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Ai Weiwei. Table with Ii Legs on the Wall

Sculpture made from Qing dynasty yu wood. 43 1/four past 36 1/4 by 43 1/iv in. 110 by 92 by 110 cm. Gauge: 100,000—200,000 USD. Lot sold: 158,500 USD

Executed in 2008, this work is accompanied past a certificate of actuality.

NOTE: Over the terminal several years Ai Weiwei has achieved prominence in the international fine art arena, alternately playing the roles of artist, architect, urban planner, curator, and cultural commentator. His ii major projects for the 2007 Documenta—Fragmented, a very big sculptural installation constructed from antique Chinese architectural fragments, and Fairytale, which entailed bringing 1001 Chinese citizens and 1001 Ming and Qing dynasty chairs to Kassel—dominated coverage of the exhibition; and his role every bit Expert Consultant to Herzog & de Meuron'due south Beijing Olympic Stadium, followed by his Baronial 2007 repudiation of his involvement with the projection due to his belief that the Olympics is a government public relations project, has as well drawn broad media attention. Ai Weiwei's power to retrieve big, and his willingness to court controversy, have long characterized his career equally an artist.

In 1978 Ai Weiwei enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, as part of the elite first class of students to be admitted upon the reopening of the art schools later the Cultural Revolution. The post-obit year he participated in the notorious first exhibition of the Stars group, mostly amateur artists working in unsanctioned styles such equally abstraction, or with unapproved content, including nudes and political commentary. The exhibition, hung on a fence adjacent to the National Art Gallery due to the absence of venues for unofficial fine art, was dispersed by the police: the Stars afterwards gained prominence as Cathay's best-known dissident artists. When Ai Weiwei moved to the United States in 1981, where he was to remain through 1993, it was against a groundwork of renewed conservative government control of the arts in China.

Living in New York, Ai Weiwei studied briefly at the Parsons Schoolhouse of Design and the Art Students League; more than importantly he became engaged with the New York fine art earth and was exposed to original works of art such as were almost never to be seen in People's republic of china. Reclining Nude (Lot threescore) and Untitled (Lot 59) are the products of a newly gained familiarity with the history of Western fine art, combined with a rebellious attitude, and set confronting the artist'south recent experience of nudes and abstractions as taboo. Both paintings reveal an appreciation of historical styles, simply conceived and executed with a fresh expression. In Reclining Nude we see an understated sense of humour, with mayhap Picasso coming together upward with New York street culture a la Keith Haring.

A little later Ai Weiwei began experimenting with the concept of the set up-made, inspired by such artists as Marcel Duchamp. He continued working with the set up-made when he returned to People's republic of china, but took Chinese cultural material equally the basis for those works. The materials he selected ran from the everyday, such as coal hives and bicycles, through the rare and precious, including antiquities similar Neolithic painted pots and antique architectural fragments. He has go an expert connoisseur of a broad diverseness of antiquities, and is particularly interested in furniture of the Ming dynasty, with its highly sophisticated joinery techniques. His 2008 Table with 2 Legs on the Wall (Lot 58) was constructed by disassembling a Qing table, and reassembling it using those techniques and so that it is no longer functional. Table with Two Legs on the Wall raises basic questions such as "When is a tabular array a table?" "What constitutes a piece of work of art?" and "When we phone call something a piece of work of art, does that negate its functionality?"-Britta Erickson

Sotheby's. Contemporary Fine art Asia. 17 Sep 08 New York. www.sothebys.com