It was still dark in Piccadilly as I walked down to find out how our all night opening of Ai Weiwei had gone. It was apparently busy till 2 o’clock in the morning, then an opera singer performed Elgar’s Sea Pictures at 3, 4 and 5 o’clock, whilst people lay down and had a mystical experience under the chandelier in the Central Hall. The trees will go on Monday:-
It may be my last glimpse of the installation:-
I spent part of the afternoon attending a community art club for the homeless who come once a month to look at one of our exhibitions and then make art work inspired by it. I found it unexpectedly therapeutic to be encouraged to look carefully at the work, talk about it and comment on its meaning – not much different from what art historians do, but maybe undertaken with a more open mind. We ended under the chandelier, which looked, as was pointed out, full of bling in the evening light:-
This may be my last post about Ai Weiwei, because, after a very full-on couple of days, the exhibition is now open to Friends for a few days before opening to the public on Saturday. It has been fascinating watching someone of such international celebrity remain so calm and unexpectedly low key, pleased mainly to be free and with his son. I finally succumbed to the universal urge to photograph him when he met Edmund de Waal. There was an encounter between two people with a particular interest in the craft of making:-
Now that the exhibition is installed, it is possible to get a sense of the full scope of its ambition before the crowds descend. It’s on a grand scale, as Sidney Smirke’s galleries both allow and encourage, each space discreet, but flowing fluidly into the next. The grandest of the galleries is devoted to an arrangement of metal bars in a wave, symbolising the lost lives of children in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan owing to poor building construction. 96 tons:-
Trees are up in the courtyard, thanks to the contributions of more than 1,000 people to our Kickstarter campaign. The paraphernalia of installation has been removed and the surrounding barricades, but not the old black armchair which this morning looked like a piece of detritus, but turns out to be carved in marble and based on Ai Weiwei’s father’s armchair:-
I went into our exhibition first thing this morning to see how it looks and how those who have been installing it have fared over what has obviously been a long weekend. I found the exhibition hard to judge last week because the process of installation has been so long and complicated with our own art handlers supplemented by others from the studio. It’s nearly there, just waiting for the finishing touches and probably work on the lighting. I like seeing exhibitions going up and how they come together. This exhibition has, of course, been conceived and planned remotely which makes it all the more remarkable.
We had the press conference this morning for our Ai Weiwei exhibition in which all of the world’s press, including the television stations, descended on the RA, as will probably be evident from the news programmes later today. What was interesting was the quality of the discussion and the fact that it was as much political and cultural as it was artistic. There was repeated questioning about the emotional impact of his incarceration and inability to travel and a dawning recognition of the significance of the fact that, after more than a hundred exhibitions which he has done internationally over the last four years, this is the first one that he has actually been able to see.
Some time ago, I was on a version of Any Questions with Yancey Strickler, the young and very impressive co-founder and now CEO of Kickstarter, the organisation which arranged and leads crowdfunding campaigns, based in Brooklyn NY. At the time, we were having difficulties getting funding for our major Ai Weiwei exhibition this September and Yancey generously suggested that Kickstarter might be able to help. The campaign was launched this morning with a target of £100,000 to pay for an installation in the courtyard.
Yesterday I was asked by Sir David Tang to speak at his new China Exchange about the nature of the relationship between the Royal Academy and China in the light of our forthcoming Ai Weiwei exhibition. The short answer is that it goes back a long way to the time of the foundation of the RA when William Chambers at least had a good knowledge of Chinese architecture from his three visits during the 1740s with the Swedish East India Company and when the modeller, Tan-Che-Qua, was included in the background of Zoffany’s early portrait of the Academicians. There have also been a number of major exhibitions of Chinese art, beginning with the Great China exhibition in 1935/6 and including the Genius of China in 1973/4 and China: The Three Emperors in 2005/6.
Back to Blenheim for another tour of the Ai Weiwei exhibition in preparation for a tour later in the day for patrons of Frieze Masters. Not a good day to be there for an event because of the death of the 11th. Duke in the early hours of the morning. The flag was at half mast.
This time I saw the handcuffs on the bed on which Winston Churchill was born:
I found the installations worked better with fewer people about. They were more serenely surreal, particularly the crabs:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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