Explore the Reception of this artwork, Sunflower Seeds (artwork).
Andrew Graham-Dixon noted that in Communist propaganda sunflowers turned towards the face of Mao, but "Ai Weiwei's multitude of seeds face and follow no one. They form a fragmented world, something atomised, smashed to rubble. And maybe that's what they're truly meant to portend: the fall of China's old guard, the dismantling of the totalitarian system, which will take place as surely as every tide will always turn." He considered the work to be "a melancholy piece".Richard Dorment called it a masterpiece, and Adrian Searle was also positive, saying it was "audacious, subtle, unexpected but inevitable," and transcended similar minimal works like Wolfgang Laib's pollen fields, Richard Long's stones or Antony Gormley's fields of human figures. He praised Ai as the "best artist to have appeared since the Cultural Revolution in China." Art Asia Pacific said the work was "meticulous, beautiful, sparse, suggestive, even emotional, but it was not prescriptive".
Wolfgang Laib Richard Long Richard Dorment Andrew Graham-Dixon Adrian Searle Ai Weiwei Antony Gormley fields of human figures