Lecture by Dr. Ping Foong: ‘To Amuse, to Amass, and to Multiply: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei’

KVVAK members are warmly invited to a lecture by Dr Foong Ping on the work of Ai Weiwei, organised by the Hulsewé-Wazniewski Foundation. Drawing on the exhibition Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, she will discuss the development of his multifaceted practice. The focus will be on the visual and material strategies that link his oeuvre across several decades.

Renowned conceptual artist Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957) questions forms of power, disrupts artistic canons, and challenges political authoritarianism. The first US retrospective in over a decade, Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at the Seattle Art Museum highlighted 130 works from the 1980s to the 2020s—across performance, photography, sculpture, and video. The exhibition featured large-scale installations made from deconstructed bicycles and images built with LEGO, and included iconic interventions such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Study of Perspective (1995-2011), Sunflower Seeds (2010), and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Gold) (2010). Several works made their international debut, including Shells (2022), The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in Green (2020), and The Cover Page of the Mueller Report, Submitted to Attorney General William Barr by Robert Mueller on March 22, 2019 (2019). In this talk, organizing curator Foong Ping evaluates the visual and material hallmarks of this artist’s multifaceted practice to identify some principles that span the decades.

Foong Ping is Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Dr. Foong received a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and her experience spans the academic and curatorial realms. She began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow and then taught at the University of Chicago as Assistant Professor and at the University of California, Berkeley. Her monograph on eleventh-century Chinese ink painting, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize.  At SAM Dr. Foong, alongside two co-curators, led an extensive effort to expand and modernize the landmark 1933 art deco building of the Seattle Asian Art Museum. The building reopened in 2020 with an innovative thematic presentation of the permanent collection. In 2025, she organized Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, the largest US retrospective exhibition on the acclaimed Chinese contemporary artist.

Registration go through: hwslectures@gmail.com