Categories
The Allure of Coloring: Ai Weiwei
The Allure of Coloring is a way to experience The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China from the comfort of your living room.
This week’s coloring page features Ai Weiwei’s Tables at Right Angles, which uses mortise-and-tenon joints to seamlessly reconfigure two tables collected from a Beijing antique market into a nonfunctional object.
The coloring sheet was drawn by artist and museum educator Erik L. Peterson. “It initially seems like a pretty simple sculpture—two square tables fastened together on perpendicular planes,” says Erik. “But when I looked closely (and especially when I drew the details) I noticed the complexities of the work. They revealed themselves in the way the tables are carefully merged by contemporary craftsmen working in concert with their Qing Dynasty predecessors, who had meticulously carved the tables’ cross members and ornamental elements, including eight neatly tied bundles of wheat.”
If you post your creations to social media, be sure to include the hashtag #theallureofcoloring so we can find your work and share it with the world!