Ai Weiwei Opens Newly Expanded Kemper Art Museum At Washington University in St. Louis

Maybe Ai Weiwei was the only artist who could open the newly renovated Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. As unlikely as that seems.

The revolutionary contemporary artist born in Beijing, China now living and working in Berlin, Germany seems to have little in common with this Midwestern city, steeped as it is in conservative middle-American values. Ai’s work confronts visitors. St. Louis welcomes visitors. Ai is global. Spend any amount of time in St. Louis and it won’t be long before someone asks where you went to high school.

Connecting these seemingly separate entities in perfect harmony is Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.  

Eckmann, you see, has a special place in her heart for artists like Ai. Artists in exile.

One year after Ai was born his family was sent to a labor camp. They were then exiled in a Western Chinese province for 16 additional years. The family resettled in Beijing in 1976 after the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Despite helping to create the stunning “Birds Nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a universally admired facility which brought Ai global fame outside of the hard-core art world, he was arrested for political dissent in 2011 and spent 81 days in secret detention.

He remained under constant government surveillance until 2015 when his passport was returned to him and he was allowed to leave the country.

Eckmann, it turns out, wrote the book on exiled artists.

In 1997, she co-authored “Exiles + emigrés: the flight of European artists from Hitler,” a seminal work on the unprecedented forced migration of artists brought on by the Nazis’ rise to power. Being German, the subject held particular interest to her.

Completing the unlikely trinity is a permanent collection at the Kemper formed in the mid-20^th century already rich in exiled artists including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Ferdinand Léger.

This all comes together in Ai Weiwei: Bare Life, the debut exhibit in the newly expanded and renovated Kemper Art Museum, one piece of the university’s $360 million transformation to its East End campus. Ai Weiwei: Bare Life (through January 5, 2020) presents over 35 artworks, including several new large-scale and site-specific installations and works being shown for the first time in the United States.

“I think it came as close as you can wish to the realization of the concept we developed from the outset,” Eckmann said of the exhibition which she put into motion three years ago with a visit to Ai’s studio. “What I also like about it is really it’s a multimedia exhibition with photography, video, sculpture, installations, mural size wallpapers.”

Numerous works vie for prominence in your memory.

Forever Bicycles brings 720 stainless steel bicycles together in an enormous, delicate arch.

Through merges wooden tables, beams and pillars from dismantled temples from the Qing Dynasty.

Heavy. Architectural. Earthy.

The immense pillars crisscross the cavernous gallery space in diagonals large enough for visitors to walk comfortably throughout. The beams were sourced from ancient temples demolished in the name of progress. China’s urban redevelopment and disregard for its cultural past is a continual theme in Ai’s work.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn recreates a famous stunt by Ai–or piece of performance art, depending on your perspective–in Legos.  

Then there’s Bombs, floor-to-ceiling wallpaper covering 1,830-square-feet featuring full-scale renderings of weapons of mass destruction. The images loom over visitors.

You’ll see “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” the weapons which obliterated Nagasaki and Hiroshima ending World War II in Japan. The enormous U.S. Tomahawk missile. The even bigger American MOAB. A grain silo of devastation.

Walking below them, in their presence, creates a weight. Palpable dread.

“It’s scary, but there’s this double thing with the Bombs,” Eckmann said. “On the one hand, they’re very seductive, when you go close to them, they’re hyper-realistic, they are sort of beautiful, they’re metallic, they’re shining, there’s a seductive quality to them.”

All true.

These weapons of war, which have combined to kill hundreds of thousands of people throughout their histories, have undeniable design elements, they have style. “Seductive” serves an appropriate description.

“I think that seductive quality makes the appalling and frightening quality of the actual bombs even more,” Eckmann said.

Putting a “face,” so to speak, on these weapons, seeing them up-close, down to the smallest details–rivets, seams in the metal fabrication–removes them from the abstract, takes them out of far off news stories and confronts us with their reality.

“Nuclear.” “Tomahawk.” “Daisy Cutter.” “MOAB.” Americans hear these words without feeling their impacts.

With two-dimensional pictures of them hanging ominously over your head at the Kemper, you can’t help, but think of the people who’ve experienced the real thing, in real life.

Ai’s work has never been the subject of a major exhibit in the Midwest–or in an academic setting–previously. The Kemper’s permanent collection, rich as it is in 20^th century modernism, with a concentration on exiled artists, suites it perfectly.

A gaseous green nightmare of Surrealism from Ernst painted near the end of World War II represents a crown jewel of the Kemper’s collection. He was forced from Germany by the Nazis. The Kemper devotes an entire gallery to Exile Art which also features stunning examples from Max Beckman (who taught for two years at Washington University), Léger, Duchamp, Arshile Gorky and a stop-and-stare Pablo Picasso from his post-World War II Women of Algiers series.

In 2015, a different example from this series of 15 sold at auction for $179 million.  

Credit goes to the Kemper’s previous directors for their vision when assembling the collection. The museum doesn’t have Picasso and Ernst and Léger and Joan Miró and Marsden Hartley in volume, but the examples they have are five-star. As is the Kemper’s Pollock and de Kooning.

All of these masterpieces could hang with pride of place in any museum in the world. All were collected virtually in real time, acquired shortly after completion, keeping the prices reasonable, by director H.W. Janson in the 40s and his successors in the 50s and 60s.

You may know Janson as the author of History of Art, the de facto American college art history textbook for more than a half century which has sold millions of copies.

Upon that remarkable history, the expanded Kemper looks forward to an even brighter future thanks to the substantial campus renovations which now connect it to the city’s Forest Park. Both the university and museum fully open to St. Louis.

This walkable, tree-lined section of St. Louis featuring The Loop and University City neighborhoods offers surprises around every corner. Make accommodations for a long weekend of exploring at the boutique Moonrise Hotel on the Delmar Loop.

Considered one of the 10 greatest streets in America by the American Planning Association, this section of Delmar Boulevard offers a bowling ally and martini bar mashup, a great live music venue, a bakery promising “warm cookies delivered until 3 AM,” Chuck Berry, the world’s largest man-made moon circling the rooftop deck of the Buck Rogers-themed Moonrise Hotel and Pi Pizzeria across the street. Pi Pizza pulls off the nearly impossible with regularity: serving an exceptional personal size deep dish pizza.

It’s difficult considering an historic, major American city like St. Louis “underrated” or a “hidden gem,” but considering everything to do there, the quality of its attractions, and how many of them are free, like the Kemper and the St. Louis Art Museum and the St. Louis Zoo and the Missouri History Museum… this Gateway to the West becomes a worthy destination in its own right.