At the opening reception of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s exhibition Who Am I? at Palazzo Fava in Bologna, Italy, a man shattered a porcelain sculpture by the artist to the astonishment of visitors.
In a security video posted on Ai’s Instagram after the incident, a man identified as 57-year-old Vaclav Pisvejc from the Czech Republic is seen theatrically toppling the artist’s “Porcelain Cube” (2009) and then holding a fragment of the artwork over his head before four security guards tackle him to the ground.
Pisvejc reportedly has a record of vandalism stretching back to at least 2018, when he hit performance artist Marina Abramovic over the head with a framed portrait of her. When she later asked him why he did it, he replied: “I had to do it for my art.”
The destroyed artwork, according to Palazzo Fava, demonstrates a mixture of Western avant-garde and traditional Chinese craft.
“The act of vandalism against Ai Weiwei’s work ‘Porcelain Cube’ is even more shocking when we consider that several of the works on display explore the theme of destruction itself,” the exhibition’s curator, Arturo Galansino, said in a statement to Hyperallergic.
One installation at the show, “Left Right Studio Material” (2018), features a bed of shattered porcelain from the Chinese government’s destruction of Ai’s Beijing studio that same year in front of a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” (circa 1495–98), mirroring the wreckage of “Porcelain Cube.”
Galansino added that Ai’s 1995 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn photography series, which features the artist dropping an ancient vase, was meant to signify the “destruction of the past in recent Chinese history.”
“The destruction that Ai Weiwei depicts in his works is a warning against the violence and injustice perpetrated by those in power,” the curator explained. “[It] has nothing to do with this violent, potentially dangerous, reckless, and senseless act carried out by a habitual troublemaker.”
In a terse comment to Hyperallergic, Ai wrote: “This incident occurred.”
