Lecture

To Amuse, to Amass, and to Multiply: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei

Foong Ping

Date: Thursday 30 April 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:45 hour
Address: Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
Linnaeusstraat 2
1092 CK Amsterdam
Room: Studio

Abstract

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.

Biography

Foong Ping is Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum 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. An ongoing book project treats the titular recognition of painters and calligraphers as a facet of Chinese spatial imagination. Her present focus is on the material histories of medieval Buddhist calligraphy and their reception during the late Qing dynasty and early Republican era. Dr. Foong oversees the SAM’s extensive collection of Chinese art, from historic to modern and contemporary, in its presentation, research, care, and interpretation. Alongside two co-curators, Foong led an extensive effort to expand and modernize the landmark 1933 art deco building of the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Envisioning its global future, 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. The International Examiner presented her with the Community Voice Award to recognize the impact of these two projects.

This event is sponsored by the Hulsewé-Wazniewski Foundation.