What is the best way to provocate art? Ai Wei Wei and Andy Warhol together again for a major international show dedicated to the two most impressive artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The project "Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei" has been created by The Andy Warhol Museum and the NGV, with the extraordinary participation of Mr. Ai Weiwei with the purpose of exploring the meaningful influence of the two great artists on modern art and contemporary life. The main focus of these exhibitions is on the parallelism, similarities and diversities between the two artistic processes of two icons. Ai Wei Wei, the most uncompromising China’s art provocateur, is an enemy of the state, a complex celebrity whose presence is solitary but extremely powerful.
Andy Warhol was an incomparable artist and the son of Slovakian immigrants, whose white hair tremendously shocked the modern age.
Mr Warhol and Mr Ai have much in common: they both changed, and are still changing, the way in which the entire universe understood and perceived art. They are unconventional artists who disrupted the art world schemes. The former scandalized with his soup cans in 1962; 30 years later, the latter was a vandal who ruined a bunch of Chinese antiquities by painting them whimsical colors.
Art is supposed to make people feel uncomfortable, to change the way they look at the world,” Mr. Ai said. “I’ve been receiving criticism my whole life, but if you’re going to throw a punch, it should be a real punch, not this kind of mediocre criticism.