Dream Villager presents: Sunflower Seeds, Anyone?

Music, Art, Dance

Sunflower Seeds, Anyone?

Mar 1, 2011 - Other / N/A

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei took over Turbine Hall at Tate Modern Museum in London, covering the floor with 100 million seeds.

Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) was designed as an interactive exhibit installed at the Turbin Hall at the Tate Modern.
Photo by Loz Flowers www.Flickr.com/photos/blahflowers

Seeds for Auction and Seeds as Art

Next time you buy a bag of sunflower seeds, remember some people think sunflower seeds can be art, to be admired in one of the world’s premier art museums, and that these seeds can be sold at auction for thousands of dollars.

Currently, 100 million “seeds” have been spread across the floor of the Turbine Hall’s entire east end of London’s Tate Modern gallery by the artist Ai Weiwei. In total the seeds cover 1,000 square meters. Unilever has underwritten the exhibit which was scheduled to be on display from Oct 11, 2010 – May 2, 2011 and is free to the public.

These sunflower seeds are special of course. Each ceramic seed was molded, fired at 1300 degrees centigrade, hand painted, and then fired again at 800 degrees. Spanning two years, more than 100 million seeds –weighing an estimated 165 tons - were crafted by 1600 Chinese workers.

Sotheby’s said Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds), which was completed in 2010, reflects the artist’s preoccupation with the scale of industrial mass production, and unachievable

agricultural quotas set by China’s late Chairman Mao Tse-tung. ArtDaily.org reports that “Kui Hua Zi is an incredibly stirring sculpture and one which has already become an icon of this important sculptor’s oeuvre. Ai Weiwei is the most important conceptual artist of his generation in China.”

Visitors were encouraged to walk across the installation and pick up seeds but not steal them (although the artist himself said has said he would be tempted to take one as well.)

Sunflower Seeds at Auction

For the first time the handmade porcelain seeds had been offered at auction. The first lot of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction – held on February 15 – was a 220 pound sack of artist Ai Weiwei’s handmade porcelain Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds).

The seeds had been expected to bring $127,000 to $190,000 but actually sold for $559,394 over 4 times the Sotheby’s estimate. Sotheby’s reported that four bidders competed for the 100,000 seeds. The winning anonymous bidder paid about $5.60 a seed.

Throughout February, Sotheby’s will offer contemporary works estimated at more than 56 million pounds ($89 million) at a series of London sales -reflecting surging confidence in the fine art market. The total is the second highest estimate for a February London contemporary art series at Sotheby’s, and follows a successful 2010 when art prices rose sharply.

A note to bargain hunters: a Chinese website, Taobao.com, known for its fake products of everything from designer bags to software, is offering fake sunflower seeds for $.25 per seed. The listing claims that the seeds were “handmade in Jingdezhen” the same town that Weiwei’s seeds were made. However, if you’re really cheap, real sunflower seeds sell for about $2 a pound.