2025 Unframed Art Column Review: Ai Weiwei to Analia Saban

14 hours ago7 min read

As the final curtain fell on 2025, the year’s most compelling artistic narratives weren’t confined to the white walls of major institutions; they unfolded in the digital pages of columns like Design Milk’s Unframed, which served as a vital, running chronicle of contemporary creativity. The journey from Ai Weiwei’s provocative LEGO constructions to Analia Saban’s materially intricate weavings wasn't merely a checklist of exhibitions but a thematic arc exploring the very substance of art in our time.Ai Weiwei, the perennial dissident, turned the ubiquitous children’s brick into a medium of profound political and historical reckoning, building vast, pixelated mosaics that echoed surveillance imagery and shattered classical forms. His work, as always, operated on a grand scale of confrontation, using the benign to interrogate power, memory, and censorship—a stark, monumental opening act for the year’s discourse.In stark contrast, yet in profound conversation, Analia Saban’s practice represents a deep, almost archaeological dive into the micro-level of art’s DNA. Her weavings, often deconstructing the canvas itself or embedding paint into fabric, ask us to consider the ontology of the artwork.Where Weiwei weaponizes symbolism, Saban dissects materiality, pulling at the threads of painting’s tradition to expose its skeleton, a quiet but radical act of redefinition that challenges our passive consumption of surface. Between these two poles—the macro-political and the micro-material—Unframed’s 2025 column traced a vibrant ecosystem of artists grappling with identity, technology, and ecology.We saw a resurgence of craft positioned as critical practice, with artists like Diedrick Brackens weaving narratives of queer and Black experience into tapestries that rival historical masterpieces in technical skill and emotional depth. The digital realm continued its infiltration, not just through NFTs, which settled into a more nuanced phase beyond the speculative frenzy, but through artists using AI and code to generate forms impossible by human hand alone, prompting essential debates about authorship and the ghost in the creative machine.The year also underscored a persistent and urgent dialogue with the environment; artists increasingly utilized recycled materials and bio-fabricated elements, making the studio a laboratory for sustainable futures. This shift isn’t merely aesthetic but ethical, responding to a collective anxiety with tangible, poetic proposals.What the Unframed column ultimately captured was a field in vigorous, polyphonic debate, refusing a singular direction. The move from Weiwei’s legible, confrontational blocks to Saban’s subtle, tactile investigations mirrors a broader transition in criticism itself—from a focus on the grand statement to a appreciation of the embedded process, from the scream to the whisper that contains multitudes.

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#art column

#2025 recap

#Ai Weiwei

#Analia Saban

#LEGO art

#weaving

#contemporary art

#Design Milk