Sunflower Seeds
A floor covered with hand-painted porcelain seeds, made by some 1,600 craftspeople in Jingdezhen. The work is about the mass and the individual.
From a distance a grey field; up close you see that every seed is unique.
Ai Weiwei showed Sunflower Seeds in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London in 2010. The Turbine Hall is a vast exhibition space in a former power station, and each year an artist was invited to make a work there. Ai Weiwei, born in 1957, is the son of the poet Ai Qing, who was sent into exile in the late 1950s. He spent part of his childhood in exile. In the 1980s he lived in New York, and he later became one of China’s best-known artists and critics of the regime.
The work consists of some 100 million small porcelain seeds that look like sunflower seeds. They covered the floor of a large part of the hall, forming a grey surface. From a distance it looks like a homogeneous mass, but every seed is unique. The seeds bear black and white stripes imitating real sunflower seeds.
The composition is simple: a large, flat expanse of seeds. There is no focal point and no hierarchy. Every seed is equally important, yet each disappears into the mass. The contrast between the individual and the mass lies at the heart of the work. The layer was about ten centimetres deep and covered some thousand square metres of the hall’s floor.
The seeds were made by hand by some 1,600 craftspeople in the city of Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain centre. Each seed was moulded, fired, painted with a few brushstrokes and fired again. The work took several years. It provided employment for many craftspeople and showcased a tradition going back centuries. At the same time it was a comment on the notion of China as the workshop of the world, where goods are mass-produced.
Sunflower seeds have a special significance in China. During the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao was often depicted as the sun and the people as sunflowers turning towards him. Ai Weiwei has also recalled that sunflower seeds were a common snack shared between people, even in times of poverty. The work has been interpreted as a comment on freedom, individuality and the collective.
At first visitors were allowed to walk on the seeds, lie in them and touch them. After a few days the area was closed, as porcelain dust was forming that could be harmful to inhale. From then on visitors could only look from the edge. The following year Ai Weiwei was detained by the Chinese authorities and held for 81 days without charge, which provoked international criticism.
Tate later acquired part of the seeds, some eight million. Smaller quantities have also been sold at auction. The work has become one of the best-known installations in the Turbine Hall and a symbol of Ai Weiwei’s art, which combines traditional craftsmanship, political questions and large-scale ideas. Ai Weiwei now lives outside China.