Andy Warhol is among the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He was a leading figure in the development of Pop Art, and his influence extended to the worlds of film, music, television and popular culture. Warhol created some of the most defining iconography of the late twentieth century through his exploration of consumer society, fame and celebrity, media and advertising, politics and capital.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, social activist and one of today’s most renowned contemporary artists. His provocative work encompasses diverse fields, including visual art, architecture, curatorial practice, cultural criticism, social media and activism. Ai’s practice addresses some of the most critical global issues of the early twenty-first century, such as the relationship between tradition and modernity, the role of the individual and the state, questions of human rights and the value of freedom of expression.

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei introduces to the artists through their engagement with self-portraiture and self-representation, and through some of their most iconic, performative and iconoclastic works. These works not only attest to both artists’ transformation of aesthetic value through artistic innovation and experimentation, but also reference their shared interest in cultural heritage and vernacular expression; in the United States and China, respectively.

Andy Warhol fanatically recorded his everyday life on audiotape, celluloid and photographic film. He moved effortlessly between underground, avant-garde and glamorous social circles and his photographs of the 1970s and 1980s provide an intimate insight into his social world. They also show his keen observation of the urban life, architecture, advertising, popular culture and personalities of his adopted New York City. When Warhol visited China in 1982, he turned his photographic gaze to the people and significant sites of a culture in transition.

Ai Weiwei lived in New York for a decade from 1983 onwards, and his New York Photographs document the young artist’s social context as part of the city’s Chinese artistic and intellectual diaspora community. The images also show his participation on the margins of the New York art world; his commitment to social activism; his involvement with influential poets, such as Allen Ginsberg; and his identification with the work of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Warhol.

In one photograph, taken at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987 – the year of Warhol’s death – Ai, in his late twenties, identifies himself explicitly with Warhol by adopting a Warholian pose in front of the Pop artist’s multiple Self-Portrait of 1966.

Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei have each transformed our understanding of the role of the studio and artistic production, in their respective eras. Warhol’s ‘Silver Factory’, established in 1964 in a disused hat manufactory on East 47th Street, Manhattan, was legendary for bringing together artists and poets, filmmakers and musicians, bohemians and intellectuals, ‘superstars’, drag queens and socialites, as well as for the serial production of silkscreen paintings, films, video, music and publications. The Factory functioned not only as a studio, office and production line, but also as a libertarian, carnivalesque space of aesthetic, social and sexual choice, whose dim-mirrored silver-foiled walls, in the words of Annette Mitchelson, ‘redoubled [the] confusion of actor and audience’

Ai’s self-designed studio in Caochangdi, on the north-eastern outskirts of Beijing, is renowned for its interdisciplinary approach and post-industrial modes of production as well as for its innovative, experimental approach to materials and technologies. Ai also plays host to teams of researchers and craftspeople, architects, designers and archivists, activists and assistants, and is known for his strategic use of social media.

The role of both artists’ studios will be a focus of the exhibition, including a selection of publishing, films, music, television programs and social media to reflect the diverse cultural practices of both artists. This will be complemented by a media lounge, including interactive touch-screens providing access to Andy Warhol’s wider filmography, and an extensive selection of films, videos and documentaries by and about Ai Weiwei.

The enigmatic French artist and pioneer of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp looms large in the art of both Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. Duchamp’s invention of the readymade, an everyday object designated as art by the artist or conferred by the gallery context, is among the most significant influences in twentieth-century art, and both Warhol and Ai were critical to the reappraisal of Duchamp’s work in New York in the 1960s and Beijing in the 1990s, respectively.

Duchamp’s emphasis on ideas over artisanal skill was foundational to Warhol’s employment of industrial fabrication and serial production in the 1960s and his critique of originality, authenticity and the commodity status of the art object. Equally, Ai’s engagement with Duchamp’s work in New York in the 1980s, and his re-reading of Duchamp in Beijing in the 1990s, equipped the Chinese artist with a repertoire of neo-Dada strategies and a conceptual approach that included linguistic play, irony, institutional critique and negation.

