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World-Renowned Artist Ai Weiwei to Debut First Major Installation in Ukraine This Fall

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Photo of Dariia Mykhailenko
Dariia Mykhailenko
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World-Renowned Artist Ai Weiwei to Debut First Major Installation in Ukraine This Fall
Ai Weiwei in his studio working on “Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White.” (Source: Artnet)

World-renowned Chinese dissident, artist, and sculptor Ai Weiwei will unveil his first large-scale installation in Ukraine this fall. Titled Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White, the work explores themes of war, concealment, and the tension between rational ideals and modern conflict.

The project is initiated by RIBBON International, who announced the news on Instagram on June 25.

Ai Weiwei is one of the most influential contemporary artists of our time. Known for his outspoken activism and powerful visual language, his works have been featured at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and the São Paulo Biennial. A longtime critic of authoritarianism, Ai was forced to flee China in the 1980s after the regime targeted his family.

“Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White” by Ai Weiwei. (Source: Artnet)
“Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White” by Ai Weiwei. (Source: Artnet)

His latest installation is a site-specific commission for Ukraine, set to open at Pavilion 13, a multidisciplinary cultural space. According to RIBBON International, the work reflects Ai’s enduring pacifist and humanist perspective — one shaped by decades of witnessing state violence and repression.

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Divine Proportion, the piece reimagines Enlightenment ideals through the lens of today’s fractured world. Camouflage patterns — symbols of concealment and war — are stripped of color and recontextualized in stark white.

“That is the challenge, to build new works relating to what I feel, to me in the past and to the current situation,” Ai Weiwei said.“ Art is more metaphysical. You cannot really give every description, but you can always suggest a gesture or attitude or some kind of symbolic meaning, more like a poetic gesture.”

The exhibition runs from September 14 to November 30, 2025.

Earlier, Ukrainian writer Viktoria Amelina was posthumously awarded the prestigious Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her unfinished book Looking at Women Looking at War.

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