The recent passing of dissident and former 1989 Tianamen Square student leader Liu Xiaobo has arguably left a yawning gap in that the pro-democracy movement now lacks high profile avatars for their cause around which adherents can rally. One such obvious candidate, may not be as effective, as he otherwise might have been in years past.
Like so many visitors before me to China, I was amazed at how advanced this nominally communist country has become. Thickets of glossy high-rises thrust into pollution-stained skies like so many steel and glass grass sheaves, soaring above rows upon rows of glittering shops selling Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and endless traffic jams choking modern concrete arteries with new Audis, BMWs and Mercedes. At first glance one could be in New York, L.A. or Tokyo—until, that is, you actually needed some information on the world beyond the Middle Kingdom’s borders. Then you discover that Facebook is permanently blocked, certain Google searches (using words like “blind,” “dissident,” etc.) crash your browser (or cause it to hang as if in suspended animation), and it seems that it is far easier to buy a Rolls-Royce than a real newspaper with content that is not in any way censored. Here is a country at once booming and repressive trying to ride atop a tiger of change while fording the river between its ancient past and uncertain future.
Now, tens of millions of Chinese accept this new prosperity in the same way previous generations have pragmatically tolerated imperial dynasties and don’t ask questions, at least not publicly. But there are others who can’t seem to stay quiet. One of them is Ai Weiwei, the charismatic, close-cropped, strikingly bearded, meaty-faced, capacious-bellied artist who has become expert at utilizing social media to wind up a government that doesn’t take well to being wound up.
Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957, the same year his father Ai Qing, one of China’s most famous revolutionary poets, fell from grace and was exiled by the Communist party. A victim of one of Mao’s periodic anti-intellectual purges, denounced for bourgeois tendencies, Ai Qing and family were sent first to Manchuria and then to the remote western region of Xinjiang, where Ai Qing was assigned the job of cleaning public toilets with a quota of thirteen a day. For extra food, the family collected the severed hooves of sheep discarded by butchers, and piglets that had frozen to death. When the Cultural Revolution began, things worsened. Ai Qing’s tormentors poured ink on his face, and children threw stones at him. He and his family were carted off to an area known as Little Siberia, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, where they had to live in an underground cavern that had been used as a birthing place for farm animals – literally a hole in the ground. They were there for five years.
Ai Weiwei’s mother, Gao Ying, worked at China’s Writers’ Association and was his father’s third wife. In a 2007 memoir, his mother remembered that her husband had simply opened a dictionary to name their son and dropped his finger on a character, pronounced Wei and meaning “Power”. Given the family’s abruptly diminished circumstances, the irony was to great, so he altered the tone slightly to make it into a different “wei” 未, which means “not yet.” Their son thus became “Not yet, not yet.”
Still, when his father was eventually pardoned, in 1976, and the family returned to Beijing, Ai was an angry teenager. And when Wei Jingsheng, one of his friends, was arrested and imprisoned for 14 years for being a leader of the Democracy Wall movement, Ai decided to leave. He told his mother that even though he could speak no English, going to the United States felt like “going home”.
He’d followed a girlfriend first to Philadelphia, then to New York where his experiments with formalized art education did not go well -- Ai studied at the Parsons School of Design, but his teacher, the artist Sean Scully, told him his drawings had “no heart”. “At that moment I dropped my pen. And I will never pick it up again. I am quite brutal like that,” says Ai -- Nor, does it seem, did sales of his work. Flustered, he began tinkering with objects, such as taking a violin, prying off the neck and strings, replacing them with the top of a shovel to produce what might generously be labelled ‘modernistic art.’ The market for Chinese art was bleak, however, and with prospects dimming faster than his unpaid electricity bills, Ai returned home to Beijing in 1993. Here he resumed practicing his art, discovered the marvellous electronic megaphone that is the Internet, and blogging.
The blog gave Ai a far wider audience than he had ever encountered, and soon he found himself commenting on subjects ranging far beyond art and infringing upon the unspoken yet tacitly understood “No Go” or “Out of Bounds” areas that the government had silently imposed. In March, 2006, he wrote of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky and brainless gluttons” who “spend two hundred billion yuan on drinking and dining and an equal amount on the military budget every year.” He fixed on one sensitive issue after another. Like many others across the world the Internet opened his eyes to the reality around him. He’d be reading the news and he’d say, ‘How can this be?’ And then the next day, and the day after that, he found himself saying the same thing, temperature rising at all of the disparities and inequities of modernistic contemporary society. He skewered a high-profile government project imbued with patriotic pride: a new railroad to Tibet, which, he wrote, would “unavoidably accelerate the disappearance of a culture.” He subverted the usual opaque Chinese mode of dissent: favoring bluntness and spectacle over metaphor and anonymity. He shamed the system with his own transparency.
