Ms.Interpreted

Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 (triptych of gelatin silver prints documenting performance action).

We tend to assume that important things naturally attract attention. But in practice, many valuable things remain invisible until something dramatic happens. The urn existed for two millennia before becoming one of the most famous ceramic vessels in the world. The moment Ai Weiwei dropped it, it became one of the most discussed ceramic vessels in contemporary art. The destruction paradoxically, amplified its cultural value.

What’s fascinating is that the work predates social media by more than a decade, yet it seems to anticipate the current moment. Platforms reward novelty, surprise, conflict, outrage, and emotional intensity because these are the things most likely to interrupt our scrolling. Ai Weiwei understood the power of attention and spectacle.

I wonder how the work is experienced today by the people seeing it for the first time. In 1995, the image of an artist smashing a 2,000-year-old artifact was genuinely shocking. In 2026, after years of doomscrolling, clickbait headlines, and precise algorithm, I wonder whether we have become desensitised to exactly the kind of provocation that gave the work its power.

On now at Auckland Art Gallery as part of Forever Tomorrow, curated by Hutch

I visited the in Venice a week after it opened, and I’m still thinking about its central provocation: “The Only True Protest Is Beauty”, a phrase that initially feels simple, but reaveals itself to be radical. Borrowed from Phil Ochs, it frames beauty as a force that generates transformation.

Curated by Dries Van Noten and Geert Bruloot, the exhibition brings together fashion, jewellery, ceramics, glass, photography, sculpture and design without disciplinary hierarchy. More than 200 objects are arranged intuitively, through proximity and contrast rather than chronology or canon-building. The result is a chain of sharp, sometimes disorienting juxtapositions: contemporary ceramics beside historical interiors, experimental fashion against ornament, rough surfaces next to exquisite craft, seductive works sitting uncomfortably close to unsettling ones.

In a social-media saturated present, attention has become a contested material. Platforms reward immediacy, outrage, and opinion; experience is constantly compressed into reaction. Against that, crafted objects, carrying embodied skill, labour, and patience, demand a different tempo. They insist on being looked at longer than the feed allows. That slowdown becomes a form of resistance by interrupting the conditions under which culture is usually consumed and judged.

In Venice, during Biennale season, the exhibition constructs something closer to a Wunderkammer (a cabinet of curiosities), where the refusal of explanation and meaning feels almost unfashionable right now.

It was a joy to encounter two works by , completely at home in the constellation, neither isolated nor over-framed, but very much part of the conversation. 💋♥️

In that sense, beauty becomes one of the few remaining ways of producing shared attention that is not fully mediated byopinion.

Recently visited the Kapoor Foundation in Venice with artist .teheuheu 🕳️. Built on water, the city continually unsettles perception: reflective, disorienting, and perpetually on the verge of being lost within. Movement is a constant negotiation between body and environment, requiring small adjustments in orientation and perspective.

Kapoor’s work amplifies that condition. Through reflection, distortion, and impossible shifts of scale, the body becomes both subject and object at once. Walking through the foundation, I was struck by how perception is constantly tested and recalibrated.

A few steps beneath At the Edge of the World (1998/2026), an immense suspended black dome, space itself seems to bend. Voices gather and return from unexpected directions, creating a fleeting moment of intimacy within the work’s vast scale. Step outside that point and the effect vanishes. What appears monumental is in fact remarkably precise, tuning the relationship between body, sound, and space. The work hovers between presence and disappearance, drawing attention to the fragile thresholds through which perception itself is organised.

Back in Aotearoa now, I keep returning to questions of optics and positioning: how art is an attempt to change reality, and the order in which it’s presented to us. 🔮