One Hundred Million Fake Sunflower Seeds

 I think I just found a new favorite art piece. Look at this:

Just a bunch of sunflower seeds, right?

Wrong. They are hand crafted replicas of sunflower seeds made out of porcelain. And there are ONE HUNDRED MILLION of them. And ALL of them were HAND CRAFTED. Every single individual one. HAND PAINTED. 1600 PEOPLE spent 2.5 YEARS hand crafting porcelain sunflower seeds. They take up 100 cubic metres and weigh 150 TONS. You used to be able to go into the pile and walk around:

Absolutely insane. I love art.

The installation is aptly named Sunflower Seeds, by Ai Weiwei. It's interesting to zoom in on the picture and look at what individual people are doing. Lots of people just lying or sitting on it, resting. One person seems to be reading a book. Another one has a handful of seeds cupped in their hand, inspecting and appreciating them. Another person seems to be doing the same, while their father watches on.



Imagine being one of the workers and having that on your resume. Imagine being in an interview like "What was the scope of your work in your previous job?" "I made fake seeds every day for 2 and a half years." You wake up and think "Gotta check in at my job at the fake seed workshop!"

Apparently, people walking on the seeds crushed some of them and released porcelain dust, and that's bad for your lungs, so they stopped allowing that after about 10 days from the opening. So, that sucks. But for the people that did get to dive into the pile, it must've been glorious.







Apparently, in 2014, it was removed from an exhibit it was supposed to be shown at:


On one hand that sucks, but on the other hand how the actual fuck would they even do that. What kind of office do they have that could contain 100,000 litres of fake sunflower seeds. Imagining a museum worker who unknowingly opens the door and all of it just flows out and floods the whole building. Like the domino scene from Robots.


    So. When people see the words "Made in China" on a product that they see, it's easy to associate that with it being mass produced, cheap, unlaborious. But it isn't necessarily so. When you see a room filled with 100,000,000 little sunflower seeds, it's easy to assume that they would have been mass produced in some factory somewhere, made by machines, with little human involvement. Like toy soldiers in a bucket. But these seeds were each made individually by human workers. Each of them shaped by hand, painted by hand. When you're holding them in your hands, you are touching something that was molded by another person's hands.


    It reminds me of "pizza movie", an animated short by vewn. The pizzeria worker in the short states, "Today, I made hundreds of pizzas for customers that don't know I exist, and made no correlation between the food they're eating and a working human being." I'm not sure if this was the point she was making, but this video has made me a lot more considerate of this fact. It was 9 years ago that I saw it, and whenever I order food now, I'm thinking "Somebody prepared this food for me."
    It's easy not to make that connection. Nowadays, we are surrounded by items that were made impersonally. My furniture was made in a factory, my mugs molded by machines. It didn't use to be this way.

14th century plate from Jingdezhen
    The seeds are made out of porcelain. The "fake seed workshop" was in Jingdezhen, the "Porcelain capital" of the world. Porcelain pottery was being produced there as early as the 500s. For the following 1500 years it was basically THE porcelain place, producing tons of it, at a high quality. If a pot didn't look right, they'd just throw it out, regardless of cost. Quality over quantity, but also at a high quantity.

    The history of porcelain in China in general goes even further back, dating back to around 4th century BC.




Decorated pot from Western Han Dynasty
    So maybe the sunflower seeds are an acknowledgement of this history. Not just the seeds as objects, but how they were made, where, by whom. It's a rebellion against mass production, against the over-commercialization of art. It's all real.















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