10 hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds by Ai Weiwei.

Dimensions: length 20mm, thickness 5-7mm

Ai Weiwei is currently one of the most important contemporary artists in the world.

He is the son of the poet Ai Qing. He graduated from the Academy of Cinema, and then later devoted himself to painting. In the seventies he was co-founder of the artistic group Stars. In September 1980 the Beijing authorities gave the Stars collective permission to set up an exhibition at the China Art Gallery in Beijing: it was the first contemporary art exhibition in a Chinese museum.

In March 1988, his works were exhibited at the Ethan Cohen Gallery, an exhibition that was his first and only one-man show in New York. One famous work of this period is a tribute to Marcel Duchamp, an artist loved by Ai Weiwei: Profile of Duchamp. Sunflower seeds. It is the transformation of a hanger into the profile of the artist, inside which sunflower seeds are placed, an important food for the Chinese people.

In June 2011 in February, Ai Weiwei's work consisting of 100 million sunflower seeds reproduced in hand-decorated porcelain was on display at the Tate Museum in London. The creation originated in China, where Ai Weiwei revisited the traditional production methods to produce an object typical Chinese tradition, strongly linked to the imperial times.The process involved about 1600 people in the city of Jingdezhen, a district famous for porcelain production, who decorated each seed by hand.