SYDNEY.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, alongside the Balnaves Foundation in honour of Neil Balnaves AO, today unveiled Mushrooms, a major new temporary public artwork by internationally acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei for the Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission series.

Installed in front of MCA Australia on Tallawoladah Lawn, overlooking Warrane/Sydney Harbour, Mushrooms invites audiences to meditate on the fragility of life during times of conflict and division.

Spanning 40-metres in length, Ai Weiwei's monumental public artwork comprises 500 cast iron sculptures of combat helmets, Mushrooms transforms symbols of war into a declaration for peace.

‘In the era we live in, the 21st century, wars have not ceased,’ says Ai Weiwei. ‘We continue to exist in a time where war and peace interchangeably assume each other’s roles, shaping the identity of our age. I hope this work prompts people to reflect on war and peace.’

A work of scale

The scale, ambition and subject matter of Ai Weiwei’s new commission for MCA Australia follows on from the artist’s most impactful large-scale artworks created by the artist such as Remembering (2009), an installation of 9000 backpacks which commemorates the children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Sunflower Seeds (2010), a vast sculpture made up of millions of handcrafted porcelain seeds installed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern that evoked the power of collective effort, and Law of the Journey (2017), a 60-metre-long inflatable artwork depicting hundreds of refugees crowded into an inflatable vessel, first presented at the Biennale of Sydney in 2018.

To create Mushrooms, the artist cast hundreds of sculptures in iron from a single mould based on a twentieth-century military helmet. Created in a foundry in China, each sculpture is a meticulous one-to-one replica and features the interior cushioning of the original design. The work originated in response to the German government's donation of 5,000 helmets to Ukraine in 2022, a gesture widely questioned at the time as symbolic and insufficient for the realities of modern warfare.

Presented in 10 uniform rows on an elevated platform, the arrangement of the helmets echoes the form of both contemporary minimal sculpture and public memorials. Visitors are invited to walk through the installation via the central pathway and observe the subtle differences between the sculptures. In Mushrooms, the presentation of hundreds of combat helmets becomes a collective symbol of endurance and survival. By reproducing objects designed for protection, Ai Weiwei draws attention to the fragility of life and the human cost of conflict.
A meditation on peace and resilience

Whimsical in title yet profound in message, the title of Ai Weiwei’s new commission draws on the regenerative qualities of mushrooms, which transform decay into new life. The title, Mushrooms, as Ai Weiwei expands, evokes ‘growth in darkness, nuclear mushroom clouds, and in Chinese, the term also suggests endless delays.’

Mushrooms is an invitation to the public to advocate for peace, suggesting that even imperfect efforts towards peace can become the seeds of understanding, healing and meaningful change. Speaking about the artistic and individual responsibility, Ai Weiwei states, 'I believe every human being has to exercise their rights and skills to protect humanity. We all have a responsibility to ask for peace and to stop wars.’





Reflecting on the human condition

Mushrooms continues Ai Weiwei's decades-long focus on conflict, displacement and the human condition. The artist notes that the starting point for Mushrooms began several years ago while creating the documentary film, Human Flow (2017), which depicted the greatest mass displacement of people since World War II – a number which has since doubled due to escalating international conflicts. Reflecting on the experience of working with refugees around the world, Ai Weiwei said: ‘Through that journey of making a film, I started to realise war is the most crucial factor in creating all those injustices and casualties in the world, not just in the past, but also now.’

Continuing a longstanding artistic tradition

From Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War to Pablo Picasso's Guernica, artists have long responded to the realities of conflict through art. In Australia, artists including Nora Heysen, Paddy Bedford and Ben Quilty have similarly grappled with the human consequences of war and its aftermath. With Mushrooms, Ai Weiwei contributes a timely contemporary voice to the tradition of artists creating works that call for peace.

Ai Weiwei artist statement:

'To be invited to participate in the MCA Australia’s Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission in the creation of an artwork is a great honour, and it filled me with excitement. To have a public project presented in Sydney, Australia, so far from where I am, and to share my work with the city's residents and visitors is, in fact, a challenge.

Every artwork, if it is to be fully articulated, should reflect the issues that concern the artist, the era in which they live, and the reality they confront. Yet reality is often extraordinarily complex, and at the same time filled with uncertainty. For me, accepting this public installation commission has been a significant challenge.

I feel very fortunate to have received the MCA's support and confidence when I submitted this project. It demonstrates the willingness of the MCA's creative and organisational teams to present challenging works to the public, as well as their remarkable openness to what artists seek to express about the realities they observe. It also reflects a profound commitment to free expression and a generous tolerance for artistic inquiry.

I hope this artwork can once again remind us that the world we inhabit is not a world free of worry. It is a world filled with crises. At the same time, these crises generate political helplessness, and it is often this sense of helplessness that manifests itself in forms of criticality and humour. Together, they constitute an important dimension of our contemporary cultural reality.

I am deeply grateful to the MCA for making it possible for this reality to be presented at this particular moment.’