Playful yet menacing, the fangs of a grinning dragon greet you as you enter @Large, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s extensive installation at Alcatraz, the notorious former prison in San Francisco Bay. Despite the brilliantly colored whorls and cheerful floral patterns of this huge serpent and its surrounding flock of birdlike kites, the ensemble (entitled With Wind) soon reveals darker messages. These lofty creatures are essentially caged, hovering in a chamber bound by barred windows and a gun-ready surveillance perch. And the jaunty kite fabric, you soon discover, subtly integrates such imagery as skeletal hands gripping twisted rebars (references to prison grating, as well as the shoddy school construction that trapped thousands of children who perished in China’s 2008 Sichuan quake). Other somber details include feather-light segments of the serpent’s body bearing such weighty words as, “Every one of us is a potential convict,” setting the tone for an exhibition loaded with provocative juxtapositions and contradictions.
Prompting questions about human rights, freedom of speech, and the value of incarceration, @Large was clearly colored by the artist’s own experience. Punished for the activism of his father, the poet Ai Qing, his family lived in exile during his childhood. Now an unflinching and outspoken critic of the government of China, Ai was imprisoned there for 81 days in 2011, in solitary confinement on vaguely defined charges. Though released three years ago, he remains stripped of a passport, effectively under “country arrest.”
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