{"id":610242,"date":"2026-07-29T16:40:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T16:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/610242\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T16:40:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T16:40:41","slug":"ai-weiwei-returns-to-drawing-after-50-years-with-a-tree-for-circa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/610242\/","title":{"rendered":"ai weiwei returns to drawing after 50 years with a tree for CIRCA"},"content":{"rendered":"

ai weiwei returns to drawing with a portrait of a dying oak tree<\/p>\n

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When Ai Weiwei<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0heard that Sherwood Forest\u2019s 1,200-year-old Major Oak had reached the end of its life, he felt an unexpected urge to draw. The sketch, made beneath the ancient oak during the summer solstice, is the artist\u2019s first drawing in more than fifty years. It now forms the basis of A Tree (2026), an animation<\/strong><\/a> commissioned by CIRCA in collaboration with Factory International and presented on London\u2019s Piccadilly Lights following the opening of Button Up!, Weiwei\u2019s major exhibition<\/strong><\/a> in Manchester.<\/p>\n

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For Ai Weiwei, the drawing is less about returning to an abandoned medium than responding to a particular moment in his own life. \u2018I am sixty-nine years old, almost seventy, and both my surroundings and I have undergone significant changes,\u2019 he tells<\/a> designboom.<\/strong> \u2018When I read the news that this 1,200-year-old tree had died, I suddenly felt compelled to go there and make a sketch.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Standing before the oak, he found himself thinking not only about its immense scale but also about its lifespan. The tree had endured twelve centuries of changing seasons before reaching its end. To Weiwei, its death was neither symbolic nor exceptional. It belonged to the same cycle as every other living being. \u2018I do not think there is any difference between the death of a tree and the death of any other living being,\u2019 he says.<\/strong> \u2018They all complete the same cycle of life. Over the course of 1,200 years, this tree endured wind, rain, dew, cold before finally relinquishing the possibility of continuing to live.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Ai Weiwei sketches the 1,200-year-old Major Oak in Sherwood Forest during the summer solstice | all images courtesy of CIRCA, unless stated otherwise<\/p>\n

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A conversation across generations<\/p>\n

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The animation pairs the drawing, commissioned by the public art platform<\/strong><\/a> CIRCA, with Trees, a poem written by Weiwei\u2019s father, the celebrated Chinese poet Ai Qing, in 1940. Written more than eighty years before the drawing was made, the poem reflects on the relationship between a tree, the land, and the surrounding forest. Together, the poem and the drawing bring two generations into conversation, united by a shared attention to the natural world. The work ends with an acknowledgment that the oak\u2019s cycle has come to an end. Weiwei recalls hearing a painter describe optimism as the belief that another spring will always arrive. For this tree, he says, there will be no next season. \u2018I was reminded of the optimistic words of a painter, who said that an optimist always believes another spring will come. Yet for this tree, there will be no further spring. It is simply tired. It leaves the land where it has lived for so long,\u2019 he shares with us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Ai Weiwei stands before the 1,200-year-old Major Oak in Sherwood Forest | image by Josef O Connor<\/p>\n

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From ancient trees to grand narratives<\/p>\n

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Trees have appeared throughout Weiwei\u2019s practice for decades, each carrying a different history. In China, he assembled sculptures from the trunks of ancient trees collected from remote mountain villages. In Brazil, he created a cast of another 1,200-year-old tree. More recently, he recreated the image of a historic tree as a full-scale sculpture in Ukraine, where soldiers climbed onto its branches to echo a photograph taken decades earlier in China.<\/p>\n

\u2018Each of these trees carries a different meaning,\u2019 the artist explains,<\/strong> \u2018yet every one of them is equally important.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Seen within that broader body of work, A Tree becomes another chapter in an ongoing investigation into memory, survival, and the lives carried by objects and landscapes. The themes also run through Button Up!, which Weiwei describes as the largest and most ambitious exhibition of his career, tracing two centuries of political and social transformation. \u2018The exhibition I am presenting in Manchester is the largest and most complex exhibition I have ever undertaken. It encompasses myself, my family and our era, reflecting on the profound transformations of the past two hundred years \u2013 from colonialism and slavery to communism, capitalism, and post-capitalism, and finally to today\u2019s age of artificial intelligence,\u2019 Ai Weiwei reflects. <\/strong>\u2018Its scope is vast, and its narrative is comprehensive and cohesive.\u2019<\/p>\n

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the artist photographs the Major Oak shortly before creating his drawing | image by Josef O Connor<\/p>\n

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A meditation on history, on CIRCA\u2019s public screens<\/p>\n

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Against that scale, returning to a single drawing might appear modest. Ai Weiwei sees it differently. \u2018Drawing a sketch of a tree is not a simple gesture,\u2019 he highlights.<\/strong> \u2018It connects a grand historical narrative with the finest details of perception and expression, because no great narrative can exist without meticulous observation. Only when observation is pursued to its fullest extent does it become an understanding of life; that life is not necessarily human life.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Presented across CIRCA\u2019s network of public screens, A Tree extends these reflections beyond the museum, placing them into the rhythm of everyday urban life. \u2018Over the past few years, I have collaborated with CIRCA on several works. As a platform for public art, CIRCA is itself an act of creativity. For an artist, working through an open public art platform presents its own challenge, both as a creative endeavor and as a way of sustaining a space for artistic practice,\u2019 he observes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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At a time when public spaces are often dominated by advertising and constant streams of information, Weiwei offers the image of a tree that has stood for twelve centuries and the recognition that even the longest lives eventually come to an end.<\/p>\n

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Ai Weiwei photographed with the completed drawing beneath the Major Oak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ai weiwei returns to drawing with a portrait of a dying oak tree \u00a0 When Ai Weiwei\u00a0heard that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610243,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[267],"tags":[43531,49171,365,362,363,364,366,18,117,966,19,17,11480],"class_list":["post-610242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-ai-weiwei","tag-art-interviews","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-public-art"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117004261092301568","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}