Ai Weiwei: Bare Life at Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, United States, presents Ai Weiwei: Bare Life, running until January 5, 2020. This marks the Chinese artist's first major institutional exhibition in the Midwest and his first within an academic context. The title references Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept of 'bare life'—vulnerable and unprotected human existence. The show features 35 works, including nine installations debuting in the U.S. and pieces created over the past two decades. A site-specific wallpaper titled Bombs spans nearly 20 meters in length and 11 meters in height, depicting life-size renderings of 43 weapons of mass destruction—from a 1911 grenade used in the Italo-Turkish War to a 2019 nuclear bomb. The weapons are arranged chronologically from left to right and by destructive power from bottom to top, with the most devastating looming near the ceiling. Ai Weiwei, born in Beijing in 1957, is renowned for his human rights activism and frequent clashes with Chinese authorities.