Opening at Pavilion 13 in Kyiv on September 14th and running until November 30, 2025 Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White is a major new work by the internationally acclaimed artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, in Ukraine.
"In this era, being invited to hold an exhibition in Kyiv, the capital of a country at war, I hope to express certain ideas and reflections through my work. My artworks are not merely an aesthetic expression but also a reflection of my position as an individual navigating immense political shifts, international hegemonies, and conflicts. This exhibition provides a platform to articulate these concerns. At its core, this exhibition is a dialogue about war and peace, rationality and irrationality." - Ai Weiwei
Commissioned by RIBBON International, Ai’s installation is a site-specific response to the escalating armed conflicts threatening the world of today, and a testament to the
possibilities of art in such times. Art is something related to humans’ most primitive reactions or emotions, fear or even fantasies or dreams. Those are always deeply rooted, and it’s more profound than we can ever even understand. So I think art is the only way to save humanity from authoritarian and other forms of this kindof technical bureaucracy and technical authoritarian push. (ibid.)
Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White developed out of Ai’s humanistic and pacifist interest in the phenomenon of war and his own practice of mining the ideologically-coded objects of the past to make art that resonates with urgent contemporary concerns: That is the challenge, to build new works relating to what I feel, to me in the past and to the current situation. Art is more metaphysical. You cannot really give every description, but you can always suggest a gesture or attitude or some kind of symbolic meaning, more like a poetic gesture. (ibid.)
The core metal structure of this installation is made up of the spherical forms that Ai created in his earlier work, Divina Proportione, 2004–2012, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrations for a book on mathematics of the same name.
The artist sees these spheres as emblematic of ancient ideals of order and rationality.
The artist conceives of these geometrical forms as figurations of Renaissance and later Enlightenment world views that promised a transformation of nature to the benefit of humanity while, at the same time, fatefully multiplying its powers of destruction.
Each sphere is encased in a modified camouflage fabric, drawing upon Ai’s decades-long investigation into its uses. The fabric is connected with buttons, an extension of Ai’s
now-seminal Five Raincoats Holding a Star, first displayed in the late 1980s. Drawn from nature, military camouflage is a visual language which imitates the subterfuges of animals in their struggle for existence. The fabric of this new work incorporates animal motifs and is painted over in thin white paint, a second layer of camouflage. This interplay of appearance and concealment evokes a world of the bellum omnium contra omnes, shrouded by a veneer of whiteness suggestive of ideological bleaching and whitewashing.
Of course, whenever you cover something there’s still something underneath. So I give extra meaning to how we’re dealing with reality and which layer of reality we’re dealing with. And is reality just what we are seeing or what we understand? (ibid.)
Adding and excavating further historical layers, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White will be housed in Pavilion 13, an exposition hall built in Kyiv in 1967. Set inside this large glass pavilion built to display the economic achievements of the Donbas region, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White incorporates its ideological forms into a configuration that puts them into a new and questioning light.
The play between transparency and concealment, on the one hand, and the formal structure of the work and the site itself, on the other, affects a re-historicization of the pavilion from a vantage point of today’s wars and technologies. Realised by an artist world renowned for his examination of the politics of objects and architectures, this exhibition comes at a critical juncture in the history of Ukraine, inside a space that speaks to ongoing contentions surrounding the country’s architectural heritage, at a time when its very survival is at stake.
Main Image: Ai Weiwei in his studio. Courtesy Adam Simons and RIBBON international