Welcome To The Collector’s Edge

Jeppe Curth 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners. Today we're gonna explore the work and the market of one of the most influential and controversial artists of our time, Ai Weiwei. Artist, activist, architect, filmmaker, and provocateur. Ai Weiwei has spent decades challenging political power, question cultural heritage, and redefining what contemporary art can be. I must warn you, this episode is going to be a bit longer than usual because there's so much to tell. With me in the studio is our art expert, Nicolas Robinson, and I'm your host, Yebbe Kurt. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Selling here at Christie's $400 million is the bid, and the piece is sold.

Nicholas Robinson 0:54

We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news. Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself? And how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is The Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered, thoughtful, and well informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the Art of Collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.

Meet Ai Weiwei And His Reach

Jeppe Curth 1:50

Hi Nick. Hello. How are you doing? Very well. How are you doing? I'm good, I'm good. Are you ready for a I guess a bit of a longer episode than usual?

Nicholas Robinson 2:00

Well, I noticed that you gave a bit of a warning at the beginning. You're concerned there's too much information to shoehorn into our usual 40 minutes, are you? I would say there will be a challenge for you two to keep it in 40 minutes. For me, yeah. Well, okay, let's see how we can get it get on. I do think that might be unrealistic, but yeah. There's a lot of people to cover. Yeah.

Jeppe Curth 2:24

People is on, so now they know. But as always, I think we should get started on who Ayawe is and how he's become one, I guess, one of the most influenced contemporary artists today.

Nicholas Robinson 2:36

Yes, he he is absolutely considered, very widely considered to be one of the most influential artists of our time. Of course, he's famed internationally, not just for his work, but for the prominence of his commentary and his general outspokenness on issues such as democracy, human rights, social justice, and the work that he makes addresses these themes, popular culture, cultural development, mass media, modes of communication, corruption in political systems, and and as well as the history of art itself and its role in in political and cultural systems. His work includes painting, sculpture, photography, architectural installations and architectural projects, political film documentaries, and and various monumental public works. So that's kind of what he's known for, I suppose you you might say known as much as an activist as an artist. But I suppose we should cover the main headlines of his of his biography, no?

Jeppe Curth 3:42

Yeah, let's do that. I mean there's many, so let's see the big headlines.

Nicholas Robinson 3:46

Okay. If we distill his sort of working life down to the or his biography down to the kind of the main core elements. He was born in 1957. He was the son of Gao Ying, a writer, and Ai Ching, who was a pro very prominent poet. Now these were part of an intellectual circle that was initially embraced by Chairman Mao, but then in the 1950s there was something called an anti-rightist movement, and rightists were people accused essentially of being anti-revolutionary, anti-communist party. And Ai Ching was accused in such a way, and so they were exiled as a family to what was called a re-education camp. Now that was simply a euphemism for a hard labour camp, where they lived for many years in tremendous hardship and privation in conditions that Weiwei has described as being suited better to wild animals than to people. So they stayed in exile for many years, only returning to Beijing in 1976 upon the death of Mao Zedong, which also, of course, marked the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, he enrolled in a film academy, and there he founded a group of avant-garde artists called the Stars. In 1981, he moved to New York City, and he lived in the East Village. He lived close by and became very good friends with Alan Ginsburg, who people of course know to be one of the most prominent members of the beat generation of poets, and by this time in the 1980s, a sort of bona fide cultural titan in the United States and beyond. So during his life in New York in the eighties, he became fascinated also with the work of Marcel Duchamp that he encountered a lot at MoMA, and he became fascinated with the idea of the ready-made in art. That of course is a key foundational element in any kind of appropriation art, using something else pre-existing as the object or theme for your own work. In the 80s and early 90s, he struggling as an artist, he actually made his living as a blackjack player and was rated as a very highly skilled, in s in many ways, an elite sort of professional player. So much so that he was a fully comp person in Atlantic City. Fully comp?

Jeppe Curth 6:20

No.

