Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern, review

For the 11th commission in the Unilever series, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has come up with a masterpiece. Rating: * * * *

For nine internationally celebrated artists, the annual commission to create a sculptural installation in Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall has proved impossible to resist. But with striking exceptions, such as Olafur Eliasson’s apocalyptic The Weather Project in 2004 (the giant disc resembling the setting sun) and Doris Salcedo’s unforgettable Shibboleth in 2008 (the trompe l’oeil crack in the foundations of the building), one after another of them has fallen flat on their face.

Not this year. For the 11th commission in the Unilever series, Tate Modern has offered the poisoned chalice to the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei - and he’s come up with a masterpiece.

At first and even second glance, Sunflower Seeds doesn’t look like much – a minimalist rectangle of gray stones such as Richard Long might have made on some beach in Iceland. Only when you look closer do you realise the 'stones’ are large sunflower seeds, and only when you pick one up do you understand they are not real seeds, but hand-painted replicas made of porcelain. From even a short distance away they appear to be interchangeable; in fact no two are exactly alike.

Did I mention that there are one hundred million of them? That is five times the population of Beijing. It took 1,600 people two and a half years to manufacture the number the artist needed to make the piece you see at Tate Modern. Like so much else about China, on paper such figures are almost meaningless. Only by seeing it can you begin to grasp its immensity. Standing before it, we look out over an immeasurable, fathomless grey sea.

But the moment when you step on it, your relationship to what lies beneath your feet changes. Each crunching footstep merely displaces a thin layer at the top of the pile. Our weight leaves no impression on the millions and millions of seeds beneath our feet. What from afar had been far too immense for the imagination to grasp instantly becomes as worthless as gravel. Were Tate Modern to lose a million sunflower seeds during the run of this show, I doubt very much anyone would notice.

Ai Weiwei has said that he chose to reproduce sunflower seeds in porcelain because during the famine years under Mao they were one of the few reliable sources of food, comfort and social interaction. For him they symbolise the Chinese people. Seen through his eyes, the piece is a powerful political statement about the relationship between rulers and the ruled in China.

The artist mentioned one other statistic that is relevant for understanding the piece. One hundred million is nearly one quarter of the number of China’s internet users. Intrinsic to the work’s meaning, Ai Weiwei will be online, tweeting and responding to questions from the public during the run of the show. Without the internet, he is saying, his countrymen are destined to be crushed underfoot by rulers who do not see – and do not want to see the individual within the mass. But with four hundred million people in touch with each other through the internet, who knows what may happen in the future?