When we visited Tate Modern in the beginning of this month, the museum’s Turbine Hall was impressive, but empty. Now it is filled, namely with 100 million sunflower seeds. They are part of an installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and though they look realistic are they in fact hand-crafted in porcelain. 1600 workers individually sculpted and painted every single seed husk in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen during the last two years. This gets your mental arithmetic going – to make a long calculation short, the production of Ai Weiwei’s piece took about 6 million hours. This is quite a number just as the millions of seeds are a powerful sight. Even on a distance Weiwei’s installation makes me  think about what role work plays in our lives, about the „Made in China” phenomena and individualism in a society like China. You are no longer allowed to walk on the seeds (this caused health-damaging dust – here you got something more to think about…), but anyhow I would love to see the installation in real.
Photos: Tate Photography, Johan Wirfält