Nicholas Robinson 6:21

It means that everything was complimentary. Such was his status with the casino, a high roller, if you will, fully comp, sending a limousine to New York City to bring him, giving him a free suite, giving him all his meals, just so he could play the tables. So so that's how he supported himself before his artistic career, before it took off to the extent that of course it it is today. And then in 1993, he went back to China, and I won't go into all the details of his life in China, but suffice to say that there were many run-ins with the authorities. He was sort of a challenging contrarian figure, constantly speaking out against corruption. This earned him numerous public rebukes, it earned him a beating, it and it eventually was to earn him an 81-day incarceration in 2011. He was sort of spirited away whilst at the airport about to leave for an exhibition, and he was taken into a secret back room, interrogated, had a hood put on his head, and was driven so as to not know his destination or his whereabouts, and was then told that he was to be imprisoned, that he'd already been tried and found guilty, and he was to be locked away for thirteen years. He was supervised by two people, two young soldiers, twenty-four hours a day, so as to not be at risk of taking his own life. And eventually, after this 81 days, of course, during this time, he he had come to believe that he would be there for thirteen years. He was told that when he was released, his son would no longer know him, and his mother would have passed away. But after 81 days he was released in the middle of the night, and authorities issued a public statement claiming that he had admitted to tax evasion for which he had to pay rather a large fine. Fast forward to 2015, and perhaps unsurprisingly his life in China had become untenable, so he leaves, and he had spent a decade away in sort of cultural and political exile, if you will, living between Germany, Berlin, and Lisbon in Portugal, and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, eventually only returning to China for the first time in a decade, December of last year, so that he could see his now very elderly mother.

Activism As A Creative Engine

Jeppe Curth 8:53

Thank you. That was the headlines. You mentioned that unlike many other artists, I guess Ayawe have been very known for his activism. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. How have politicals and freedom expression shaped his career?

Nicholas Robinson 9:09

Well, I I think that everything that he does is uh is is designed to sort of speak truth to power, designed to challenge the status quo, and really to to speak about social justice issues, and because you know he's he's a man of tremendous courage and tremendous conviction, his idea is that he can give a voice to the voiceless. And we can see that constantly throughout his his works. I mean his his works are always making not all they're not always making commentary about prevailing political systems or corruption, but there's always some very sort of prescient commentary about the prevailing conditions in in the world, in the economy, in relationships between countries, in the development of China, the th these kinds of things. So I suppose if we if we if we look at some of his significant bodies of work, we can see how his aesthetic life has unfolded through these various milestones. Would that be an idea? Yeah, very good.

New York Photos And Perspective Series

Nicholas Robinson 10:16

Okay. So the first body of work that he became known for, and and he's become known for them subsequently as his first body of work, they were not renowned during the time he was making them. But he made a group of photographs. He was a prolific documenter of everything. Between 1983 and 1993, he made what have come to be called the New York photographs. So this is before he was internationally recognized as an artist and an activist, and living in this tiny apartment in the East Village, having befriended Ginsburg, and he was a a prominent member of a community of expat Chinese artists and intellectuals that formed a sort of a subsection of the downtown avant-garde scene. And throughout these years, he documented exhaustively his life, his work, his surroundings, and the sort of atmosphere of the time. And what we have are these documents of a of an of a now largely lost New York, which sort of rich rich in the flavor of sort of East Village poetry readings, people hanging out in Tomkins Square Park, drag queens at Wig Wigstock, and various well-known artists and intellectuals from China and elsewhere that he came across in his his everyday life. So so so these are the sort of the beginnings of his conceptual art practice, if you will. Carrying on the theme of photography throughout the 1990s until the 2000s, he made a group of photographs called the Study of Perspective series. And these essentially consist of Weiwei holding the camera, giving the finger to something in the background. So it could be the White House, it could be the Eiffel Tower, but but but basically he's he's of course giving a finger as a metaphor for a critical eye that he's turning towards these edifices of power. So that's you know, then these of course these these these buildings they always come to symbolize the state, and and that's why he's giving them the finger. In 1994, he started making his first what I suppose we could call appropriation works, his sort of ready-mades, if you like.

