A gallery-goer’s worst nightmare is accidentally running over a precious piece of porcelain, but a man sneaked into an Ai Weiwei exhibition in Italy on Friday and knocked over a porcelain sculpture by the Chinese dissident artist, apparently planning to cause a disturbance.
The man destroyed a large blue-and-white porcelain cube at a private opening of the “Who Am I?” exhibition at Palazzo Fava in Bologna on the night of September 21. Local police arrested a 57-year-old Czech man, identified in Italian media as Vaclav Pisvejc, a provocateur and self-proclaimed artist known for targeting important works of art.
It’s unclear how the culprit gained entry to the invitation-only event, but the museum confirmed that the exhibition opened to the public as scheduled. Per the artist’s wishes, the debris was covered in cloth and removed. A life-size print of the work will be installed soon, along with a label explaining what happened.
Ai shared security camera footage on Instagram, in which a man is seen loitering near the work before suddenly going behind it and forcefully shoving it onto the gallery floor. As the man triumphantly holds up the broken pieces, several men in suits pounce on him, dragging him off the work’s raised platform and onto the floor.
“The sound of destruction was so loud, like an explosion, that at first I thought it was a terrorist attack,” Ai said in an email this morning. “Confusion ensued.”
The artist’s first concern was to make sure that no one was harmed in the incident. “I realized later that it was a shame because the piece was incredibly difficult,” he said. “Made using the finest Jingdezhen blue-and-white porcelain techniques, it required a lot of trial and error and experimentation to create.”
The unique piece took more than a year to make in a traditional kiln. “Only a true connoisseur of Yuan and Ming porcelain can understand the effort and style behind this piece,” Ai said, adding that he had no plans to create a replacement and that what happened was “part of the reality” of a divided society.
Ai Weiwei revealed that the attacker approached him two days before the exhibition was due to open, demanding to read “about 20 pages of handwritten notes” from the artist’s book, “1,000 Years of Joy and Sorrow.” Ai explained that the attacker did not speak Italian, and the man suggested he find an interpreter.
Ai Weiwei’s porcelain cube was intentionally destroyed by vandals at Palazzo Fava in Bologna on September 21, 2024. Photo by Ai Weiwei.
“I found the request odd and told him I had no intention of reading the note. I encounter people like this from time to time,” Ai said. “I had no interest in engaging with him. I handed his note over to the staff at Galleria Continua and thought nothing more of it, but I would often see him sitting alone in the cafe.”
Ai himself is known for destroying artwork; exhibition curator Arturo Galansino said several of the works on display document the destruction of precious ceramics, the most famous of which is a black-and-white photographic triptych called “Dropping a Han Dynasty Vase” (1995), in which Ai picks up and drops a 2,000-year-old piece of pottery, a comment on China’s deliberate erasure of its cultural heritage.
“The acts of vandalism depicted in Ai Weiwei’s work are a warning against violence and injustice perpetrated by those in power,” he said. “(It) has nothing to do with the reckless and thoughtless acts of serial troublemakers who seek attention by destroying artists, artworks, monuments and institutions.”
Vaclav Pisvejc, the suspect Italian media say destroyed the Porcelain Cube, has a long history of targeting important artworks. Last year he was arrested for climbing naked onto the statue of Hercules and Caesar in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei attends the preview of the exhibition “Who Am I?” at Palazzo Fava in Bologna, Italy on September 20, 2024. Photo by Roberto Serra – Iguana Press/Getty Images.
A year ago, Florence draped a replica of David in the Piazza della Signoria with a black mourning veil, after Pisvejk set it on fire, causing €15,000 in damage to the statue and earning six months in prison and a €26,000 fine.
Pisvejk has also targeted contemporary artworks. In 2018, he used a spray can to deface a work by Urs Fischer in the Piazza della Signoria. That same year, Pisvejk attacked Marina Abramović as she was leaving a signing session at Strozzi Palace. At first, he appeared to be gifting the Serbian performance artist a portrait of her, but then he hit her over the head with it. Abramović offered to talk to Pisvejk instead of filing charges, but he said he had to attack her “for the sake of his art”.
Garancino said the incident and the destruction of the porcelain cube were not acts of protest, but rather “to draw attention to (Pisvejc’s) vandalism.”
Galansino said many museums around the world have struggled to protect artworks from various acts of vandalism, including those by political protesters. At Strozzi Palace, where Galansino serves as director, “we have a group of very attentive guards, but it’s very difficult to keep out people with bad intentions. We have metal detectors, but they’re for knives. If someone wants to press a sculpture, it’s very difficult.”
