(photo courtesy April Carandang)
Wheel by wheel and seat by seat, a British installation team is constructing a work by Ai Weiwei that will grace a field near the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg for the next three years.
The 30-foot piece, Forever Bicycles, is hard to miss. It’s made from 1,254 bicycles that resemble the Shanghai Forever Co. bicycles that filled Chinese streets during Ai’s childhood but were financially out of reach for his family.
His father, poet Ai Qing, was denounced by China's Communist Party in 1958 and his family was sent to labour camps, first near the North Korean border and then eventually in Xinjiang province. They returned to Beijing in 1976 after the cultural revolution.
Ai Weiwei, a world-renowned Chinese artist, often uses themes related to human rights and the plight of refugees as inspiration for his work and his activism — he’s been openly critical of the Chinese government.
The unmoving bicycles symbolize a loss of freedom and the repetitiveness and size of the installation points to mass production, a cornerstone of China's economy.
The goal is to have the work installed by Saturday in time for the arts festival Nuit Blanche.
It's the first time Ai's work has been shown in Winnipeg. Ai is not in the city himself.
Source: The Forks, Winnipeg