The following image is that of an exhibition '42 Bicycles' in 2003 by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei when he conjoined forty-two Forever bicycles into a circular sculpture. Manufactured in Shanghai since 1940, the Forever bicycle was an essential mode of transportation that has become an icon of the post-revolutionary era. Made of heavy steel, these utilitarian bicycles were meant to last forever.
8 years later, Weiwei configured another exhibition using Forever bicycles this time employing 1200 of them in an exhibit entitled simply 'Forever Bicycles'.
...one bicycle is only a bicycle, but one thousand, two thousand - you cannot say this is only a bicycle.
Cai Lujun
Humans are destined to be narrow-minded empiricists. But only by venerating the mystical world can we rise above our petty quandaries. Humans are animals who have renounced nature, and from among every possible path, humans have chosen the longest and most remote path leading to the self.
Ai Weiwei, The Grey Book
As Lujun states in an interview (Lujun himself spent 3 years in prison for speaking out against the Chinese government), the exhibit is symbolic of a call to arms (perhaps better a call to 'feet') transforming the bicycles into would-be dissidents... In other words, the bicycle, as a vehicle of autonomy and integrity (you need backbone to ride a bike!), subverts the status quo, and brings us perhaps onto a more direct path with the mystical world and that path leading to the self...
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