Ai Weiwei. Table with Two Legs on the Wall

Sculpture made from Qing dynasty yu wood. 43 1/4 by 36 1/4 by 43 1/4 in. 110 by 92 by 110 cm. Estimate: 100,000—200,000 USD. Lot sold: 158,500 USD

Executed in 2008, this work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

NOTE: Over the last several years Ai Weiwei has achieved prominence in the international art arena, alternately playing the roles of artist, architect, urban planner, curator, and cultural commentator. His two major projects for the 2007 Documenta—Fragmented, a very large sculptural installation constructed from antique Chinese architectural fragments, and Fairytale, which entailed bringing 1001 Chinese citizens and 1001 Ming and Qing dynasty chairs to Kassel—dominated coverage of the exhibition; and his role as Expert Consultant to Herzog & de Meuron's Beijing Olympic Stadium, followed by his August 2007 repudiation of his involvement with the project due to his belief that the Olympics is a government public relations project, has also drawn broad media attention. Ai Weiwei's ability to think big, and his willingness to court controversy, have long characterized his career as an artist.

In 1978 Ai Weiwei enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, as part of the elite first class of students to be admitted upon the reopening of the art schools after the Cultural Revolution. The following year he participated in the notorious first exhibition of the Stars group, mostly amateur artists working in unsanctioned styles such as abstraction, or with unapproved content, including nudes and political commentary. The exhibition, hung on a fence adjacent to the National Art Gallery due to the absence of venues for unofficial art, was dispersed by the police: the Stars subsequently gained prominence as China's best-known dissident artists. When Ai Weiwei moved to the United States in 1981, where he was to remain through 1993, it was against a background of renewed conservative government control of the arts in China.

Living in New York, Ai Weiwei studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League; more importantly he became engaged with the New York art world and was exposed to original works of art such as were almost never to be seen in China. Reclining Nude (Lot 60) and Untitled (Lot 59) are the products of a newly gained familiarity with the history of Western art, combined with a rebellious attitude, and set against the artist's recent experience of nudes and abstractions as taboo. Both paintings reveal an appreciation of historical styles, but conceived and executed with a fresh expression. In Reclining Nude we see an understated sense of humor, with perhaps Picasso meeting up with New York street culture a la Keith Haring.

A little later Ai Weiwei began experimenting with the concept of the ready-made, inspired by such artists as Marcel Duchamp. He continued working with the ready-made when he returned to China, but took Chinese cultural material as the basis for those works. The materials he selected ran from the everyday, such as coal hives and bicycles, through the rare and precious, including antiquities like Neolithic painted pots and antique architectural fragments. He has become an expert connoisseur of a wide variety of antiquities, and is particularly interested in furniture of the Ming dynasty, with its highly sophisticated joinery techniques. His 2008 Table with Two Legs on the Wall (Lot 58) was constructed by disassembling a Qing table, and reassembling it using those techniques so that it is no longer functional. Table with Two Legs on the Wall raises basic questions such as "When is a table a table?" "What constitutes a work of art?" and "When we call something a work of art, does that negate its functionality?"-Britta Erickson

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art Asia. 17 Sep 08  New York. www.sothebys.com