Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn” at the Victoria and Albert Museum and “The Flamboyant Mr. Chinnery” at Asia House offer, in quite, different ways, interesting insights into the interplay between Chinese and Western Art.
At the center of the exhibition “Dropping the Urn,” is a triple-framed photo of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei first holding, then dropping, then standing by the shattered shards of a Han Dynasty (266 B.C.–A.D. 220) urn. A valuable historic artifact has become a disposable item in an enactment of modern performance art. The curators of the V&A have thoughtfully placed close at hand a similar, but intact, Eastern Han earthenware jar with a brown lead glaze. The curators have done the same with Ai’s Coca-Cola Vase (1997), made by painting a Coca-Cola logo in bright red with gold underlining on a Neolithic vase. Next to it stands a similar but unimproved earth-colored vase with black decoration; both date from 5000–3000 B.C.. The branded version has by far the higher value in the marketplace and is also the more attractive of the two. Possibly this is an illusion created by its having suffered a “sea change into something rich and strange.” Yet the original vase is still there underneath, and it is questionable whether it was of much interest to anyone other than dusty archaeologists who measure out their lives with ancient pots.
Ai Weiwei would have been pleased with the juxtaposition: he both takes a pride in China’s