Ai Weiwei's 'Resetting Memories' continues at MARCO, Monterrey

27 February 2020

Ai Weiwei’s solo exhibition ‘Resetting Memories’ is currently on view at MARCO in Monterrey, Mexico. The exhibition connects the destruction of our relationship with our history and ancestors to violence against young people as an attack on the future. Alongside recovered and re-glazed ceramics in works such as Set of Spouts (2015) and recent experiments using LEGO blocks and photographs, ‘Resetting Memories’ is centred around the installation of Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), presented here in full for the first time. The reconstructed ruins of this Ming dynasty shitang (community centre) constitute the largest of Ai’s politically-inflected readymades – having for generations served as a communal meeting place, the structure was eventually sold and left to deteriorate. Ai reassembled over 1,500 individual pieces of the building, replacing missing elements with brightly painted flowers or crystals, repurposing its cultural and aesthetic significance in a new environment.