♪♪
-We are in one of the final galleries
Ai, Rebel.
It's a very large gallery and dim in the light,
but you see how it highlights all of the works on the wall,
which are all made out of Legos.
For Ai Weiwei, Legos are a very important medium.
He started using it in 2014,
and he has continued over a decade now,
creating all kinds of images with Legos,
which he feels like is very interesting visually
because it is by nature pixelated.
So it looks kind of like Roman mosaics.
It looks like pointillist paintings,
and it looks like smartphone snapshots.
This is one example of a smartphone snapshot.
The image today is quite iconic.
It shows Ai Weiwei inside an elevator.
He has lifted up his phone,
and you can see his flash going off
and it's reflecting in all the mirrors in the elevator.
He's in there with a friend of his,
and also a policeman
who had come to take him away in the middle of the night.
Ai Weiwei had been called to testify
at a fellow activist's trial.
And this was during the 2008 earthquake
when they were had begun asking for transparency
and for more information as to what had happened
that led to the tens and thousands of people
who died during a magnitude-eight earthquake
in Sichuan province in southwest China.
So he was prevented from testifying.
They went into his room.
They hit him on the head.
He had developed a hematoma that nearly killed him.
This work is a Lego version of that very famous photograph,
which he. as soon as he took it,
he somehow managed to post it online,
where it instantly went viral.
It reminds us of the importance of smartphones
in acts of resistance and in political activism today.
♪♪
-Ai, Rebel:
The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei
at Seattle Art Museum
closes on September 7th,
so don't delay.
Reserve your ticket
at seattleartmuseum.org.
♪♪