Urns Broken And Heritage Remade

Nicholas Robinson 12:33

He took a Han Dynasty urn, and that is uh an imperial piece of pottery from uh around 2,000 years old. And he's always been very aware of the value of antiques and is very schooled in antiques, in fact. And just to give a bit of background to the importance of ceramics, especially in China, I mean everyone considers China to be, you know, the home of ceramics. But China had been making true porcelain since the 7th or the 8th centuries. But in Europe, it was not until 1708 that true porcelain, and by by true porcelain I mean the specific recipe for mixing kaolin with with the other elements and firing it at a specific temperature so that it remains in a stable form after it has been baked. But they were not able to do this in Europe until 1708, and that was what led to the founding of the the Meissen factory, in fact. So China has had many, many hundreds of years head start technically in this field, and so within China there's a tremendous national pride regarding their prowess in making ceramics. So, anyway, Weiwei, of course, is very attuned to this, and in 1994 he took a Han Dynasty urn and he painted Coca-Cola on it. So, of course, he took an ancient Chinese antique and then he turned it into this sort of contemporary branded object, simultaneously sort of destroying one thing in order to create another. And this idea of destruction carried on in a very sort of iconic performance that he did in '95, where he broke a Han Dynasty vase. And this was memorialized in a photographic triptych, three panels, showing him holding the vase, and then having dropped it, the vase sort of midfall, then the third panel with this vase in pieces on the floor. So this was a very kind of of course a very anarchic thing to do to break such a precious antique. But of course, implicit in that is his own commentary about the values in China and and the meaning of value in an object and of course within the cultural sphere generally. So it's important to remember with all of these works that that that these were made during a time of radical expansion in China. There's an incredible pace of development in which vast tracts of land and all of the historical structures built upon them are being demolished and erased in order to build a modern industrialized society, to build the city, the country of the future. So contained within all of these works is a key paradox or dichotomy which which seeks to show that the destruction of something is simultaneously enabling the construction or the making of something new. So we in these works, his works manage to be both old and new. They manage to show that the erasure of one element is necessary to enable the development of the other, and they confront the notion that destruction is something that construction sometimes inevitably requires. So it's been a prevalent theme in his work for many years that he's he's made these, uh he made a bunch of uh stools, for instance, in the same idea. Humble antique wooden stools that he reconstituted into these complicated constellations where they were sort of joined together and became these extremely complicated, fantastical constellations of items, which in some ways symbolize a sort of reverence for the craft of the past, but simultaneously making something new out of them, which which functions as a metaphor for this drive towards developing and building the future. So that's the a key period in his work making these kinds of things. In in 2003, he was enlisted alongside the Sw Swiss architects Herzog and Demuron to with Weiwei as an artistic consultant to design the stadium for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. So he was very involved in this, and the design to this day is sort of largely credited to him, but eventually he was to sort of disavow this project, calling it a fake smile serving Chinese propaganda. In 2006, he took the the the the Han Dynasty vases that he'd become sort of known for using, and he then dipped them in colour. So again, making a new contemporary object out of an antique object. He took incredible pieces of antique temples, the the wooden panels and screens, carved screens, flooring, beautiful woodwork that was essentially being discarded and turned it into these huge, dramatic, intricate installations. In 2008-2009, he again repurposed wood salvage from Qing Dynasty temples and made an enormous map of China using ancient joinery t traditions, but then reappropriating them to make something new. 2010 was the year he made his famed zodiac heads. Now these are a suite of bronze heads depicting the twelve animal signs. Of course, every twelve years there's a new year of the rat, the dog, the dragon, and of course, each of these animals represents a set of reputed or legendary characteristics, and one of Weiwei's most prominent works is making a suite of these heads. I guess that covers a lot of the sculptural works that he's made.

Jeppe Curth 18:40

But maybe I can add because as you mentioned, he I we often destroys, reconstructs, and or transform historical objects, right? Yes. What why is the cultural heritage so central in his you can say artistic language?

Nicholas Robinson 18:55

Well, I I think I mean that there's a particular sensibility in China that has a tremendous pride in the in the longevity and heritage of their culture. I mean, of course, this is a culture that has had, you know, instrumental role in not only the development of ceramics that I've mentioned, but in all kinds of innovations. I mean, uh innovations with trading and banking and arithmetic and I mean it's a tremendously sophisticated ancient culture that really set the bar very high above and beyond other cultures that were sort of lagging far behind it in developmental terms. And yet, this culture today is, you know, it's sort of people that celebrate it can often become a little bit suppressed. There's this sort of drive for newness, which is something that that has to be created at the expense of the old. And so there's this there's this tension within Chinese culture, and of course, it's something that the rest of the world is is aware of too. Yeah. Okay, so let's get back on the historical timeline of his body of works.

