Ai Weiwei, Snake Ceiling, 2009. The artist's activism included demanding that the government come clean about the number of deaths in the cataclysmic 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The "snake" is made up of backpacks, representing the students who died when their school buildings pancaked in the temblor.
According to What? The Ai Weiwei Retrospective in Washington D.C.
The show takes its name from a 1964 Jasper Johns work and explores the controversial Chinese artist-activist's attempts to make art a way of looking at the world--and challenging its authorities--rather than accumulating artifacts.