A sculpture by Ai Weiwei was destroyed during the opening of his exhibition at Palazzo Fava in Bologna last Friday. The work, Porcelain Cube (2009), was shattered by a man who pushed it over and then held a piece of it above his head. The man was then tackled by security, as shown in CCTV footage from the event shared on Ai’s Instagram.
Local police later confirmed the arrest of a 57-year-old Czech man, identified in the Italian media as Vaclav Pisvejc, a provocateur and self-described artist.
Porcelain Cube was created in the qinghua (blue-and-white) style and integrates the tradition of Yuan and Ming dynasty craftsmanship with Western Minimalist influences. The work took more than a year to create, said Ai, in comments reported by Artnet News. “Afterward, I felt it’s a pity as the artwork had been incredibly difficult to create,” he said. “Crafted using the finest blue-and-white qinghua porcelain techniques from Jingdezhen, it required numerous attempts and a lot of experiments to produce.”
This is not the first high-profile art stunt carried out by Pisvejc. “Unfortunately, I know the author of this inconsiderate gesture from a series of disturbing and damaging episodes over the years involving various exhibitions and institutions in Florence,” Arturo Galansino, the curator of the exhibition, told Reuters.
In 2018, Pisvejc defaced a work by Urs Fischer in Piazza della Signoria, Florence. That same year, he also attacked Marina Abramović as she was leaving a book signing at Palazzo Strozzi in Venice.
In comments also reported by Artnet News, Weiwei said that Pisvejc had approached him two days before the opening of the exhibition to demand that he read “around 20 handwritten pages of notes” on the artist’s book 1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.
“I felt the request was odd and told him I wasn’t prepared to read the notes. I encounter people like this from time to time,” he said. “I wasn’t interested in engaging with him. I handed his notes to the staff of Galleria Continua and thought nothing more of it, though I often saw him sitting alone in the café.”
The spokesperson for the museum said that the exhibition, “Who am I?,” opened as normal on Saturday, and that the destroyed work will be replaced by a life-size print. The exhibition runs through May 4, 2025.