Duchamp himself appears in Warhol’s Screen Test: Marcel Duchamp, 1964–65, and in Ai’s Hanging Man, 1985/2009, in which the French artist’s profile is fashioned from a coat hanger, in the form of a question mark.

Flowers in Western art history have symbolised love, death, sexuality, nobility, sleep and transience. In Chinese culture flowers also carry rich and auspicious symbolic meanings; from wealth and social status to beauty, reflection and enlightenment. The flower is a repeated motif in Andy Warhol’s work, from his earliest drawings and commercial illustrations to his Pop paintings and prints, first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1964. While the production of Warhol’s Flower paintings and silkscreens through the 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the burgeoning Flower Power movement, their bold plasticity, mechanical reproduction and seriality also suggested a more commercial undercurrent to the counterculture.

Flowers feature repeatedly in the work of Ai Weiwei, from his celebrated Sunflower Seeds of 2010 to a new installation, Blossom, 2015, composed of hundreds of delicate white flowers created in the finest traditions of Chinese porcelain production. Along with poetic ideals of beauty, remembrance and renewal, Ai directs the symbolism of flowers towards political ends in projects such as With Flowers, 2013–15, which saw the artist place a fresh bunch of flowers in the basket of a bicycle on a daily basis, for the benefit of surveillance cameras trained upon his studio.

Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei have both engaged experimental filmmaking to explore the scale, rhythm and urban life of New York and Beijing, respectively. Rather than capturing fleeting experiences, both artists have documented these cities through long-form films which serve as time capsules of urban life in periods of rapid transition.

Warhol’s silent, black-and-white film Empire, 1964, focuses on the Empire State Building, a sign of twentieth-century modernity and one of New York City’s most iconic buildings. Empire draws upon experimental techniques aligned with underground cinema of the 1960s. Beginning at sunset and lasting eight hours, the film is composed of a single take which merges space and time, its extreme duration echoing the physical height and prominence of the building in New York’s urban imagination. In the city that never sleeps, the building seems a beacon distanced from the bustle of the streets below.

Ai Weiwei explores the urban fabric of Beijing – a twenty-first century metropolis – in hundreds of hours of documentary footage recorded during a period of rapid urban transformation in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Lacking stylistic flair or explicit judgement, his ‘Ring Road’ videos capture urban experience and transformation in real time, recording the uneasy balance between heritage and development, and changing patterns of human activity and displacement.

From 1964 to 1966, Andy Warhol produced hundreds of Screen Tests. These short, black-and-white films are portrait studies of many individuals, from artists and models to anonymous visitors to his studio. Warhol wrote in POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980): ‘I only wanted to find great people and let them be themselves and I’d film them for a certain length of time and that would be the movie’. Understood in this way, his Screen Tests could be viewed as precursors to social media and reality TV.

In 2005 Ai Weiwei began blogging and remains an incessant producer of social content. Between 2005 and 2009 Ai posted hundreds of images on a daily basis to his blog, along with social commentary on contemporary China, criticism of government policy, thoughts on art and architecture, and reflections on his life as an artist. He wrote passionately about the Sichuan earthquake that killed thousands of schoolchildren in 2008, and reminisced about his time in the New York art scene. Owing to his openness and at times provocative stance in the face of government censorship, on 28 May 2009 Chinese authorities shut down Ai’s blog, leading him to embrace Instagram and Twitter as communication platforms. The transcribed text of his blog, now published in book form, remains a valuable document of Ai’s commitment to social justice and freedom of expression.

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei presents an extensive range of films and videos by both artists in both gallery and media lounge contexts.

Andy Warhol had a keen understanding of what might be achieved in ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, as he famously called it, and actively cultivated celebrity. Warhol’s celebrity portraits are among his most renowned works, and – along with his Polaroid photographs – chronicle his relationships with artists, socialites, celebrities, fashion designers, art collectors and friends.

