Cats (Pink Edition)

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Ai Weiwei is an artist and activist once based in China but, being critical of the government's policies, has been in exile since 2015. Many of Ai Weiwei's works, using a range of formats and materials, have engaged with key societal issues. From the photographs of him dropping and smashing a valuable Han Dynasty vase, in a nod to Chairman Mao's diktat of needing to destroy an old world to create a new one; to his steel work in response to the Chinese earthquake of 2008; to the large-scale installation, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, of thousands of porcelain ‘sunflower seeds’ handmade in the ceramics centre of Jingdezhen in China; many of his works have been poetic responses to social truths and injustices he has witnessed. After a period of imprisonment, Weiwei left China first for Berlin and then Cambridge in the UK, before settling in Portugal. While in Cambridge, he showed work at Kettle's Yard and this print, made in collaboration with his son who is at school in the town, was produced as a series for the gallery during that exhibition. Ai Weiwei has talked about how keeping pet cats is not a cultural norm in China yet he was always drawn to them. When based in Beijing, he had, he says, over 30 pet cats in his studio compound. 'It’s important,' he has said 'to be around another species that has a completely different set of instincts and intuitions'. This artwork was originally titled 'Studio Cats' and shown as part of the exhibition Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, reflecting both artists’ mutual love of cats – Ai Weiwei spent time with Warhol when he lived in New York. The two cats in the print belong to Ai Weiwei and his son and are called Maple and Birch.

Ai Weiwei was born in China and shortly after his birth in 1957 moved with his family to a series of remote locales where the communist regime exiled his father, a poet. His family returned to Beijing in 1976 and Weiwei enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978. He became part of an influential collective of avant garde artists known as the ‘Stars’ (XIngxing). He moved to the US in 1981 studying at Parsons School of Design (now the New School) in New York. He has had major solo exhibitions internationally in a number of institutions including most recently at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands; Design Museum, London (both 2023); Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2022); Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK (2022); and Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2021). Architectural collaborations include the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Stadium, with Herzog and de Meuron. Among numerous awards and honours, he won the lifetime achievement award from the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2008 and was made Honorary Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2011. His human rights work has been recognised through the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2012 and Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2015.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), print (as object name), screenprint, velvet paper

Artist

Weiwei Ai (1957 - )

Title

Cats (Pink Edition)

Edition

Number 174 in an edition of 300

Date

2022

Medium

screenprint on paper

Dimensions

height: 44.8 cm; width: 62.2 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Kettle's Yard, May 2022

Inscription

recto: inscribed '174/300', bottom left; signed by the artist, bottom right

Provenance

Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 25 May 2022

GAC number

19100