April 9, 2012 |
Even if you don’t know much about the kind of art he makes you might recognise Ai Weiwei from a photo. There’s the full beard. The big belly and burly wrestler’s frame. And often, a half-smile as if he’s tuning into a private joke he doesn’t care to share. The Beijing-based artist was arrested and jailed for two and a half months earlier this year by the Chinese government. During that time poster campaigns in his support sprang up on the streets of London, New York, Berlin and other cities round the world.
Modelled on the “Obey” images of Shepard Fairey’s classic Andre the Giant, versions performed a deft bit of substitution, replacing Andre with Ai and “Obey” with “Disobey”.
It’s hard to think of any other artist living and working today with the kind of recognition levels to inspire an international guerrilla art campaign in his honour. Probably the last public figure of any kind to get that sort of treatment was Barack Obama, when Fairey’s “Hope” poster became ubiquitous in the run-up to the 2008 US presidential elections.
By contrast, most contemporary artists exist at the periphery of things. Very few figures break through to become household names such as Warhol in the 1960s and Damien and Tracey today. Ai isn’t a celebrity in the way that those figures are. Nor is he even exactly famous for what he does. True, the 100m porcelain sunflower seeds that he filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with in 2010 brought him widespread attention. But he doesn’t have a signature style, like Damien’s preserved animals and spin paintings and he hasn’t made an iconic piece of work, as Tracey did with her bed.
Rather, Ai is important because of what he stands for, which is a concept of the artist as a voice of freedom and conscience and deep integrity in a flawed modern world.
The past few years in all of our lives have marked a strange, dark period. We’ve seen our politicians lie to us over Iraq and the use of torture become routine as part of the “war on terror”. The international economic system has teetered on the brink of collapse. Global warming has continued unchecked and the yawning gap between rich and poor and North and South continues to grow. In so many ways this is a uniquely grim time.
Yet, in response, this time, the art world has been conspicuously quiet. Maybe it’s expecting too much to think a work of art can have any impact in the face of such huge global forces. But think of how Picasso’s Guernica sums up the horror of war and articulates, in one image, the fear and hurt of generations of innocents caught in conflict. Through paintings like that you get an idea of how artists can play a unique role in stirring conscience and prompting reflection. Where most of the art world has left big issues untouched Ai has stood apart as an artist with a deep engagement in the politics of our time. As a Chinese citizen, his focus is on the conditions within his homeland, but the scope of his work has a wider resonance for the way we all live today and the questions we should ask about the state of the world around us.
Ai is a trenchant critic of the Chinese government and, in making art, he has sought to prompt the Chinese people to question their circumstances, to hold the government to account and, ultimately, to demand a change in their lives and how the state is run. To that end, much of his work doesn’t take place anywhere near a gallery. Often, he works directly with ordinary people, creating politically charged projects that prompt participants to look at the world around them with new eyes. Invited to take part in the prestigious Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany, in 2007, Ai arranged for 1,001 volunteers from across China, most of whom had never left the country before, to visit the town and wander freely for eight days. Ostensibly a mass excursion, the trip took on a more pointed resonance when read in the context of questions of migration, globalisation and the constrained role of the individual in China.
And until his arrest earlier this year, he was a prolific blogger and tweeter. His numerous posts, sometimes in the dozens a day, acting as an acerbic running commentary on the authoritarian Chinese state.
It’s this total blurring of life, art and politics that makes him such a unique and daring figure in the art world. Art generally sits behind the cloistered walls of galleries and museums. It is the province of a cognoscenti of curators and critics who speak a rarified language quite alien to most average art lovers. But by insisting on tweeting, blogging and working outside the gallery, Ai has created a territory of his own, in which art can have a real and dramatic impact on the lives of ordinary people. That was certainly the case with the events of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.
On May 12 of that year, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale shook the province of Sichuan in southwestern China. Among the dead were thousands of children whose schools – shoddily built as a result of corruption – collapsed around them. Despite widespread anger and grief, government officials refused to fully investigate the disaster.
That was when Ai stepped in to launch his own enquiry, organising 200 volunteers to go door to door, talk to bereaved parents and record details of their deceased children online. “Everybody knew something was wrong but nobody knew any facts or looked carefully to find the names of the children who died, which school they were in, at what level, how old they were, female or male,” he has said. Eventually, his volunteers uncovered the names of more than 5,000 pupils. “Whatever we found out, we posted on the blog. That caused a revolution in the minds of the people.”
Ai’s enquiry had huge ramifications. It helped parents to properly mourn their dead children and it forced the government to stage a proper investigation of their own. But given the considerable risks that come with taking on a totalitarian regime, the central question here is what motivates Ai to stand in opposition to the power of the Chinese state? If there’s anything as simple as a single answer, it probably lies in the uniquely terrible circumstances of his childhood.