Sichuan Earthquake And Straight

Nicholas Robinson 20:07

Okay, so so as we've established, it's not just sculptures that he's making that can be sort of consumed as artworks, he's also making tremendous statements that are essentially political statements railing against corruption, societal problems, whatever it might be. And 2009 was a very significant year for one such piece. In 2009, there was an earthquake in Sichuan, and the destruction was enormous, but the destruction predominantly affected school children, school buildings and school children, and the the huge volumes of dead mostly consisted of school children. So very moved by this situation, Weiwei went to the site and he realized, of course, that the school buildings had been affected more than other buildings, that the residential and office buildings around were largely unscathed. And of course, the implication of this is that the school buildings that had been made under the aegis of the government construction were so poorly constructed due to corruption. There's a there's a uh quite a lot of problems with with with government building in China and and even private building where a lot of shortcuts are made to save costs and to save time. They have a name for it, they call it tofu drink construction, and they use shoddy materials, they use all kinds of weird filler garbage instead of you know proper filler in some of these m construction methods, and you know, it causes these intrinsic problems to the structure. So anyway, he spent a year in what he called a citizen's investigation. And this investigation consisted of he and an assembled team of volunteers going door to door, gathering the names of the dead. He wanted to create a record of. To memorialize the children that had lost their lives in this disaster. And he started off by calling the government and asking for some names, and they sort of said, Well, why do you want to know? Are you an American spy? You know, this is secret. And his response is, Well, well, why is this secret? This how can this be allowed to happen? So he spent a year to get these names together, and eventually he published 5,385 names. And at the time he published it on a hugely popular online blog he had, which had more than 20 million viewers. But simultaneously he was salvaging 170 tons of rebar. Now, rebar is the metal rod that goes inside the concrete to reinforce it to make ferro concrete. So he was taking these damaged, twisted bars and he was transporting them surreptitiously to his studio in Beijing, and he had dozens and dozens of workers hammering on these bars to make them perfectly straight again. And eventually it consisted of 170 tons, sort of shown in this almost like landscape formation, very beautiful, very poignant, and it was often exhibited where it was accompanied by the list of children. And in the three years between 2012 and 2015, it was shown in Washington DC, it was shown in Venice, and also in London. And the same year he travelled to Chengdu, where he was going to testify in support of a fellow investigator in this disaster, and he was very severely beaten by the Chinese authorities. But this is something that does not deter Weiwei, it just makes him more determined to uncover the facts and the realities of these kinds of problematic government situations or caused by government corruption and the subsequent cover-up that they seek to propagate. So the sculptural work straight was the was a key thing that arose from his experience of this disaster. Subsequently, he made another installation on the facade of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, spelled out a phrase in in coloured backpacks on the facade of the building, and the phrase had come from a letter that one of the victim's mothers had written to him, basically thanking him for his work, thanking him for shining a light on this situation, and and just making a very small comment about deceased daughter. And the comment said simply, She lived happily for seven years in this world. And that is what that phrase spells out on the facade of the Haus der Kunst. So very poignant, simple, but very reductive and dramatic public installations that he also makes in order to draw attention to some of these political situations. He did one here in Copenhagen. There was one on the facade of the Schlodenburg. Similar to one he did on the concert house in on the columns in Berlin as well. So yeah, so so these are very ambitious projects, incredibly labor intensive, and and and kind of maybe leading up to the most famous large-scale installation, or at least to my mind it's probably the most famous one that he's

