August 11, 2016
The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei posing next to a sculpture from Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, one of a set of 12 bronze animals inspired by figures looted from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in the 19th century.
Hans Klaus Techt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
PRINCETON, N.J. — On summer days at Princeton University, children splash in a fountain next to an unlikely piece of art: 12 large bronze heads of animals sitting atop poles in a line.
The heads are arrayed between the fountain and the hall of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The 10-foot installations range from the mythic (a dragon) to the prosaic (a rabbit and a snake). They are the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, and the Chinese tour groups common here in the summer often stop to take photographs. Visitors delight in posing with the animal for their birth year.
The heads were designed around 2010 by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a frequent critic of his country’s Communist Party, and are replicas of the famous zodiac heads looted in the sacking of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, by British and French soldiers in 1860. The originals were part of a water clock and were arranged around a fountain that European Jesuits had designed a century earlier for the court of the Qianlong Emperor.
Those original heads are now scattered around the world, with a handful kept in Beijing after being bought or recovered from their foreign owners by the state-owned China Poly Group Corporation, which has ties to the Chinese military. For many Chinese, the original heads symbolize the “century of humiliation” that China endured at the hands of Western and Japanese invaders starting in the late Qing dynasty.
Mr. Ai’s work, called the Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, is a commentary on historical memory. The heads, loaded with their own political message, have sat outside Robertson Hall for four years. They are on loan until this December, but the collector who owns them, a Princeton graduate, may extend their stay, said Larry Warsh, a friend of Mr. Ai who lives in New York and manages the international tours and exhibitions of the heads.
“The person is a real intellectual and is into the concept of the works being in front of the Woodrow Wilson School specifically,” Mr. Warsh said, adding that the collector prefers to remain anonymous. “With all the people who come through those doors on an annual basis, it makes an impact.”
A Princeton website says, “Ai complicates conversations about repatriation, shared cultural heritage and contemporary expectations regarding the democratization of art and public space.”
In a recent interview, Mr. Ai said he had long been interested in the animal heads and became keenly aware of their political overtones in 2009, when the Chinese government stoked a nationalist uproar over an attempt by Christie’s to auction off two pieces, a rabbit and a rat. They had been part of the estate of the French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.
The Chinese government, Mr. Ai said, used the occasion “to generate some sort of public opinion for propaganda purposes, to gain some kind of national pride or, at the same time, anger about what happened 100 years ago.”
Mr. Ai said he wrote a blog post at the time pointing out the flaws in the way that the Communist Party was manipulating history and the reading of the heads. Mr. Ai said he found it curious that objects that Europeans had created to ornament a Qing palace were being held up as emblems of China and their recovery framed as a patriotic project.
The Qing dynasty was founded by Manchus who had invaded China from their forested homeland in the northeast and seized the throne in Beijing in 1644 after rebels had already toppled the Ming court. To many Chinese revolutionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Manchu rulers were themselves a foreign force to be eliminated as part of China’s transformation into a modern nation.
Mr. Ai said he then thought of recreating the heads as public art and placing them at different sites in the West. That, he said, would be “quite an ironic act.”
There are six editions of Mr. Ai’s zodiac heads in bronze and an additional two artist’s proofs. The series at Princeton has been on display at a single site longer than any other bronze set. One set may soon be exhibited at the European Parliament in Brussels, Mr. Warsh said.
Mr. Ai also made 10 series of golden heads, with two artist’s proofs. These are smaller than their bronze brethren and are often displayed indoors.
The bronze and gold heads have been shown at nearly 40 sites, and together they are Mr. Ai’s most viewed work of art.
Last year, a bronze series that was the first one completed, in 2010, sold at auction for 3.4 million British pounds, or $5.4 million, at Phillips in London. It set an auction record for Mr. Ai.
After a preview in São Paulo, Brazil, that series was exhibited at the Pulitzer Fountain in Manhattan, on the southeast edge of Central Park. In May 2011, one month after Mr. Ai was detained by Beijing security officers during a crackdown on liberal thinkers, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg introduced the set at the fountain, saying that New York was a city that “fiercely defends the right of all people to express themselves.”
Mr. Ai would go on to spend 81 days in detention.
In a review in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote that knowing the history of the original Qing-era heads “gives Mr. Ai’s piece a certain frisson, beginning with its mongrel origins (Manchurian, Chinese and European) and extending to his enlargement of the original work’s scale and reimagining of the missing heads.”
“It is a seemingly benign work plundered by the West, now being shown to the West, triumphantly enlarged and reconstituted,” she added.
