Ai Weiwei

AI Weiwei: Fragments Beijing 2006 Ai Weiwei

This book covers a recent sculptural installation by the Chinese artist, architect and radical intellectual, Ai Weiwei--who is currently being watched the world over for his work on China's 2008 Olympic Stadium, designed in collaboration with the Swiss Architects, Herzog & de Meuron. Fragments depicts a mysterious large-scale sculpture that hybridizes architectural elements from several Chinese temples. "Each architectural element in a temple has a precise order. The fragments in my installation are from three or four temples, so everything is wrongly connected and misfit. They serve no purpose to each other, and the whole structure serves no purpose at all. At the beginning, many of my carpenters quit, despite the fact that I paid them a high salary and never rushed them. They quit because they didn't know what their job was for--why the table needed to be cut a certain way, or why the patina should be kept and joints hidden.