Sunflower Seeds - Ai Wei Wei at SAM

Sunflower Seeds (detail of edge of pile); Ai Wei Wei, porcelain

‘Ai, Rebel’ is the title of the new Ai Wei Wei retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum, (viewing from March 12 - September 7, 2025). The offerings are wildly varied but almost always thought provoking. I’ll be going back to take it in more slowly. The somewhat quiet pieces that I was most drawn to were several displays of some of the life-sized, porcelain sunflower seeds. Not sure if these are surplussed or taken from the enormous quantity that filled the salon floor at the Tate Museum in London where the piece made it’s debut, but the amount shown at SAM is just a drop comparatively.

Reading about the piece online there are many interpretations and most relate it to Chinese society and their giant numbers of similar but unique individuals all coexisting closely and holding within a potential for transformation, etc. Yet reading one of the curators placards on the wall at the museum, there was a very different story told that related to the public community humiliation of Ai Wei Weis father, a poet who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. A common snack food often found in the pockets of workers, the seed husks were thrown at his father while the young Ai sat in the audience. I’ve yet to find this story in print anywhere else so that alone is a reason to go back.

Sunflower Seeds - process photo (glazing each seed); Ai Wei Wei, from the Taschen monograph, ‘Ai Wei Wei’

Sunflower Seeds - process photo 2 (glazing each seed around a table); Ai Wei Wei, from the Taschen monograph, ‘Ai Wei Wei’