This September, renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei will unveil a powerful new site-specific installation in Kyiv, marking his first major commission in Ukraine. Titled Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White, the work will be on view from September 14th to November 30th, 2025, at Pavilion 13, a Soviet-era cultural venue now reimagined as a multidisciplinary art space. The project is commissioned by RIBBON International, in collaboration with FORMA architects and Pavilion of Culture.
Rooted in Ai Weiwei’s ongoing humanistic and pacifist concerns, the installation addresses the experience of conflict through layered symbolism.
“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 work takes its formal inspiration from Ai’s earlier Divina Proportione series (2004–12), which references Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of geometric perfection and Enlightenment rationality. In Kyiv, Ai will present three large metal icosahedrons — a nod to that series — wrapped in modified camouflage fabric patterned with animal motifs. This surface will then be “painted over in thin white paint, a second layer of camouflage,” according to a release.
“Of course, whenever you cover something there’s still something underneath. So I give extra meaning to how we’re dealing with reality and which layer of reality we’re dealing with. And is reality just what are we seeing or what we understand?”
Ai Weiwei
For Ai Weiwei, the project reflects not only aesthetic inquiry but also a personal response to the urgent political moment. “In this era, being invited to hold an exhibition in Kyiv, the capital of a country at war, I hope to express certain ideas and reflections through my work,” he said. “My artworks are not merely an aesthetic expression but also a reflection of my position as an individual navigating immense political shifts, international hegemonies, and conflicts. This exhibition provides a platform to articulate these concerns. At its core, this exhibition is a dialogue about war and peace, rationality and irrationality.”
Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White continues Ai Weiwei’s long-standing practice of using ideologically charged materials and forms to interrogate the contradictions of modern life — here, turning da Vinci’s rational purity into a meditation on visibility, concealment, and the fragility of peace.
Ai Weiwei, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White,
14th September – 30th November 2025
Pavilion 13, Kyiv