Sunflower Seeds At Tate Modern

Nicholas Robinson 25:37

done so far. And in 2010, he was granted the commission or whatever, granted the uh exhibition space at the turbine hall at the Tate in London. And this was uh exhibited from October 2010 to May 2011, and it was a a remarkable installation consisting of a hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds. Now, these sunflower seeds covered a thousand square meter floor with a depth of ten centimetres filling the Tate's turbine hall. The entire artwork weighed around 150 tons, and each seed went through a 30-step procedure, hand painted or sculpted, hand painted, and then fired at 1300 degrees Celsius. And this process required 1,600 workers over a span of two and a half years working in Jingtian. Now, Jingtijin is is a town known as the Porcelain Capital, and it's where the imperial kilns were situated, and they became most famous for making the blue and white porcelain of the Ming dynasty. So this is uh an incredible sort of institutional uh facility that he then co-opted to make his sculptural installation. So this this piece of work really embraced the handmade, of course, but of but each tiny sunflower seed is such a small, somewhat insignificant thing by itself by itself. So he's embracing this sort of minutia of the handmade where where this overwhelming scale is created through painstaking craft instead of militarized or industrial production. So normally that's how this kind of scale uh scalability is arrived at, right? Through a certain kind of production line, but he instead used a very, very ancient handicraft skill to make them. So in this installation of unbelievable tactile beauty, and initially, actually, you you you were able to go onto this sort of bed of porcelain sunflower seeds and had this sort of funny, crunchy, I mean it was a very strange sensation. Ultimately, they stopped people going on it because they were concerned that the way that the people would break down the seeds would was creating a or could create a dust that could be hazardous to people. So sadly, people at some point were stopped from going on it, but initially you could actually physically interact with it. But it's an incredibly incredibly tactile beauty that it has, but very sensuous, with comments on nature, on craft, and especially on the relationship between the individual and the masses. So we have these key themes in Weiwei's work, and and this work is a very good distillation of lots of things that he's interested in. The first, the power of the collective. Now each of these seeds is unique, meticulously crafted, miniature sculpture. And while looking at these at this massive sea of seeds from a distance, of course, the individual seeds are lost in the crowd. But up close, every single seed is unique, and therefore, because it's made by a person, has its own specific identity. So this questions whether individuals are powerless alone, but immensely strong when gathered together. The second key theme with this is the theme of propaganda. Now during China's cultural revolution, the citizens were heavily propagandized to act as sunflowers. They were characterized and described as sunflowers, meaning that they should turn their face toward the sun, and the sun, of course, being the leader Mao Tse Tung. But here, the seeds are on the ground, there are no flowers, and the millions of seeds are actually obscured by other seeds simply because they're buried within the sheer volume. So part of this then is a critique of mass production. Now, this this installation sort of challenges our Western world's reliance on this idea of made in China by choosing porcelain, which is, as we've mentioned, China's most historic and revered craft of all, and employing 1600 artisans to replicate this tiny little thing, he is highlighting both traditional human labour labour and also the realities of mass consumption. So this to me is really one of the great pieces of work of the last 20 years or so.

Jeppe Curth 30:27

I said it was in 2010, right? 2010, 2011, yeah. Okay, so in 11, 2011, he it became international news, he's gone to prison in China, right?

Prison Aftermath And Lego Works

Jeppe Curth 30:38

Yes. So moving from 2011 and forward, this moment also changed a little bit his practice and maybe also his position in the art world. In what way do you do you mean that? Well, before then maybe he was not international, but because of this prison it it became an international theme and international news, so I guess he got out to the mass.

Nicholas Robinson 31:01

Yeah, because he came because his incarceration became a sort of a a headline news item. I would say that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean I guess he he did sort of transfer from the the art pages to the news pages, so to speak. But I I he he had been a very prominent artist before that, with uh you know, a big a big following as one of the most sort of significant artists of the day, and certainly probably the most renowned artist coming out of China. But I do think that his sort of profile as an activist was made m much more known as a result of him being imprisoned, certainly.

Jeppe Curth 31:42

Yeah. Okay. So if we move on from eleven and forward in terms of body artworks, which are the headlines and things should we Well, I I think I think uh obviously there's the v varying sculptural works that we've mentioned.

Nicholas Robinson 31:58

There's works that he's made in marble, uh, he's made some marble Ming Dynasty furniture, he's made marble surveillance cameras, you know, taking new things, old things, memorializing them in this sort of classical um statuary material, referencing, you know, this sort of a pop culture object, it's also a classical sculptural object, just very clever ideas encapsulated within these objects. And I suppose that has parlayed into the more recent past with his Lego works. Now, uh sometimes people call them Lego paintings, of course, they're not actually paintings, but they are collages of Lego, each individual sort of square of Lego, tessellated on a surface to make a picture that is then mounted on the wall like a painting.

Jeppe Curth 32:51

Is it only Lego?

