Ai Weiwei, Rebar Caskets and Marble Rebar, 2014, installation view, huali wood, marble and foam.
A subtle message regarding people and cultures distorted by circumstance—historical, social, psychological—seems to pervade the latest show by China’s art-star dissident. In the main gallery are marble versions of twisted lengths of rebar from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake—the disaster whose disproportionate number of schoolhouse deaths Ai very publically investigated, prompting his three-month detention in 2011. Each bar has its own irregularly designed coffin, exquisitely crafted in the kind of precious wood used in high-end Ming and Qing dynasty furniture. The gallery’s back garden contains porcelain pieces shaped, incongruously, into a bench or a huge cube of “tofu” that is here neither nutritious nor soft. A side gallery features vitrines displaying jade pieces carved in the forms of modern cosmetics holders, perfume bottles and sex toys.