Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's "sunflower seeds" - a work made up of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, weighing a total of 150 tons, spread across the floor to create an inch-thick carpet of porcelain seeds.  The seeds were hand-crafted by artisans in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen before being flown across the world.  Their painted decoration closely resembles the roasted snacks served in tea houses all over China.

 “This is one of the most common natural products in China. It even grows in the wild. I grew up in the harsh conditions of the Gobi desert, where my family was sent as a punishment as political dissidents during the Cultural Revolution. But even there, we always had sunflowers around. There are two reasons why I used them in this piece. First, a political reason: Chairman Mao used to be depicted as the sun, and the mass of people as sunflowers always turning to the sun to show their revolutionary loyalty. Also, sunflower seeds are simply very common — they’re shared during conversations, holidays, before the movies, at weddings. Every household has some. So they have something to do with my memories. At the same time, the individual pieces for this piece were made by different hands of different people over a very long period of time.”