Ai Weiwei’s exhibition at The Royal Academy of Arts in London includes his work Straight (2008-2012), displayed in the largest exhibition space. The piece is approximately 15 metres in length and about 90 tonnes in weight. It features thousands of steel reinforcement bars stacked up to knee height, placed painstakingly and ordered decoratively into a wave-like structure. The sheer scale of the structure offers an appreciation of the process in which the artist and his team has gone through to create it. Each individual rod varies in length and is placed in height order on top, making the top layers of the rods into a wave pattern. The sculpture echoes the characteristics of seismic waves in remembrance of the children that passed in a school destroyed by the devastating Sichuan earthquake back in 2009. Ai Weiwei and his team salvaged the mangled rebars from the debris and straightened them to create this memorial. A sombre tribute and a controversial dig towards the Chinese government by Ai Weiwei.

There is a huge importance to seeing an artwork ‘in the flesh’ in my opinion. It encourages a more active inquisition than that of looking around on the internet listening to a critics view, forcing a perhaps different opinion onto oneself. Personally, walking into that room for the first time spikes my curiosity, it forces me into investigating. I hate being confused about art. So, I tend to gather as much information from titles, dates, artist statements etc. to gauge my own opinion on matters explored. Also, to see something in the flesh is to feel the raw emotion of the piece. Straight did exactly that, the sheer scale of it evokes empathy, drama and a huge sense of community effort. Something that I wouldn’t otherwise get looking at a 100x150mm picture on a computer screen.