Art as defiance

Building Blocks of Defiance

Starting September 19, Patrick Derom Gallery presents Belgium's first-ever major retrospective of Ai Weiwei. The Art of Defiance brings together more than fifty works, spread across two locations in Brussels's Sablon district. The exhibition runs parallel to a second, more personal exhibition at the Musée Émile Verhaeren in Puurs-Sint-Amands.

Ai Weiwei owes his worldwide fame not only to his art, but at least as much to his lifelong struggle for political and social freedom. The Chinese artist was himself shadowed, detained, and subjected to travel restrictions by the Chinese authorities. In 2015 he left China and has since lived in Berlin, Cambridge, and currently Portugal.

"Liberty is about the right to question everything." — Ai Weiwei

Freedom of expression became a recurring theme in his work. Through sculpture, installation, photography, film, and architecture, he interrogates power, displacement, cultural heritage, human rights, and individual freedom. To do so, he often reworks existing objects, materials, and images, putting their cultural, political, or symbolic value up for debate.

More Than Fifty Works, Three Decades

The exhibition contains more than fifty works spanning over three decades of Ai Weiwei's career. It features both emblematic pieces from the nineties, such as the photo series Study of Perspective, and iconic works like Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo. With this, the artist confronts cultural heritage with the symbols and contradictions of our contemporary society.

More recent work is also included — for instance, LEGO compositions such as Illumination, and work built from knots, such as F.U.C.K. There are also sculptural works like Grapes and Strength, alongside monumental installations such as Left Right Studio Material and Backpack Snake. All of this shows how widely the artist's visual vocabulary has since branched out. Across that diversity of media, materials, and scale, the retrospective reveals a striking coherence. The same questions keep recurring in Ai Weiwei's work: how power is exercised, how cultural memory is built up or erased, and what it means to defend individual and artistic freedom.

A Tribute to Two Poets

Running parallel to the Brussels exhibition, the Musée Émile Verhaeren in Puurs-Sint-Amands hosts a second, more personal exhibition: Life, Revolt, Poetry. It takes as its starting point the special bond between the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren and Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei's father. Ai Qing was the first to translate Verhaeren's poetry into Chinese, thereby introducing him to a Chinese audience — an encounter that profoundly shaped his own intellectual and artistic development.

The exhibition shows, among other things, works that refer to the entanglements of Ai Weiwei and his father with the Chinese authorities, such as Remains (2015) and Free Speech Puzzle (2014–2016), alongside a series of porcelain plates addressing the refugee crisis. The bond between Ai Qing and Verhaeren is given physical form in a portrait of Verhaeren that Ai Weiwei made in LEGO, created especially for this exhibition. The result is a deeply personal selection, curated by Ai Weiwei himself.

More information via Patrick Derom Gallery.

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