Proceeds from the sale will go to help children of Syrian refuges. The auction organised by the Kayany Foundation will be held in Berlin. The sale will also feature works by Rosemarie Trockel and Tomás Saraceno.
The sculpture is an oversized copy of a cat toy. The sculpture was made by Chinese carpenters. Ai Weiwei employed them earlier for his other projects, but as he was focusing on his film Human Flow, the carpenters had no work to do, so he decided to give them a difficult task to keep them busy.
Ai Weiwei. Photo: Alfred Weidinger
He gave them his cat’s toy – a polyhedron composed of hexagons and pentagons – and asked to make a large-scale copy of it, using huali wood and traditional techniques from the Ming dynasty.
Ai Weiwei’s F-Size will be auctioned on December 1. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The F-Size sculpture will be auctioned at Villa Grisebach, an auction house in Germany, on December 1 with an estimated price of €200,000-€300,000. Proceeds from the sale will go to the Kayany Foundation, a charity that provides education to Syrian refugee children in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon.
Ai Weiwei began to support the foundation after he visited an education centre at a refugee camp while filming Human Flow:
“It had such a strong impact when we drove far away to the Syrian border, a completely forgotten place where no one cares, to find this nice school and to hear people reading books,” Ai Weiwei told the Art Newspaper. “The school is very basic, but the teachers are teaching students who are really eager. This is about hope for the next generation.”
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