I don’t know what the one hundred million porcelain seeds in Ai Weiwei’s installation are supposed to ‘represent‘. Am I not supposed to think that they should represent something? Is it missing the point; ignorant? I thought they looked pretty nice, even if you can no longer walk on them. I liked looking at a few of the seeds and thinking that some Chinese worker made those in some little studio somewhere. I wonder if they had noodles for lunch, or a sandwich? Do studio workers have the option of a sandwich in China? What’s their standard lunch? How many seeds did they have to make every day? Was it an easy target to achieve? Could they just zone out and make seeds – the equivalent of Excel for an artisan in China? I wonder if the person who made the one in front of me had a family, or was single? Was a man or a woman? Do they drink tea at work? Do they have to make a round when they get up to make one for themselves? Even if there aren’t one hundred million of them, which there probably aren’t, it’s still mind-boggling to think about making them.
Free, large-scale art in London is a good thing.
