Ai Weiwei
Coca-Cola Vase
2014
Around 2014 Ai Weiwei painted the Coca-Cola logo in industrial enamel onto a genuine Han Dynasty urn (206 BC–AD 220), continuing the series of interventions on ancient ceramics he had begun in the 1990s. The deliberate defacement of a 2,000-year-old antiquity with the world's most ubiquitous corporate emblem confronts notions of cultural heritage, authenticity, and the reach of global consumerism in post-reform China. Alongside 'Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn' and the 'Coloured Vases' series, it is one of the defining icons of Chinese contemporary conceptualism.
Exhibition Venue
Related Stories
Image source: Wikimedia Commons