Chinese sculptor Ai Weiwei's work can be seen at Bretton Park

Ai Weiwei couldn't be at the opening of his exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park but his voice could be heard

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11:43, 13 JUN 2014

Ai Weiwei's Iron Tree sculpture at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo courtesy of the YSP

The artist himself couldn’t be at the opening of his new exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, but the work of Chinese dissident sculptor Ai Weiwei speaks for him and millions of his countrymen.

Prevented from travelling by the Chinese authorities, who have surrounded his home in Beijing with surveillance cameras and confiscated his passport, Ai Weiwei, and his poignant sculptures, are known throughout the world and can now be seen at Bretton until early November. He once said of his artistic mission: “I have to speak out for the people who are afraid”.

The YSP exhibition, his first in a British public gallery since ‘Sunflower Seeds’ at the Tate Modern in 2010, coincides with the 25th anniversary of the massacre of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, but Ai’s work encompasses the plight of all Chinese people through famine, natural disaster, revolution and political oppression. He is one of the country’s most outspoken critics of China’s record on human rights .

His Bretton exhibition is focused around the newly-refurbished 18th century chapel, which houses a version of Ai’s ‘Fairytale -1001 Chairs’. Working from plans and by email, the artist selected 45 antique chairs from the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912) to be arranged in nine rows of five inside the chapel. The original work featured 1001 chairs and 1001 Chinese citizens, who were taken to Kassel in Germany in 2007 to highlight the complications of travel for ordinary Chinese people.

At the YSP, visitors will be invited to sit on the chairs and contemplate freedom, refuge, sanctuary and their opposites, as well as those who have used the chairs before.

Ai’s 2013 work ‘Iron Tree’, a six-metre high sculpture inspired by the wood sold by street vendors in Jingdezhen, Southern China, stands outside the chapel. His largest and most complex sculpture to date, it comprises 99 separate elements cast in iron and pieced together to look both natural and artificial at the same time.

Three other works have been selected for the chapel – ‘Ruyi’, which means ‘as one wishes’, a lividly-coloured porcelain sculpture; ‘Lantern’, a giant rounded form carved from the same stone used by emperors to build the Forbidden City and, in more recent times, to create Mao Zedong’s tomb; and ‘Map of China’, created from iron wood reclaimed from Qing dynasty temples and showing China as an isolated island.

Alongside the exhibition, the YSP has been given permission to present readings of poetry by Ai Qing, Ai’s father, who initially supported Mao but was sent to a labour camp with his family for the crime of ‘rightism’.

Ai, who was the artistic advisor for the ‘Bird’s Nest’ Olympic Stadium at the Beijing Olympics, spent his entire childhood in enforced exile. Ironically, despite becoming a ‘celebrity’ sculptor he is now once again a prisoner, albeit in his own home. But his voice is being heard.