individual, and yet each lost in a field of near copies …

Ai Weiwei, Stools (2014) © Ai Weiwei

individual, and yet each lost in a field of near copies — it could have been a definition of us, mankind, but is in fact a description used about Ai Weiwei’s new Berlin exhibition.

Ai Weiwei, Stools (2014) © Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei has filled a large atrium in Martin-Gropius-Bau museum, Berlin, with more than 6,000 antique stools gathered from villages across China’s north — of the type that have been used in the Chinese countryside for hundreds of years, since the Ming Dynasty, the gallery states that “the result is an aesthetically pleasing, pixel-like work”. These stools, according to Ai Weiwei, are an expression of the centuries-old aesthetic of rural China. And it is really no problem to discover the aesthetic beauty in these objects. They look the same but different, just like us, each one with its own personality, the more worn and used, the more beautiful …