The British Tate Gallery has purchased sunflower seeds by Ai Weiwei

London - The Tate gallery in London has announced that it has purchased eight million porcelain sunflower seeds, which were part of a famous installation by the world-renowned Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. This was reported today by the AP agency.
     Ten tons of seeds made by Chinese glassmakers, which the gallery purchased as a work titled Sunflower Seeds 2010, represent only a tenth of the original amount that Ai Weiwei used to cover the floor of the giant Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2010. The price of the purchased work was not disclosed.
     Millions of porcelain sunflower seeds were handcrafted over two years by 1,600 glassmakers in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. When the exhibition opened in 2010, visitors were invited to wade through or lie on the seeds. However, the ceramic dust was deemed a health risk after just 48 hours of the exhibition, and the exhibit was cordoned off with rope barriers.
     Last year, Sotheby's auction house sold a hundred-kilogram bag of these seeds for £350,000 (10.4 million crowns).
     Ten tons of seeds, which the Tate gallery now has in its collection, is not enough to cover the floor of the Turbine Hall. The artist therefore suggested that the seeds be piled into a cone with a diameter of five meters and a height of 1.5 meters. In this form, visitors were able to see them from last June until early this year at Tate Modern, which Ai Weiwei lent them.
     The gallery stated that the seeds, which are a popular snack sold on the streets of Chinese cities, represent friendship and solidarity, challenge individualism, and evoke memories of enforced unity during the Cultural Revolution, when propaganda posters depicted Chinese leader Mao Zedong as the sun and the people of China as sunflowers turning towards him.
     The renowned British magazine Art Review named Ai Weiwei the most influential artist of the year last year. This avant-garde artist is an outspoken critic of the Chinese communist government and has become a symbol of the regime's repression of dissidents.
     Last spring, Ai Weiwei, who is also known as a co-designer of the Olympic Stadium (Bird's Nest) in Beijing, was detained at Beijing airport and subsequently imprisoned for 81 days in an undisclosed location. He was released on bail at the end of June and is prohibited from giving interviews to journalists, meeting with foreigners, using the internet, or communicating with human rights advocates for one year. He is also still under investigation for suspected tax evasion.