Nicholas Robinson 32:53

It's not only Lego, it is Lego, as in the branded Danish brick, and it is also Woma, which is a Chinese brick which has identical dimensions within well I guess not identical, but very, very close dimensions within tiny margins to Lego. And Woma is a Chinese brick that is, of course, to a Western eye, a copy, a fake kind of Lego. But it can be used interchangeably with Lego if you were making an object and you just had coloured bricks, they do function in the same fashion. And he makes the these visual images, and sometimes he makes them of iconic historic paintings, old master paintings, where he has adds his own little twist. There's a painting of the the scream by Monk, and he's there sort of in the background instead of those two figures on the bridge. You can see him. You can you can see uh a monumental cycle of Monet's water lilies with this strange little kind of cave grotto in it that is designed to show the sort of hovel that he lived in when he and his family were in exile in 1958. So some of the images are the Lego images are of topical news photographs, of political figures, of conflict, some of them are self-portraits, where of course he's taking this more Warholian approach to making an image. But these paintings, I mean, what what what what do they mean? Why is he making them out of this material? Well, what he's doing is he's transforming this mass-produced industrial toy into these pixelated mosaics of these great painted masterpieces, as well as the modern topical news imagery. And here, what he's doing, he's he's very specifically critiquing digital media by subverting these iconic masterpieces. So he's replacing this craft and technique of traditional brush strokes with these pixel-like blocks of colour, which in in a way is sort of illustrating both how we perceive and consume art, but also challenging and critiquing how we perceive and consume art in this modern era, which is often through this digitally mediated way, i.e. through a resolution of a screen rather than in person. So this these paintings serve as a metaphor for a world where our experience of culture is is is in fact given to us through these pixels instead of through our own eye and our own perception. And of course, by using Lego and or Woma interchangeably, he's basically saying that it is immaterial to him which of these kinds of bricks he uses, because here he's also making various comments about authenticity, originality, intellectual property, whatever you want to call it. In fact, his studio in China is the name of his corporate entity is called fake design. So that perhaps this idea as much as anything else ever does. Great. Is that it on to now? Yes, I mean I mean there's many kind of performative things that he's done, which can't be considered as individual artworks, but they're the works of an artistic life. I mean, uh to cut to comment on his ideas about free speech and censorship, he's been posting prolifically on Cena Weibo from 2005. He's used Twitter, you know, sometimes as much as a hundred times a day since 2009. I I don't think any more, but for a period he was using it like this. And even in Instagram, you know, he's got a million followers, and his daily life is depicted in minute detail where every day there's a post, sometimes it's poetic, sometimes it's gritty, sometimes it's political. It's just this his observational approach to this sort of reportage of his life.

Museums, Scale And What Collectors Buy

Jeppe Curth 37:16

So we came to the his market and looking into a bit of data and Gary's and institutions. So maybe we should start with his institutions, including Tate, Royal Academy, MoMA. Is there any institution that don't have Iwe work?

Nicholas Robinson 37:31

Well, I'm sure there are, but I think that if you if you look at the leading institutions of the world, if you if you go to the Tate or the Pompeie or the or MoMA or you know the museums in any great city that have significant holdings of modern contemporary art, his work is in all of those collections. Not only is he a leading artist, he's also a leading voice, and he's been considered an important person in that respect by the curatorial community for a long time.

Jeppe Curth 38:07

But as you had mentioned, also he has been working across sculpture, installations, ceramic, photos, films, legal architecture. Is there a medium that institutions and maybe also collectors value more than others?

Nicholas Robinson 38:21

That's a good question. I think that a lot of his sculptures are quite physically large and unwieldy. I mean, there's very complicated sculptures that he's made of these stools that I've discussed. He's made similar crazy constellations of bicycles, dozens or hundreds of bicycles. And of course, you know, these these are very dramatic when installed in a in a large space in a in a museum. And only really in that context are they able to sort of function as their true self and be properly appreciated. So I would say that a lot of his works like that are inevitably in institutions, things that are very physically large and cumbersome or too cumbersome for a domestic audience to be able to have as a collector. But wherever you find these kinds of works, you can find sort of smaller, distilled versions of these works that are thematically akin to the big ones. For example, a stool that has two parts or a little writing table that has, you know, folded in a funny way. It's not, it's not, it doesn't function as a table anymore, it functions as a sculpture that that is made from a table. So I I would say that those are the kinds of things that typically you see in the in the institutions. So let's talk about his galleries. Who is representing Aya We? Well, he's represented by some very good galleries, all of which have a very strong pedigree for being real artists' places. I mean, we can speak about the commercial behemoths of the art world, and we know that places like Gagosian and Zwerna real powerhouses for selling paintings, for taking an artist, adding the imprimature of the gallery's brand, making the sort of the prices and the market get somewhat superheated, this sort of combination of factors. Weiwei does not participate in that part of the gallery system. He works with galleries that that have a particular support for his ideology and and somehow facilitate and enable him to make work whilst enabling him to really just be himself. Now that has caused some issues. I mean he shows with Continua, which is a superb gallery in Italy, he shows with Neugim Schneider in Germany, a fantastic gallery, he shows with Vito Schnabel, who has galleries between New York and Samuritz, and he shows, at least on paper, with Listen Gallery. But he hasn't had a show with Listen for a while, and he had an issue with them where I suppose to use common parlance. You could say that he got cancelled. He made some comments about the plight of the Palestinians, and he made these comments alluding to Israel's aggression towards them, and he made comments that implied a certain sort of level of collusion, cultural, economic, military collusion between the United States and Israel. In any event, there were comments that you know some people would say anti-Semitic, some people would say, well, these are political comments, and you should be free to criticize the actions of Israel without them automatically being construed as anti-Semitic. Whatever your position on those comments, he made them and they were received poorly by Listen, who made a what people generally perceive to be a sort of self-serving political decision to postpone or cancel his exhibition in order to not, you know, damage relationships with some of their collecting community, I suppose would be the most politic way of putting it.

