Hanging Man in Porcelain 2009

Ai Weiwei made this, Hanging Man in Porcelain, from porcelain. The porcelain line has a delicacy that belies the weight of what it depicts. I’m intrigued by how art can be both a thing and an idea, and here we have both. The material – porcelain, known for its fragility – is unexpectedly formed into the shape of a coat hanger, a mundane, functional object. Yet, the hanger is also a profile of a man’s head. It’s this tension between the object and the image that gets me thinking about absence and presence, identity and anonymity. There’s a quiet, subversive wit to it, reminiscent of Duchamp's readymades, but with an added layer of cultural and political commentary, typical of Weiwei’s work. It leaves you questioning the relationship between form and function, art and life, freedom and constraint, a conversation that art never ceases to provoke.