Ai Weiwei is taking the car company to court for having used his work as the background in one of their advertisements. The piece in question is the famous installation Soleil Levant (2017), made from 3,500 refugee life jackets from Lesbos, Greece, which was created for World Refugee Day and installed on the façade of Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
Ai Weiwei, Soleil Levant (2017) and... a Volkswagen
The case brings to mind that brought against Mercedes-Benz by Detroit street artists.
“I was not credited as the artist, and my artwork image was… cropped without permission,” Ai wrote on Instagram in March. “The infringing material was circulated to over 200,000 people, giving the false impression that I had authorized Volkswagen to use my artwork in its ad.” He added: “I was astonished by Volkswagen’s brazen violations of my intellectual property and moral rights.”
