I had the best time today at The Andy Warhol Museum! Get this! 7 floors of Andy Warhol’s and Ai Weiwei’s works, side by side. Amazing! Whereas, the Ai Weiwei exhibit at Carnegie Museum of Art was just his Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, the Warhol featured almost all of Weiwei’s works. I got to see two of his works which I shared in the my previous blog post about Weiwei: Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and Tea Brick (2006). However, the Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn wasn’t displayed as photographs. According to the description, Weiwei recreated his iconic work in legos, and in a pixelated form, to argue the distribution of images by digital technologies. It was really awesome to see Warhol’s and Weiwei’s works side by side. It allowed me to see how much of an influence Warhol was to Weiwei. Each floor “focus[ed] on the parallels, intersections, and points of differences between their practices.” I saw how one person represented the 20th century (Warhol), while the other represented this current century (Weiwei). I was surprised to see how their respective works on Mao were similar to one another. They both featured his face and his signature stance, except they were executed with different materials. Weiwei painted his Maos’ with oil on canvas, while Warhol used acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen fabric. At the end of my visit, I came to a conclusion.  Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol both produced work on controversial subjects during controversial time periods. If you guys have the chance, I highly recommend seeing Weiwei’s exhibit at Carnegie first, and then see this second exhibit at the Warhol!

Check out my post on Ai Weiwei for a refresher!

Check out my trip!

P.S. This got me annoyed! Can you tell what’s wrong? Also, I’ll put up captions later. I’m having some technical difficulties.