Saturday, August 3, 2013

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.






11 comments:

  1. The photos are beautiful, and the information about this artwork is fascinating. My Snapshot is at http://goo.gl/LAe6cu

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  2. What fun to find are outside. These look very cool. Here's Mine

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  3. What a fascinating story behind these sculptures! How sad it is that the artist cannot accompany his work!

    BTW, your chart does not go far enough back for some of us. I think I'm a dragon, too (1956).

    Here's my Saturday Snapshot.

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  4. HOW COOL! These are just my idea of interesting things to shoot! Lucky for us you both did this!

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  5. Very different! Have never been to Toronto.

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  6. I love the zodiac sculptures. They look huge.

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  7. I must get out to see these, thanks for the reminder.

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  8. These are so cool! What a great art installation.

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  9. What an interesting display, great to see these artworks. There's so much interest going on out there in our world.

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  10. These are so cool! Thank you for sharing your photos!

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