Hanging Man in Porcelain 2009

Ai Weiwei made "Hanging Man in Porcelain," well, we don't know exactly when. Now, this piece is a bit different, isn't it? It's not paint, but porcelain, shaped into a wire hanger, which in turn forms the silhouette of a man’s head in profile. So, what’s Ai Weiwei thinking here, taking something so mundane – a hanger – and elevating it to art? I wonder if he was thinking about transformation, about how an object can carry so much more meaning than its original purpose? It's like Duchamp, you know, but with a twist. The readymade meets portraiture. You see it, too, don’t you? That profile emerging from a simple loop of material. The hanger has a double meaning, one for hanging clothes, and another for hanging, as in, punishment. And it is an ongoing conversation, a kind of material poetry, where the artist invites us to contemplate not just what we see, but how we see, and what we choose to hang onto.