Warhol And Ai's Illuminations: A Comparative Analysis

Several attempts have been made in order to insert artists Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei into a single discourse, including a major recent show sponsored by the Warhol Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. As a further attempt at enabling conversation between the two artists, I will be analyzing both Warhol’s and Ai’s portrayal of the self through Warhol’s Self-Portrait (1986) and Ai’s Illuminations (2014). Both pieces photographically represent the artists, although in quite disparate manners: in Warhol’s case, a silk-screen print transferred onto canvas, and in Ai’s, a digital mirror selfie. As viewers, we tend to interpret self-portraits and selfies as two different things, or rather, we place one higher in the scale of art whereas we consider the latter a lesser art—or simply not an art at

Artists like Warhol and Ai reshaped the way we view instant, readymade and ‘easy’ art, and Ai is perhaps a reason why the selfie is being sculpted as a new mode of “high” artistic expression, and also being interpreted as such. Due to the multiple similarities between the two artists and the influences that Warhol paved on Ai’s work, it is simply expected that their resemblance would yield conversation- or even comparison - in exhibition spaces, literature and film. “Is Ai Weiwei the Andy Warhol of our time?” or “Andy Warhol & Ai Weiwei: A Match Made in Heaven” are examples of headlines from news articles featuring the exhibition that housed works by Warhol and Ai, and despite their comparable approach to art, their works have emerged underneath diverse circumstance with regards to time, space and medium. In unraveling these two works, I explore the version(s) of the self that pertains their respective modes of representation through assessing Warhol and Ai’s vision of the self in relation to society and sociopolitical