Jeppe Curth 42:25

So let's talk about uh maybe before jumping into the secondary market and auction.

Prices, Auction Records And Liquidity

Jeppe Curth 42:30

It's it's I know it's really very difficult because it depends also of the medium, but from what price range are we talking about?

Nicholas Robinson 42:38

I think that you're talking about anything from 150,000 euros up to, you know, in the millions. And and and there are works that he has, important historic works that I suppose he has in his studio that would have a very high price were he to release something to the market. These Lego paintings, for instance, they range from 150,000 euros for a modest uh size painting in inverted commerce, up to a million plus for an enormous water lily painting. Some of them are three, four hundred thousand euros, some of them are eight hundred thousand euros. Of course, it's premised on their scale. I think that there's a number of works that that that we bought many years ago. We bought some of his marble chairs, we bought some of his Coca-Cola pots, we bought bicycle sculpture, and you know, back then a marble chair was $85,000, something like that. This is maybe to even close to 20 years ago. Um I'm I'm thinking that today something like that probably would be two, three hundred thousand if it were even possible to get on on the primary market, and probably would you know comfortably fetch more on the secondary market. As an example, there's a Coca-Cola pot that I think we bought for a hundred. And this would have been yeah, close to 20 years ago. And there was one that sold at auction in 2015 and it made $690,000. You know, they're they're they're the kinds of things that are considered like iconic Iwe works, and so when they come to market, and I know this is sort of blurring the distinction between primary and secondary market, but it's difficult to make that distinction. Yeah. But we could just jump into the secondary market because what what is his record? The record I think is of five plus million dollars. Five point four, right? Five point four million, and that would have been for his zodiac heads. In fact, the top four prices he's ever made at auction are for what's the edition? The edition size is eight. So there have been four different groups of these twelve heads that have sold at auction, the most expensive of which was five point four million dollars. So it's up there. Yeah. Yeah, there it is. And then and then if we run down his highest prices, we've got these beautiful sculptural maps of China made with this ancient Qing dynasty uh temple wood. We've got the photographic triptych of dropping the Han Dynasty urn that made a million dollars. We've got some of some sculptural installations that include porcelain that include the porcelain sunflower seeds. We've got some groups of Neolithic vases dipped in the colour, we've got some of his bicycle sculptures. You know, these are the top, yeah, the top forming the top 20, 25, 30 results of his auction uh career.

Jeppe Curth 45:50

Do you want to hear a fun fact? Yeah, please. So in in Denmark, we have a a total turnover on art every year annually, right? Yeah. That is equal to what he turns over a year just in his market, 60 million dollars.

Nicholas Robinson 46:04

Is that right?

Jeppe Curth 46:05

Yeah. Oh wow. That was for me as a Dane, fun fact.

Nicholas Robinson 46:10

Yeah, and that's the and that's the that's the considered to be the dollar volume for the secondary market of his work on an annual basis. Yes.

Jeppe Curth 46:17

So it's the same as the whole Denmark. That's a lot of money. Yeah. So it's a liquidity market, you can say. Good. Let's move on.

Where To Start And What To Buy

Jeppe Curth 46:32

So I think we have been speaking a lot about Ayawe and his what body of works, historical. So if anybody don't know about Iwei and they would like to, you know, get more information to see his works, where should they start?

