Our hero of international free speech and activism, Ai Weiwei, has unveiled his installation made entirely out of baby formula (previously on the floor of Sheung Wan Civic Centre in Hong Kong), at the Michael Janssen Gallery in Singapore. The piece is a response to lax oversight on behalf of the Chinese government over baby formula, in 2008. Thousands of children consumed bad milk and some died. The consumer epidemic hit particularly close to home for Weiwei, whose son was only four-years-old at the time. The installation consists of 1,800 cans of formula arranged in the shape of a map of China.
It's not the first time that Weiwei has created work revolving around the mistreatment of children. Previously, Weiwei produced So Sorry/Remembering. That piece was a massive installation on the facade of Munich's Haus der Kunst. It contained some-9,000 backpacks on the museum's facade, one for every child who died or went missing in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China. The different colored packs read: "She lived happily for seven years in this world." Shoddy construction in schools across the region was blamed for much of the tragedy.
RELATED: The 50 Most Political Art Pieces of the Past 15 Years
[via Designboom]