He also placed himself at the centre of his work. One of the ways in which he has done this is via 24/7 self-surveillance and the tireless documentation of his life, all available on another blocked information venue, YouTube. In April 2012, for instance, Weiwei installed four surveillance cameras, ‘WeiweiCam’, that streamed live video feeds of him at home, offering his viewers a chance to see the world from the perspective of the government – always spying furtively on its people ‘. By recording himself, he was mockingly reproducing the party-state surveillance of his life. In the process, he created a fan-base of voyeurs, one which he lured into sharing his addiction to provocation and retaliation.
Ai went from being a talented, if slightly glib conceptual artist—there are photos of him giving the finger to the gate in Tiananmen Square, the White House in Washington DC and in front of other famous locations—to a noisy (and nosy) activist who, after being involved with the design of Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Olympics, publicly decried the event as political propaganda, a ghastly extravaganza full of strum und drang dedicated to celebrating the ‘coming out’ of a new empire masquerading as a ‘People’s Republic.’
The event that fractured Ai’s relationship with the authorities was the earthquake that struck Wenchuan, Sichuan province. On May 12, 2008, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake rocked Sichuan province in western China, leading to the collapse of 7,000 classrooms. For seven days after the event, Ai—who had been blogging daily since 2005 on Sina Weibo—didn’t post any entries at all. The scenes of hundreds of children’s backpacks strewn amid the dusty rubble silenced him more assuredly than any attempt at censorship. He was unable to fully absorb the sheer, awesome scale of the tragedy. When he did start to blog again, his project was an attempt to offer catalytic mourning.
Although the government was lauded for its rapid response to the emergency and the media access it allowed to the disaster site, the temper of public opinion changed as evidence came to light that the schoolrooms had collapsed during the quake due to shoddy construction methods and substandard materials. The killer schools were dubbed ‘tofu-dregs schoolhouses’. At least five thousand children died as they sat in class on the afternoon of the earthquake. Grieving parents publicly protested against the government corruption that had led to the building of ‘tofu-dregs schoolhouses’ and called for an official investigation. They also demanded that the authorities publish the names of all the dead children.
Initially, the Sichuan authorities undertook to conduct an investigation into the tragedy. However, the central government, fearful that such a major public spectacle would mar the 2008 Beijing Olympics to be held in August that year, imposed a media ban on the subject. In stark contrast to the state’s opacity, Ai Weiwei took it upon himself to organise a team of researchers and volunteers to conduct a citizen’s investigation in the earthquake zone to gather the names and stories of the dead children.
What can be more elemental and purely expressive than a cry of grief, the effort to commemorate? Yet governments in different times and places have long known that such purely expressive cries are very destabilizing. Grief often leads straight to anger—and anger, commonly, to calls for action, which authorities might not be able to address, or contain.
Societies as far back as Ancient Athens have been grappling with this since the Greeks – Antigone comes to mind. Limits were placed on the right of women to mourn in public, and Pericles concludes his funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War by enjoining the women to silence. In May 1999 during the Kosovo war, Serbian wives and mothers took to the streets by the thousands because relatives they had sent to the front fourteen months earlier had not come home from tours of duty that were supposed to last only twelve. Because the unrest threatened to evolve into war resistance, the government dispatched a leading general to the provinces “to defuse the anger of the women.”
By pushing for information which they were trying to suppress, Ai put the authorities in a bad light. They shut down his blog. He turned to Twitter, only to have access cut off from all of the mainland. Yet he pushed on, leveraging upon technology to use a Web proxy, VPN or other circumvention tools to leap over China’s Great Firewall and keep on tweeting.
During frequent follow-up trips to Sichuan in 2009, Ai recorded his encounters with local police officers and party bureaucrats who were evidently overwhelmed and frustrated by, as well as ill-equipped to handle, the presumptuous Beijing artist’s seemingly egomaniacal and irrational behaviour. In the encounters between the state and the artist, Ai ‘disturbed the peace’ by acting as if he was a citizen with rights that were respected by a state that he treated as if it was truly accountable to its citizens.
In August 2009, the artist traveled to Chengdu to act as a witness at the trial of Tan Zuoren, a local Sichuan writer who had been arrested for supposedly ‘inciting the subversion of state power’. Tan had the temerity to conduct his own investigation into toufu-dregs schoolhouses and, as a result, was arrested for his efforts. In the early hours of 12 August 2009 (the day of Tan’s trial), Ai was accosted by police in his hotel room and badly beaten. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and was forced to travel overseas for treatment. This was something else that he transformed into art: the cell-phone selfie of him in a Munich hospital room holding a bag of fluid that he said had been drained from his skull went viral on the Internet.
On 3 April 2011, Weiwei was detained at the Beijing International Airport while attempting to board a flight to Hong Kong. He was held in solitary confinement for eighty-one days while the authorities allegedly amassed evidence of his having evaded taxes. Ai’s detention prompted a wave of international outrage, demonstrations of solidarity, and protests. For a time, there was great uncertainty about his fate, and trepidation as to what his disappearance might mean. If someone with the kind of international media profile he had could suddenly just vanish, what did it mean? Was the government seeking to prove that no one was immune from their clutches? Was this some sort of pre-emptive strike against the formulation of a coherent movement inspired by the flaring ‘Arab Spring’ a world away? There would be no easy explanation for a seemingly arbitrary act.
