Ai Weiwei - Contemporary Art Part II New York Friday, November 17, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Chambers Fine Art, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Chambers Fine Art, Cement: Marginal Space in Contemporary Chinese Art, July 3-August 3, 2002 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    The present lot, “A Gift from Beijing,” comprises a brick dating from the Qing dynasty placed in a box constructed of iron wood salvaged from a demolished temple in China’s southern province of Guangdong. The work is a conceptual reduction of many of Ai’s other video, sculpture, and photography works that redeploy ancient bricks and salvaged temple beams in new configurations. In the same manner of Ai’s acclaimed Furniture series, the box in the present lot is constructed using traditional joining methods of Chinese carpentry without any nails. The “Gift” is a material manifestation of a long-forgotten fragment of history given a new, Duchampian meaning by its contemporary context.

296

A Gift from Beijing

2002
Tieli (iron wood) box with lid and Qing Dynasty brick.
3 1/8 x 15 x 10 1/4 in. (7.9 x 38.1 x 26 cm).
Signed in Chinese characters on the box lid.

Estimate
$8,000 - 12,000 

Sold for $11,400

Contemporary Art Part II

17 Nov 2006, 10am & 2pm
New York