The Cleveland Museum of Art will mount an installation by noted contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, best known for his recent installation at the Tate Turbine Hall in London that featured 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds. The CMA will install Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads in its newly opened atrium. Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads draws on the history of an 18th-century zodiac fountain clock located in the Yuanming Yuan, or Garden of Perfect Brightness, in the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was destroyed during the Second Opium War (1856–60) and looted, including the bronze fountain heads. Ai Weiwei reinterprets the heads in the context of looting and repatriation and as symbols of Chinese national pride, allowing visitors to question the ways history can be made to serve different purposes.
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