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Ai Weiwei is son of Ai Qing, one of the best Chinese poets of the 20th century, accused of being a right-wing intellectual by the Mao regime and exiled to the western region of Xinjiang, where he was forbidden to publish and was forced to clean latrines. It has traditionally challenged power and disrupted the use of objects; one day, neither short nor lazy, he decided to fill the gallery’s Turbine Room Tate Modern in London with 100 million porcelain sunflower pipes.
But Ai can afford this and much more. How to make the Helga de Alvear Museum of Contemporary Art shine with its ‘Descending Light’, a sculpture that he created in 2007 and that resulted in an immense chandelier, formed by seven golden concentric circles from which hang 60,000 red crystals.
The animal rests twisted on the ground, as if it had fallen from the ceiling. A weak light makes it seem still alive. In reality a chandelier style lamp, introduced to China by Western influence, turned into an ostentatious symbol of power and social class that adorns buildings of a new wealthy class, temples of consumption and puts the finishing touch on commemorative institutional buildings throughout the country. “The work becomes a metaphor for China, a giant in full economic transformation that mortgages its past and succumbs to the weight of material success in an odd race to be an industrialized country,” says the expert Maria Jesus Avila.
The mayor, Luis Salaya, publishes a snapshot on his social networks that will go around the world
‘Descending Light’ is the undoubtedly Helga’s most photographed work (the museum inaugurated its second phase in February), and now a new image of it will go around the world. It has been published by the mayor, Luis Salaya, in his networks with the following text: «I leave you this photograph that has been taken a while ago and we can already be sure that it will be historical. Ai Weiwei meets again, many years later, with his work, at the Helga de Alvear Museum. We still do not fully understand the immense importance that this museum has and will have for the future of Cáceres ».
Salaya’s satisfaction is more than justified, Ai Wei Wei is one of the most important contemporary artists in the world thanks to his activism and artistic work loaded with political and social criticism. He has been in Cáceres, has seen his work and has had his portraits with Helga, the German collector who with her sneakers puts the world for montera.
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