2014.9: 258 Fake
Audiovisual WorksThe audiovisual presentation uses twelve monitors mounted in three columns of four. Seven thousand seventy-seven photographs taken over the span of eight years rotate on the different screens. The photographs include clouds against a blue sky, a city view, and a cat looking out of a window.
Gallery Text
The malleability of what is true and what is real is at the core of conceptual artist and social activist Ai Weiwei’s work. A child of China’s brutal Cultural Revolution, he experienced firsthand the profound human cost of government-enforced social reform and the attendant campaigns to rewrite history and “reeducate” citizens through indoctrination and reprisal. In a determined act of artistic defiance, Ai established Fake Design Studio in Beijing in 2003. The name implies an intention both to perpetrate and to unmask fictions; it also signals dissent, as the Chinese pronunciation of fake is similar to the English word fuck. The artist began to exploit the documentary, archival, coercive, political, and aesthetic capacity of photography—much of it produced with smartphones—and began experimenting with ways to distribute his massive daily image production together with his written thoughts through digital social media platforms.Created after the government shut down his blog, and drawn from its visual content, the installation 258 Fake is a choreographed meditation consisting of disassociated fragments from eight years of Ai’s social, political, and artistic life, presented through the conceptually unstable medium of photography. As he wrote on July 25, 2003, and posted to his blog on January 16, 2006: “[Photography] . . . is similar to the seemingly truthful—but actually false—state of various kinds of ‘knowledge.’ No matter whether or not we are convinced of the information that is presented to us, every bit of it is useless in allaying our doubts.”
Identification and Creation
- Object Number
- 2014.9
- People
-
Ai Weiwei, Chinese (Beijing, China born 1957)
- Title
- 258 Fake
- Classification
- Audiovisual Works
- Work Type
- audiovisual work
- Date
- 2011
- Culture
- Chinese
- Persistent Link
- https://hvrd.art/o/348902
Location
- Location
-
Level 0, Room 0006, Lower Level Lobby
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Physical Descriptions
- Medium
- 7677 photographs (2003-2011), 12 monitors
- Dimensions
- Dimensions vary with installation
Provenance
- Recorded Ownership History
- [Galerie Urs Meile, Switzerland], sold; to the Harvard Art Museums, 2013.
Acquisition and Rights
- Credit Line
- Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund
- Copyright
- © Ai Weiwei
- Accession Year
- 2014
- Object Number
- 2014.9
- Division
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- Contact
- am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
- Permissions
-
The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request.
Publication History
- Cate McQuaid, Contemporary art in the foreground at Harvard Art Museums, The Boston Globe (Boston, MA, November 1, 2014), ill. in online edition (color)
- Daniel Grant, "Museum Acquisitions: Top Picks of 2014", Antiques and Fine Art Magazine (2015), XIIV, 1, pp. 128-137, p. 135
- Suzanne Volmer, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Rebecca Horn, Sculpture, International Sculpture Center (June 2015), Vol. 34, No. 5, p. 70
Exhibition History
- 32Q: 1010 Prescott Street Entrance, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 11/16/2014 - 01/01/2050
Verification Level
This record was created from historic documentation and may not have been reviewed by a curator; it may be inaccurate or incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu