Art isn’t just something that produces beauty, or provides pleasure and enjoyment. Art is a means of communication, a means of expression, of any experience, or of any aspect of the human condition. And that is what artists do. With the use of symbols and techniques, artists express their thoughts and emotions about particular views on things. But sometimes, artists tend to go further down the more serious path of activism and politics. Ai Wei Wei and Pablo Picasso are two perfect examples of these artists. Ai Wei Wei is a Chinese contemporary artist and political activist who wasn’t afraid of speaking out against the Chinese government; while Picasso is a Spanish 20th century artist whose opinion very much opposed the Spanish nationalists’. Both outstanding artists and well-known figures of their art periods, they exploit with different materials and media to utilise their artworks as a message of protest, or a political comment to inspire their audiences.
Ai Wei Wei is a Chinese contemporary artist born in 1957, in Beijing. He is a social, political and cultural critic and a political activist who strongly opposes the Chinese government. Majorly interested in the issue of cultural anxiety of changes in China, Ai Wei Wei uses sculptures, installations, architecture, and photography to express his disapproval of political views in China. One of the more famous of his works is an installation entitled Sunflower Seeds (2010) exhibited in Tate Modern. This artwork consists of approximately 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, each painted individually by one of hundreds of artisans, and laid out into one large piece on the floor, like a carpet. Though every single porcelain piece looks identical to one another, all of them are unique. Porcelain and sunflower seeds are extremely symbolic to China, and in order to etch this message deeper into the audience’s mind, he