Warhol chronicled his everyday life on audiotape, photographic and celluloid film, and video, as well as in diaries, memoirs and Interview magazine. As Warhol explained, by the end of the 1960s he was ‘taping and polaroiding everything in sight’. Through the 1970s this activity was complemented by his Factory Diaries, c. 1971–76, an extensive video record of the sometimes banal and at other times rivetingly eventful comings and goings at the Factory. From our present vantage point, we can see Warhol as a social media artist before his time: Warhol’s Factory Diaries might be considered as a precursor to reality television, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975) a literary precedent to Facebook, and his Polaroids an analogue forerunner of Instagram and the ‘selfie’. He was an acute producer of new social realities through the production of art, music, television, publishing and multimedia events, and equally as a voracious participant in society life.

Inspired by this legacy, Ai took up photography in the 1980s, publishing and curating in the 1990s, and blogging in the 2000s, and continues to be an incessant producer of social media content through Twitter, Instagram, media interviews and social activism. His activities on social media move fluidly between the role of artist, activist and cultural critic, embracing the poetic and polemical, the symbolic and political, and the experimental and didactic in equal measure.

Andy Warhol’s Mao paintings, based on a photograph from Mao’s famous Little Red Book, adopt the subject matter of totalitarian propaganda to create pop portraits of the communist leader. Created in 1972, in the year that US President Nixon travelled to China – signalling a thawing of relations between two nations after almost three decades of cold war – Warhol’s paintings address the cult of personality surrounding Mao. This interest in political figures extends to Vladimir Lenin and John F Kennedy, among others, highlighting the status and influence of these towering political figures at the height of the Cold War, as well as the basis of their fame in the repetition of their images.

In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, avant-garde artists in China embraced a wide range of aesthetic positions, including pop and postmodern critiques of socialist realism – sometimes known as cynical realism – to recalibrate the historical images and propaganda that had preceded them. These deadpan critiques of official state imagery are apparent in Ai Weiwei large-scale, hand-painted images of Mao, produced in the mid-1980s in New York. Ai’s various representations of Mao subject the communist leader to patterns of interference familiar from television signals and CRT screens, or to gestural abstraction and distortion.

The relationship between individual freedom and state power is a relevant subject for both Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. Warhol began exploring the electric chair as a motif in 1963, and the image remains a potent symbol of state disciplinary power. The artist’s celebrated Death and Disaster series – including representations of political assassinations, guns and knives, the hammer and sickle and most-wanted men – also explores the glamourisation of violence in the United States. These works, as well as the spectacular images of capital itself in Warhol’s Dollar Signs series, might be seen as a grand narrative of his time.

Ai Weiwei is committed to free expression and defends individual acts of resistance against political or corporate power. Ai’s irrepressible impulse to defy state authority is illustrated in the photograph June 1994, showing his partner Lu Qing lifting her skirt in Tiananmen Square, and his Study of Perspective series where Ai raises his middle finger to recognised institutions of power, measuring the distance between the artist and his subject. 4851 commemorates thousands of schoolchildren that died when an earthquake led to the collapse of improperly built school buildings, making visible devastation underrepresented in the media.

Myths – from ancient parables of gods to contemporary tales of cartoon characters – are shared stories used to explain cultural customs and historical events. Andy Warhol’s Myth series presents archetypes of twentieth-century American popular culture. The series runs from the patriotism of Uncle Sam to the superstardom of Hollywood screen siren Greta Garbo and the innocent charm of Mickey Mouse – mythic figures that carry the weight of our own hopes and fears.

Ai Weiwei examines myths associated with the Chinese zodiac. His Circle of Heads (in Gold) reinterprets twelve bronze animal heads that once stood in the gardens of Yuanmingyuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing. In 1860 French and British troops looted the palace and took the zodiac heads. Ai interrogates this history and the production and circulation of myths without losing sight of the hazards of cultural appropriation and the value of cultural heritage.

The skull remains a dominant motif of mortality. Warhol’s silkscreen skulls move between the vivid hues of life and the iconography of death, recalling Dutch vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century in which skulls symbolise the transient nature of worldly life. Warhol’s printing technique gives a contemporary edge to an enduring theme.