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Friday, July 28, 2017

Ai Weiwei Exhibit In DC

For anyone planning to be in the Washington, DC area before January 1, there is a great Ai Weiwei exhibit at the Hirschhorn that I highly recommend.  Ai Weiwei created portraits of political activists and prisoners of conscience out of Legos!  Scott and I went to see it a couple weeks ago.  The level of detail was incredible.

As we entered the exhibit, there was a disclaimer sign explaining that the choice of portrait subjects was Ai Weiwei's and to please not be offended with the Smithsonian if you disagreed with any of his choices.  I'm ashamed to admit that I did not recognize the vast majority of the names.  Probably the one that would have been most controversial among Americans was Edward Snowden.  I would not have chosen to include him myself, but I'll have to agree to disagree with Ai Weiwei on that point, just as I've had to agree to disagree with a number of Americans.

Aung San Suu Kyi, possibly one of the most famous subjects of Ai Weiwei's Lego portraits.
One useful feature of the exhibit was a touch screen in each room where visitors could look up information about the people featured in the portraits.  If it weren't for pesky social niceties like needing to share with others, I probably could have spent a lot of time looking people up because I was so curious.  One thing I noticed was that Ai Weiwei included a number of Uyghur activists in his portraits.  Just one more thing for the Chinese government to dislike him for, I guess.  Here are a few more photos of some of the portraits:

Roza Tuletaeva is a Kazakhstani labor activist.  Interestingly, we never heard about her while we were living in Kazakhstan...
Liu Xiabo was China's Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died recently.
Ahmed Douma is an Egyptian activist and blogger who has been imprisoned by three consecutive governments.

The week we saw this exhibit later brought problems with taxes, air conditioning, plumbing, and internet connectivity.  One of the hidden benefits of seeing an exhibit like this is that it reminds me that even a bad week for me is still a cake walk compared to what some people are dealing with.

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