Saturday Snapshot

July 2013 - Toronto ON

This week my BFF and I did one of our favourite things, went out and about with our cameras. Our first stop was outside Toronto City Hall at Nathan Phillips Square.

The only Canadian stop on the world-tour, Weiwei’s installation called “Circle of Animals – Zodiac Heads” was erected in the reflecting pool in the square in front of Toronto’s downtown City Hall.

Opened in June and will remain on display until mid-August when it will move to the AGO, Art Gallery of Ontario.

Ai Weiwei is unable to leave China as his passport was confiscated, but his artwork is currently touring the world.

Organized by the AGO and Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, the large-scale artwork is billed as the provocative artist's first major public sculpture. It offers a reinterpretation of the 12 animals that represent the traditional Chinese zodiac.

The zodiac's animals were most famously depicted in bronze as part of an elaborate fountain that Jesuit missionaries designed for the Summer Palace in Beijing. During the second Opium War of 1860, British and French troops set the palace ablaze and plundered its treasures, including the bronze heads.

They are works that Ai Weiwei made in response to a series of works that were done in the late 1700s and taken away to Europe during the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century.

BFF is a snake.

I'm a dragon.