Nicholas Robinson 46:52

Well, I I think of course there's no shortage of information. I mean, you can go to his website where you'll find lots of information on some of the films that he's made, which are tremendously thought-provoking and informative. But I think that if one goes to YouTube, you can find films that relate to exhibitions where he's interviewed by curators and speaking about specific works. You can find films from cultural institutions where they're surveying his work. You can find films from current affairs programs where they're talking about his work from the perspective of an activist. You can find him being interviewed by, you know, news shows, daytime talk shows, all kinds of things. I mean, this is the kind of, you know, when you see all the different kinds of videos, you can understand the gamut of his sort of role in modern society, both from sort of art and entertainment and consumption, you can understand it from politics and from various topical issues that he is, you know, giving a voice to. And there's unbelievable wealth of resources that you can draw upon to learn more about what he does, what he's accomplished, his life, and how he views all of these different disparate things that continue to happen to him.

Jeppe Curth 48:08

Do you believe that his market still is underestimated in terms of his long-term historical importance? And is there specific mediums you should focus on?

Nicholas Robinson 48:19

I think that I think Weiwei is is is a is a great artist. He's a he's a he's a complex person. I mean, he's probably able to be very sort of mercurial and difficult in some ways, but he's also tremendously kind and generous and sort of determined to try and see the best in situations. I mean, as an example, when he was incarcerated for 81 days and he was you know being scrutinized by these two soldiers that were you know less than a metre away from him at all times, you know, he speaks of feeling sorry for them, that they had this very sort of inauspicious, challenging job to have to do, and and and he felt compassion for the fact that these young soldiers were enlisted with this task. But but anyway, I do I do think that his his his market is undervalued. I think that he is you know towering figure who has tremendous courage, tremendous humility, and you know, he he he's been asked about you know could you remember the first artwork you ever did? Have you always been creative? And he said, I'm not creative, I just I just have ideas. So, so the the the the things that he he makes, they are an incredible distillation of ideas, and the fact that he's able to produce these incredibly powerful and and rather reductive things, but they encapsulate so many different ideas and concepts and say so much, and often there is you know tremendous tactile or or or physical beauty, or there's something very visually appealing about them, but other times they're just you know powerful, powerful objects. And I think that there's no one thing, I mean, he's made very specific bodies of work. I mean, you know, uh if you're thinking that you're gonna buy some monumental bicycle sculpture, then then do because it's an amazing thing. But of course, what do you plan to do with it? Are you able to display it? If you think that at some point you want to sell it, realistically, who's gonna be able to buy this from you? So if you wish to be participating in Weiwei's market as a collector, then buy the thing that you find most appealing. It could be a Lego painting. They are brilliant, they are concise, they are humorous, they are beautiful, they are fascinating, and you can hang them on a wall like a painting, and they do everything that we have talked about and more when you see them in person. A Coca-Cola pot, if you've got more money, a marble chair. I mean, there's amazing works that he has made that are thought-provoking and sometimes provocative, sometimes humorous, but always extremely interesting.

Jeppe Curth 51:05

So, here in the end, anything missing?

Nicholas Robinson 51:10

I I I don't think so. I mean, you know, his work as an activist has gone hand in hand with his artistic career for many, many years, and and we can see, you know, major accomplishments and also major personal sacrifice. And you know, we see him being prepared just to put himself out there time and time again in order to, you know, say something that he feels needs to be said. I think maybe a really good way to understand his life if you want to, you know, instead of if you know, not not everyone is able to buy these things as a collector, but maybe the the sort of the persona and the person are very compelling and interesting. And he has a a biography, I believe it's an autobiography, it's called A Thousand Years of Joys and Sorrows. I think that's what it's called. A hundred years of joys and sorrows or a thousand years, I'm not sure. We can we can look that up and edit that in.

Jeppe Curth 52:09

But that would have a book title now.

Nicholas Robinson 52:12

That would be a good a good a good thing to to to to look to as well.

Closing Thoughts And How To Reach Us

Jeppe Curth 52:16

Well, I guess there's much more to talk about, but for this episode, we're gonna I think we're gonna end it here. Yep. And thank you so much for this time. Thanks. That was it for this episode of the Collector's Edge. If you are looking for expert insights, want to make informed decisions, and would like advice from independent advisors, send us an email or maybe just call us. You can find all the info on our website, nordicardpartners.com. Thank you for listening, and we hope to have you back for another episode. Bye.