use, which is definitely relevant to design. A multitude of lives are present in the room, but most of what you see are things. And alongside the glimpses of horror there are also playfulness and delight.
The display occupies a large single space, the partitions that usually subdivide it having been removed, whose floor is mostly taken up with five rectangular fields of stuff. One is made of 4,000 stone tools from the neolithic period, the next of 250,000 spouts broken from teapots and ewers deemed to be imperfect in the porcelain factories of the Song dynasty, approximately a millennium ago. Next are 200,000 handmade porcelain balls from the same period, used as ammunition in the artillery of the time.
These installations manifest prodigious feats of collecting and storage by Ai, who discovered vast numbers of antique objects going cheap in flea markets, and otherwise accumulated troves of forgotten fragments. Next to the balls comes an oblong of chunky blue-glazed porcelain shards, the remains of his own sculptures that were destroyed when the Chinese state demolished his Beijing studio in 2018. The last field is made of Lego bricks, sent in by members of the public when the Lego company briefly stopped selling them to Ai, who was using them to make portraits of political prisoners.
Taken together, these five fields give material form to questions of value and use. The stone tools, thousands of years old, occupy the same space as mass-produced children’s building bricks. What was once rubbish, the spouts, have been made venerable by the passage of time, albeit not so much that they are given usual museological levels of respect. Their unguarded arrangement on the floor makes it likely that some will be displaced by straying feet, visitors being another kind of human presence that the objects bring into the space.
Further layers of understanding are offered by the room’s other exhibits. Vitrines contain artworks by Ai, such as toilet rolls beautifully represented in marble and glass, intended as a comment on the fluctuating value of this ordinary product – suddenly precious during Covid, when it was scarce, and a luxury in Ai’s childhood, when it was also hard to get. There is a sex toy rendered in jade, uncomfortably rigid, and a hard hat in glass, uselessly fragile. There are porcelain replicas of skull and bone fragments from a 1950s labour camp of the kind where Ai’s poet father was sent.
The useful but humble are set alongside the useless but precious, and switches are made from one to the other. There are transmutations of materials and forms – things are made into something they are not. Connections are suggested and dead things animated. Ai makes a few of the spouts into sculptures, for example, that help you notice their resemblance, fleshy-coloured and oddly curving as they are, to body parts and bones, which associates them with the labour camp relics.
Taken as whole, the show is about making, by hand and machine. It is about creation and destruction, about the humanity and persistence of stuff. It is partly elegiac, paying tribute to the skills and memories that large-scale industrialised construction projects (which are depicted by photographs on the walls) threaten to destroy, but it is also affirmative. It joins making in the present to making in the past, across vertiginous timespans of many millennia, an interaction between the living and the dead mediated by dizzying numbers of artefacts. The apparent casualness with which old items are presented contributes to this end: it keeps the ancient in play.
Last, a shoutout to two of the most memorable exhibits. The atrium of the Design Museum, a somewhat forbidding void, is inhabited as never before by the timber frame of a Qing dynasty house rescued by Ai from complete destruction. He has had it painted with a confectionary shop range of modern industrial colours that, if not entirely respectful of heritage, bring it to life. And there is a wall-sized rendering in Lego bricks of one of Monet’s water lily paintings, a meditation on the exhibition’s themes of artifice and craft. A dark rectangle interrupts the potential idyll, representing the portal to the underground desert home where Ai and his father were forced to live in the 1960s. It takes you back to a spirit of resilience in extreme circumstances, which is what gives this show its authority.
• Making Sense is at the Design Museum, London, until 30 July
