Lisson Gallery, London
This is as good an introduction to Ai Weiwei as we are likely to see in London in the near future. The publicity surrounding the cloud of porcelain dust caused by Ai's field of ceramic sunflower seeds at Tate Modern, and the controversy over his continuing imprisonment without access to lawyers or a confirmation of his supposed crimes, make this show all the more timely.
Focusing on sculpture and films made in the past decade, it is both beautiful and haunting, haunted most of all by Ai's absence. Two empty chairs, an empty coffin, empty vessels,long videos of Beijing streets, empty roads, people passing;marble doors piled up like wreckage, achingly empty quince-wood cabinets , each as big as a wardrobe,pierced by asymmetricalholes through which one sees a passing moon. And a CCTV camera, like the ones that monitored Ai outside his studio, but carved in dead white marble. Maybe he was focusing on the familiar, a thing that also looked back at him.
It all feels very poignant and elegiac, even though these works were made at different times, for different reasons. Ai's work looks utterly contemporary while looking into the past. He also gives us a jolt and something unexpected, past and present, east and west in a peculiar synthesis.
Both the oversized coffin, made of wood salvaged from demolished Qing dynasty temples, and the Moon Cabinets, are immaculately constructed using traditional Chinese techniques, without glue, nails or screws. The coffin takes a sharp angle, part way along its length, like a crooked death.
Made using the same Ming Dynasty joinery methods, a large wooden polyhedron is based on a plastic cat's toy but follows the form of a drawing Leonardo da Vinci made, in the 1509 Divina Proportione.Groups of neolithic clay vases, each dunked in garish industrial paints, again collide ancient and modern, a clash of values and sensibilities. Their colour is stunning, the drools of paint both dumb desecration and elegant, almost respectful glaze. The chairs are Qing dynasty copies, the marble giving them a classical air and a tawdry bathroom chic. You can admire their shapes, again carved from single blocks, but hate the things themselves, the perversity that they exemplify.
The videos go on for hours, with their static shots of roads, bridges, dawns, dusks, cyclists and passers-by becoming a sort of ambient cinema of life elsewhere. The silent Chang'an Boulevard lasts over 10 hours, and is a sort of Chinese take on Warhol's early films and Ed Ruscha's documentation of the buildings on Sunset Strip. Less a film to study than just to be with, it is none the worse for that. I'd like to have it in my room, just running on and on.