Extra Credit : Ai Wei Wei at the Brooklyn Museum

The Ai Wei Wei exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum was very interesting. Before visiting the Museum I expected to see projects that we did not cover in class, but instead I saw everything we covered in class. Being there I realized that the video was more like background information. All of Ai's artwork shown in the video were in the exhibit as well as more videos that were recorded by Ai himself.

There were a lot of pieces that I would consider my favorite but the one that stood out to me the most was the project called "Straight". The project consisted of 73 tons of steel rebars piled and lined up in a specific order. The tons of rebar were from the schoolhouse that collapsed during the Earthquake in 2008. Ai created this piece to symbolize how the Chinese society pretended how like nothing happened, like the children who died in the schoolhouse during the earthquake, or even the many people who died during the earthquake. The artwork basically represented Ai's concern.

Some things that I thought of while observing "Straight" was how the steel bars were assembled as if was forming a passageway, or like it was imitating a river. The Straight project was placed right beside the artwork were the names of the people who died during the earthquake. It also had the audio to the names. The Ai Weiwei was a very interesting Museum and I would recommend for other students to visit it.