Footnotes

Related Work
Other examples of these plates are held in the collection of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, United States of America

Ai Weiwei had his first ever major solo exhibition at the Sherman
Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) in April 2008 – the year of the
Beijing Olympic Games (held in August).
Exhibition planning went back to 2006, at which time the artist's work
was included in Charles Merewether's Zones of Contact Biennale of
Sydney and in QAGOMA's Asia Pacific Triennale.
The Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR) cottage hosted Weiwei for
several weeks with his wife Lu Qing, whose 2.5-metre-long painted
silk scroll she continued to paint daily at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales throughout the duration of the same Biennale.
Brian and I had come to know the soon-to-become mega star artist
rather well – although of course in 2006 we could not have foreseen
his stance on China's Olympic Stadium, the deliberate destruction
of his Shanghai studios, the beating he was subjected to as a result
of his citizen investigation into the Sichuan earthquake corruption
scandal, (which lead to the death of thousands of children, mostly
from single child families), his subsequent 81-day arrest in April 2011
and his final exile to Europe. At the time of our meeting, all of the
above still lay in the future.
We met happily during those weeks for coffee and meals à quatre
in Paddington cafés and intimate restaurants – sharing, on our side,
experiences of dissident life in Apartheid South Africa an on the
artist's side, listening to revelations about his father Ai Qing's Chinese
Communist Party-enforced exile in Xinjiang with his family, (including
babe in arms Ai Weiwei), in the far reaches of the Taklamakan desert.
Ai Qing, the once lauded national poet, had become a designated
enemy of the Party and the People. The family lived in a dug-out and
Ai Qing cleaned latrines as per the Party's orders.
During his visit for those precious-to-us weeks, Ai Weiwei and Lu Qing
visited our family's Voiceless offices, leading to the compassionate
Lu Qing gently offering her services to help alleviate the suffering
of factory farmed animals. Sadly, her limited English made the idea
impractical. However, we were deeply moved by her interest and their
heartfelt gesture of support. Later the artist offered a major work to
a Sherman Galleries-organised Voiceless fundraiser and, following a
trip to Weiwei's Berlin studio by Ondine, her husband Dror and me in
2019, the artist agreed to become a Voiceless Ambassador, circling
back to our earlier conversations on Voiceless and his desire to
become involved.
Fast forward to Weiwei's refugee investigation, his subsequent film
Human Flow and his Law of the Journey (2018), a 60-metre-long
inflated boat filled with more than 300 faceless refugee men, women,
and children, installed as a centrepiece in Mami Kataoka's highly
successful 2018 Biennale of Sydney. Having been connected to
Mami for a number of years, Brian and I decided to help financially
facilitate the presentation of Law of the Journey in Sydney via the
commissioning of a series of porcelain plates. Offered here for sale via
Private Treaty, the work (number 5 of an edition of 10), relates directly
to the aforementioned monumental piece and to Ai Weiwei's concerns
regarding the 60 million plus stateless people who continue to live in
crisis conditions worldwide.
The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection retains the first edition of this
special treasure – linking, as it does, the centuries-long illustrious
history of Chinese porcelain making to current world events.
Dr Gene Sherman