Former Menil Collection curator Franklin Sirmans, now chief contemporary art curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has a post on LACMA's blog about Ai Weiwei's outdoor exhibit Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, which is coming to Houston in early 2012.

Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Ai Weiwei, photo © 2011 Museum Associates/LACMA

The exhibition appeared in Brazil's São Paulo Biennial in September before embarking on two simultaneous tours in May in London and New York. The edition seen in New York is now at LACMA and will go on view March 1 through early June.

The 12 bronze Chinese zodiac heads, each weighing about 800 pounds and standing 10 feet tall with its base, are Ai's large-scale re-creations of animal heads designed by two European Jesuits for the Qianlong emperor in the 18th century. Originally functioning as a water-clock fountain for the Old Summer Palace, they were pillaged in 1860 during a ransacking by British and French troops.

Sirmans writes that Ai "reminds me of other tricksterish artists such as many of the European surrealists, including his hero Marcel Duchamp, or Andy Warhol, and his near contemporaries Jimmie Durham, Bruce Nauman, and David Hammons, born a generation earlier."

Referencing a work of art from the eighteenth century that was made by Chinese with Europeans and subsequently destroyed by Europeans in the Second Opium War in 1860, Ai’s Zodiac, made in China but presented in the Americas and Europe, has many layers of meaning. As an encyclopedic museum where contemporary artists often present works that probe the past and reflect on long histories, where our collection spans thousands of years and all the regions of the globe, we knew Ai’s work would fit right in. ...

His knack for creating powerful images had a link to the group of iconoclasts currently occupying half of the third floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum: Andy Warhol, John Baldessari and Jeff Koons. In addition to those artists, large-scale works of art going up on campus this fall include a new work by Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, which along with Chris Burden’s Urban Light and Ai’s Zodiac Heads put a focus on public art and its presence here on our campus.

In Houston, the city will pay 11 percent of the exhibit's $180,000 budget, according to a Houston Arts Alliance prospectus. Individuals will contribute 50 percent of the cost, with 36 percent coming from corporations and foundations and 3 percent from in-kind gifts.