Seven Frames

The full-length portrait of a young soldier guarding Tiananmen Square is dissected in seven sequenced frames, as in a storyboard. The unsuspecting subject is stripped of his individuality, his uniform becoming the embodiment of state power. Yet the untied shoelaces remind us of the soldier’s inherently subversive humanity.


Ai Weiwei is one of today’s most mediatized artists from China. Beginning in the early 1990s, he promptly carved out a position for himself as a prominent figure of the Chinese avant-garde, as a promoter, producer and artist. Like many of his contemporaries, he chose photography, a quick and economically accessible medium to archive, scrutinize and challenge the intellectual asphyxiation and cultural censorship to which artists were subjected at the time this seminal work was conceived.