As a chron­i­cler of war, Don McCullin is a leg­end. Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son once com­pared him to Goya, and John Le Car­ré wrote, “He was a com­mu­ni­ca­tor of the world’s worst ago­nies, a pil­grim to the front line of human suf­fer­ing, return­ing with his kit-bag of hor­rors to appal the com­fort­able, the wil­ful­ly blind and the unknow­ing.” As a pho­to­jour­nal­ist for The Observ­er and the Sun­day Times Mag­a­zine, McCullin cov­ered all the major con­flicts of the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the minor ones: Viet­nam, Cam­bo­dia, North­ern Ire­land, Lebanon, Cyprus, Biafra, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kip­pur War. But McCullin has always hat­ed the term “war pho­tog­ra­ph­er” for what he calls its mer­ce­nary ring. In recent years the pho­tog­ra­ph­er has turned his lens on more peace­ful sub­jects, like the Eng­lish land­scape. Yet even in pas­toral set­tings, McCullin’s work retains a sense of men­ace. The very light seems to brood, as one col­league put it. “My favorite time to pho­to­graph land­scape is evening,” McCullin said in a 1987 inter­view. “I can’t avoid want­i­ng every­thing to go dark, dark, dark.”

A major exhib­it of McCullin’s work is on dis­play at the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um in Lon­don through April 15, while a small­er exhib­it of his non-war pho­tographs (see above) is on dis­play at the Tate Britain through March 4.

In the state-con­trolled pro­pa­gan­da art of rev­o­lu­tion­ary Chi­na, sun­flow­ers car­ried a blunt sym­bol­ism: Mao Zedong was the sun and the Chi­nese peo­ple were the sun­flow­ers, all fac­ing one direc­tion to receive the nour­ish­ing rays.

A gen­er­a­tion lat­er, in the work of Chi­nese artist Ai Wei­wei, the sym­bol­ism is a bit more sub­ver­sive. In 2010 Ai launched a show called Sun­flower Seeds, where a riot of indi­vid­ual porce­lain seeds–more than a hun­dred mil­lion of them, all hand-painted–were spread across the floor of a large hall at the Tate Mod­ern in Lon­don. Ai want­ed vis­i­tors to move freely across the instal­la­tion, pick­ing the seeds up, mov­ing them around, doing what­ev­er they want­ed — all shown in the video above.

As a cham­pi­on of free­dom and an out­spo­ken crit­ic of Chi­na’s human rights record, Ai has come under heavy pres­sure from the Chi­nese regime. Ear­ly this year his Shang­hai stu­dio was demol­ished and he was lat­er arrest­ed and detained at secret loca­tions for 81 days. Now he is for­bid­den from giv­ing inter­views or using the Inter­net. But before he was arrest­ed, Ai was able to send a video­taped speech to the TED con­fer­ence, out­lin­ing his views. You can watch it below. To learn more about the extra­or­di­nary Sun­flower Seeds 2010 exhib­it, you can watch the “TateShots” film above.

Dur­ing the ear­ly 1960s, Andy Warhol became an inter­na­tion­al celebri­ty when he pro­duced his icon­ic Pop Art works — 32 Camp­bel­l’s Soup Cans, the Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Dip­tych, Green Coca Cola Bot­tles and all of the rest. The provoca­tive artist had achieved more than 15 min­utes of fame — he coined that phrase too — and it was time for some­thing new.

In ’65, Warhol took a break from paint­ing, immersed him­self in film­mak­ing and mul­ti­me­dia projects, then threw his influ­ence behind the up-and-com­ing NYC band, The Vel­vet Under­ground. He became the band’s man­ag­er and “pro­duced” their first album, which meant design­ing the album cov­er and giv­ing the band mem­bers (Lou Reed, John Cale, Ster­ling Mor­ri­son, Mau­reen Tuck­er and Nico) the free­dom to make what­ev­er album they pleased. (Lou Reed has more on that here.) As Bri­an Eno lat­er put it, the album, The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico “only sold 10,000 copies, but every­one who bought it formed a band.” It was that influ­en­tial.

The clip above comes from the PBS Amer­i­can Mas­ters series, Andy Warhol — A Doc­u­men­tary Film and tells you more about Warhol’s patron­age of VU.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steven Spiel­berg Admits Swal­low­ing a Tran­sis­tor to Andy Warhol

Warhol’s Screen Tests: Lou Reed, Den­nis Hop­per, Nico, and More

Andy Warhol Eats a Burg­er, and We Watch … and Watch

Sweet Jane: Then and Now