A maverick Chinese artist, who filled the main hall in London's famous Tate Modern art gallery with 100 million sunflower seeds meant for trampling and asking, has now had that exhibition quarantined due to health concerns of dust.
Luckily the ARTKABINETT social network of fine art collectors can safely view the exhibit right on our website.
Around 150 tons of seeds have been used to make an inches-thick carpet that visitors to the gallery will be encouraged to play in and crunch under foot.
The enormous installation, which opens Tuesday, is the work of artist Ai Weiwei, known as China's "Andy Warhol." {Please visit our Kab Pedia biography page to learn more about him}
The work is the 11th commission in the internationally acclaimed Unilever Series at the gallery, an annual series kicked off in 2000 by Louise Bourgeois's spiders and mirrors.
Ai's seeds are porcelain, each one individually handcrafted by laborers in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Each tiny piece has been individually molded and hand-painted, according to the gallery.
Sunflower seeds are a popular Chinese street snack and one of the country's most famous exports, according to the gallery.
But they hold greater significance for Ai, who spent his childhood in Xinjiang as the son of a celebrated poet exiled by the Chinese communist government during the Cultural Revolution.
He told CNN: "It was very poor and rural there, we had nothing else to enjoy.
Sunflower seeds were something basic that everyone could have. Every holiday, wedding or even just going to the movies, we would all share sunflower seeds with one another.
I think it's a very common, very inconspicuous object, but it also has a special relationship to our daily lives ... Of course, during the cultural revolution we all knew that the Sun symbolized the leader, and sunflowers represented the people.
So I think these seeds carry multiple meanings."
Ai is a well-known and controversial figure in China, probably best-known today for the design -- in collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron -- of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" stadium, built for the 2008 Olympics.
Shortly after, Ai -- who is one of China's leading social activists and bloggers -- distanced himself from the Olympics calling for a boycott and saying the Chinese government was using them as propaganda.
In the 1990s, Ai came to international attention when he helped establish the avant-garde East Village in Beijing where a group of artists took up residence in impoverished migrant workers housing on the city's outskirts. It became a mecca for radical Chinese contemporary artists like Ma Liuming.
