Exhibition Details

Galleria Continua is pleased to present Neither Nor, an exhibition that traces the creative career of one of the most important and influential contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei, from 1995 to today. The exhibition will see the entire cinema-theatre home of Galleria Continua completely transformed, featuring a large selection of new works made with LEGO bricks and historical works made from porcelain, wood, marble, bamboo, and assemblages of different materials.
Concerning the title of the exhibition, Ai Weiwei states: “In the current era we find ourselves faced with a cultural panorama that tends towards extremes, where everything is reduced to a binary choice between black and white. This trend is deeply backward and troubling and is reminiscent of authoritarian periods in history, such as the first Soviet purges, the McCarthy era in the United States, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. Times in which, not only were human rights seriously violated, but also the very essence of human nature and the collective beliefs of ordinary people were profoundly damaged. The title, Neither Nor, is intended to convey that, in most cases, our thinking is not limited to absolute truths or single interpretations, but rather exists in a state of ambiguity that allows for greater possibilities and debate. It is within this state of ambiguity that human thought and culture, including art, finds the environment and space to thrive. As a result, it is often difficult to provide definitive yes or no answers; regardless of the answer, there is a strong sense of exclusivity and a lack of tolerance for alternative perspectives.”
Conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, performer, photographer, architect and urban planner, collector, director (of cinema, documentaries, theatre and opera), actor, musician (singer and lyricist), writer and editor, blogger, investigative journalist, activist for human rights and dissident – Ai Weiwei is an artist impossible to label; prolific, committed, open to any innovation, he wisely combines art, private life and political commitment. A profound connoisseur of the tradition of his native country, he interprets motifs, manufacturing processes and traditional materials in a playful and iconoclastic way, denouncing the contradictions between the individual and the community in the contemporary world.
On the first floor of the gallery, the exhibition offers, for the first time, a comprehensive survey of works created between 2019 and 2023 through the assembly of hundreds of toy bricks. Ai Weiwei explains, “LEGOs are used to convey personal messages and contain stories related to me, my childhood and my upbringing. Pixels, digitisation, segmentation, fragmentation and disconnection provide a unique freedom for reproduction, enabling a qualitative and quantitative breakthrough in image formation that moves away from the widely used order, method and composition. It is similar to the use of ancient mosaics and the presentation of fabrics (silk, wool) and carpets, which have a lengthy history. Like the wooden movable type printing of the Song Dynasty (c. 1000 AD), the methods and means of production replaced manual control and this led to a high level of accuracy and precision of the completed images. EN SAN GIMIGNANO is the linguistic advantage of computer technology and a figurative presentation of an intelligent logical system for the digital age. (…) The existence and logic of using LEGO as a structure are surprisingly consistent with the logic of my expression on social media, including tweets and Instagram images. Both include temporal and spatial factors, the flattening, fragmentation and expropriated continuity of media and reality, including existence itself, ideologies, politics and events, and linguistic approaches to culture and dreams.”
A journey through history that begins with the Renaissance, the first two rooms welcome us with Sleeping Venus with Coat Hanger, a work based on the painting attributed to Giorgione in which Ai Weiwei inserts, next to the Roman goddess of fertility, a hanger in memory of brutal abortions self-induced before pregnancy termination became legal. In The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in Untitled (After Rubens), the repetition of the individual Legos restore the colours, the vigour of the bodies and the power of the composition, to which the artist juxtaposes a panda, symbol of contemporary Chinese state power. Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat is reinterpreted with the image of a refugee as Ai Weiwei’s response to the ban on the burkini in France. The image of the locust invasion that wiped out entire crops in the heart of Pakistan in 2020 overlaps with Van Gogh’s “Le semeur au soleil couchant”. The impersonal language of the coloured bricks translates two of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous works, La Gioconda portrayed here smeared with cake after the action of environmental activists and Last Supper where the face of Ai Weiwei replaces that of Judas. The exhibition continues with works that give a voice to urgent, dramatic, and current issues such as war and gas leaks from gas pipelines. Among the previously unseen works, Cloud images that bring us back to the shooting down by a US fighter of a Chinese air balloon accused of spying on strategic sites, an incident that led to a drastic tightening of diplomatic relations between the two world powers.
Ai Weiwei’s strong bond with tradition and the millenary Chinese culture - towards which the artist manifests a deferential respect, accompanied by an incredible ability to project himself into modernity - takes shape in a series of historical works, among these: Treasure Box (2014), a cube finely decorated with inlay designs and enriched by hexagonal openings that reveal the internal shelves, Marble Cube (2010) which combines the minimalist sculpture of the sixties and memorials made of marble, a material common to both Chinese and Western traditions, and Porcelain Cube (2009) created in the Qinghua style (blue and white porcelain). The garden hosts two large installations Pick Up Stick (2006), a board game known throughout the world by different names, in Italy it is known as Game of Sticks or Shanghai, in ancient China it was called Chien Tung and was used for oracular practice, and Pillar (2006) which consists of large porcelain vases, perfectly integrated with the environment, measuring two metres in height they explore the limits of the processing of this material that is traditionally considered the highest expression of Chinese art.
The installation located in the stalls area, Stools, is made with approximately 3,000 stools dating back to the Ming and Qing dynasties and the Republican era which, connected to each other, form a wooden surface that covers the floor of the room. Collected in the villages of northern China, with their solid and simple structure, they speak of a design that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
The exhibition concludes with Huantou Guo (2015), a floating mythological creature made of bamboo and silk. Starting in 2013, Ai Weiwei began creating works using the language of traditional Chinese kites and created a series of works inspired by the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas). The text, which dates back to the 4th century BC, is an important documentation of the mythology, geography, culture and social structure of the time. While most traditional kites are two dimensional and intended for flight, the artist pushes craftsmen to explore the limits of what is possible with these familiar materials, resulting in large-scale works with more elaborate designs and three-dimensional form.