After my short class at college today, I found myself in the Sherman Gallery in Paddington where the iconic Chinese artist Ai Weiwei exhibited his work entitled Through. He had assembled the installation back in the Beijing studio with his team, but it was dismantled for freight to the tiny Sydney gallery - it must have taken forever using cranes and forklifts to reconstruct the design almost identical to what it was in China.

Ai Weiwei is more recently known as the architect who designed the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games. He suffered through exile in his background, during China's political and social tension and his artworks provoke this as well as becoming a major cultural influence in the country.

The piece consists of Tieli iron wood, tables, beams and pillars resurrected from the disembodied temples of the Qing dynasty 1644-1911.

The beams and pillar inserted at violent angles through the table surfaces suggest the collision of public and private realms in the wake of China's frenetic engagement with global capitalism. Buildings are torn down and lives dislocated to make way for an architectural vision predicted on economic imperatives.