Chinese artist Ai Weiwei carpeted the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with 100 million porcelain seeds and invited the public to walk across them. But within days of the work’s grand unveiling, staff reported a fine dust rising from the seeds as people crunched them underfoot. According to health and safety experts, prolonged exposure to the dust could exacerbate conditions such as asthma. The work can now be viewed only from a bridge high above the Turbine Hall, an embarrassment for the Tate and a sorry turn of events for the artist who billed Sunflower Seeds as “a sensory and immersive installation which visitors can touch, walk on and listen to as the seeds shift beneath their feet”. |
