Imprisoned Sunflower Seeds: Thoughts on Ai Weiwei's Exhibition @ Tate Modern

In October of 2010, an interactive piece by Ai Weiwei (above) entitled Sunflower Seeds was installed in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern museum in London. The work consisted of one hundred million hand-painted porcelain “seeds”. The intention of the piece was for visitors to physically engage with it in the hopes that it would instigate a more involved level of contemplation towards mass consumption and how this relates to Chinese industry, famine and collective work.

After the 16^th of October Tate Modern stopped people from walking/interacting with the exhibit due to health liability concerns surrounding the porcelain dust. I visited the piece recently and was shocked by the manner in which they segregated visitors from the piece. The piece now seems to act as a predicator for the house arrest that Ai was put under in November of that year due to the Chinese government fearing his activism. Like Ai, his piece was imprisoned by the powers that be in order to prevent the status quo being harmed. The following footage I took on my visit exposes the fact that not only does the Tate Modern not want people to walk on the piece, but they are also disallowed from physically engaging with it in any way.

Although apt, I think this containment exposes a "failed" piece that at the point of audience segregation should have been removed, but maybe the way in which it is now caged says even more about mass consumption. It seems to me that at such an unstable time it is something that capitalist society does not really want to be supporting, as all it seems to do is propagate the flawed and fragmented nature of the crumbling system of which we are still associated with. Aligning this with the manner in which the Chinese government are holding Ai prisoner in his own country by means of playing the ambiguous reasons of national security card, these bodies of control need to become aware that when you try to negate these “situations” all you are doing is promoting and proving the ideologies of that which you are trying to contain. In this sense the "failures" of Ai's piece can also be perceived as victories.