Ai was born in Beijing in 1957. His father, Ai Qing, was a celebrated poet who was denounced by the Communist party as a class traitor. The family was sent to Manchuria, and then the remote region of Xinjiang, where Qing was made to clean public toilets for a living. For extra food, they gathered the severed hooves of sheep discarded by butchers. When the Cultural Revolution began things got even worse. The family was sent to the edge of the Gobi desert, in a region known as Little Siberia. For five years they lived in an underground cavern previously used as a birthing place for farm animals. Qing attempted suicide several times. Only in 1976, after Mao’s death, was Qing finally rehabilitated and the family free to return to Beijing.
By then, Ai knew he wanted to be an artist. He studied film at the Beijing Film Academy but unhappy, ill at ease and finding it impossible to express himself freely in China, he managed to leave for New York in 1981, aged 24.
Photos from the time show him looking young, bored and restless. Having enrolled, and then dropped out of Parsons School of Design, he was filling his time doing odd jobs and playing blackjack in Atlantic City. He missed China but felt like he couldn’t return home and might never be able to do so. Ai spent a dozen years in New York. During that time he took about 10,000 photos to document his semi-exile. Some are self-portraits – the nascent artist half his current weight, mooching through Manhattan in a T-shirt and vintage dinner jacket or wrapped in a in a heavy winter coat, hunched against the cold. But there are also images of gay rights’ activists, demonstrating for greater action against Aids, and of pitched battles of oppressed groups with police, such as the Tompkins Square Park riot in 1988. The events he witnessed during this time – the discord, the resistance to the police, the insistence by activists on being heard – made a lasting impression. They taught him, as he later put it, “to be in the middle of things”. And that remains a guiding mantra for his life and work to this day.
Ai seems to delight in stirring things up. He likes to mock and provoke. To flip the finger at authority. Literally so in a series of photos showing famous monuments to national pride like the Eiffel Tower, the White House and Tiananmen Square, in the foreground of each of which is his middle digit raised to the sky. Another series, a photographic triptych called Dropping of a Han Dynasty Urn, features the moments immediately before, during and after he lets a 2,000-year-old vase slip through his fingers to shatter into pieces on the ground. If that sounds like wanton vandalism, think about it instead as a commentary on China’s troubled relationship with its past, from the purges of the Cultural Revolution and the bulldozing of historic districts in Beijing and Shanghai to official amnesia about Tiananmen Square.
In advance of the Beijing Olympics, Ai collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to design the Bird’s Nest stadium that became the centerpiece of the 2008 competition. Before the Games began, however, he had disowned the project, descrying the Olympics as a propaganda project for the state, a “fake smile” that disguised China’s flaws.
British audiences know him best for the sunflower seeds in Tate Modern. But even here there is anti-authoritarian critique at work: a reflection on mass labour and patterns of trade, all tied up in the neat metaphor of a favourite Chinese snack.
That impulse to stir things up has landed him in trouble. In 2009, while he was in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, investigating the events of the earthquake, police burst into his hotel room. A struggle ensued and Ai was beaten so badly that later, on a trip to Munich, he was admitted to hospital with a potentially life-threatening pool of blood on the right side of his brain. Surgeons had to drill two holes in his head to remove 30ml of fluid from his skull. Characteristically, he posted copies of brain scans and doctor’s statements online from his hospital bed in Munich. He had already lived for some years with the knowledge that he was under surveillance, with security forces tracking his movements and monitoring his internet activity.
But his most serious encounter with the state came earlier this year when he was arrested at Beijing airport and held in an undisclosed location for 81 days. Charged initially with unspecified “economic crimes”, he was released on bail only after having apparently confessed to massive tax evasion amounting to more than £1m. During his detention, his critics in Chinese art circles wasted no time in denouncing him as a “fraud”, an “amateur” and a “third rate artist”. But his arrest triggered an international outcry, with protests from prominent artists like Anish Kapoor and the 100,000-plus fans that signed an online petition calling for his release. As a condition of his bail he has been largely silent since his release. But it is likely that he’d be pleased by the show of support from around the world. Especially the manner of it. From the online petition to the print-it-out-and-paste-it-up-yourself nature of the “Disobey” poster campaign, the demonstrations of solidarity have tended to feature ordinary people coming together to make themselves heard. You could say that, in small ways, this is what change looks like: a striving to make the world a better place through individual action. And despite the grave risks to him personally, Ai Weiwei might conclude that inspiring people to take action is a truly meaningful role for art to play in these dark times of ours.
by Ekow Eshun