Almost as abruptly as his disappearance, on 23 June 2011, Ai was allowed to return home, released on bail. He appeared uncharacteristically reticent in front of the crowd of international reporters who had gathered outside his house. Before withdrawing inside, Ai apologised: ‘I’m sorry I can’t (talk), I am on probation, please understand’. Prior to his arrest, Ai Weiwei seemed insulated from government threats and reprisals yet now there was definitely a feeling that immunity had in reality been borrowed time. His detention made it clear that no amount of celebrity could protect anyone from state reach.
Following his release, again Ai made work that reflected his experience: he commissioned artisans to build six fibreglass dioramas of his prison cell. To his avid global audience, it was an invitation to accompany him (from a safe remove) into the claustrophobic recesses of state power
When the Chinese authorities demanded he immediately pay £1.5 million in allegedly unpaid taxes, his fans folded 100 yuan (£10) notes into paper aeroplanes and sailed them over the walls of his courtyard. They wrapped cash around fruit and left it on his doorstep. One woman turned up with one million yuan. Apparently the amount constituted her life savings, though she did not request a receipt as she thought Ai could use the money better.
Within a week, 30,000 people had given Ai the nine million yuan he needed to pay a bond and have the right to appeal the case. “They never really formally arrested me or accused me. They have no respect for the law,” he says. “No one believes them now, or why would all these people raise this money? It is not about me personally, it is about the public sharing and caring. We are not naive; we are making a difference, although it is very limited.”
Ai Weiwei is now in an awkward position: he has survived his own martyrdom. What happens next, , is unclear. As the son of Ai Qing, whose work is revered by China’s leaders, it was a huge surprise when Ai was imprisoned in the first place. He seemed too well-connected, too prominent. There were uncomfortable parallels with how his father had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, being exiled and forced to clean toilets.
By “disappearing” Ai, the authorities upped the ante and left him with few options. A return to the sort of crusading activism with which he responded to the Sichuan school disaster is likely to see him swiftly imprisoned again. Still, Ai says he has learnt “to survive”. This canny provocateur continues to stage international shows and tweaks Chinese authorities on Twitter. Indeed, Ai’s tempestuous life has the subject of much adulation in the West, with the BBC going so far as to label him the “most dangerous artist in the world.” Whether this designation is appropriate or not, he is generally lauded by legions of admirers eager to see him as some sort of avatar for freedom of speech and expression.
Of course, it’s the fate of political art that the world usually cares far more about the politics than the art itself. So it is with Ai who has done some other, evocative pieces—like his creative installation of almost 100 million sunflower seeds made of porcelain at London’s Tate Modern—yet owes his fame to his anti-government blogposts and Tweets. Such highly publicized messages have led some to write him off as a shameless self-promoter, one who wins attention—and courts the favor of the West—by criticizing China in black-and-white terms even as the country has improved vastly over the past 30 years. After all, the idea goes, the nation has made undoubted advances which he never deigns to acknowledge.
To his detractors, Ai is too quick to satisfy Western expectations of “the dissident,” too willing to condense the complexity of today’s China into black-and-white absolutes that attract foreign sympathies. The fact that Ai exhibits mostly abroad also fuels the criticism that he is happier allowing foreigners to project their moral longings onto him than engaging with China’s ambiguities. (At one point, so many commentators online were speculating that he had renounced his Chinese citizenship that Ai felt compelled to post images of his Chinese passport.)
So, the fact that Ai is able to embark on these extracurricular ventures at all is, in its way, something of a triumph. But by enhancing his celebrity through showy publicity stunts, Ai has unwittingly empowered the Chinese Communist Party by outwardly conforming to its definition of a dissident: a narcissist more attuned to the whims of foreign admirers than to the interests of his own people.
Now, there’s no denying that Ai enjoys being the world-famous Ai Weiwei. No saint, he has more than his fair share of ambition and vanity, even pretentiousness. Yet vaulting individualism isn’t merely Ai’s style. It’s his message—and source of strength—in a country that too often stifles personal expression in the name of the collective good, even as party bosses personally enrich themselves (as evinced by Xi Jinping’s relentless campaign against corruption). As for claims that Ai is too politically simplistic, the fact is that he’s an artist, not a social theorist. His job isn’t so much to propose solutions but to give those in power a headache. And this he does, tirelessly pointing out the ways that the communist government hides the truth, betrays officially professed ideals, and tries to crush expressive freedom.
This judgment may be right, but it is also rather unfair to Ai. He is, after all, only an artist and is doing what artists do: being creative and a little bit wacky and displaying a knack for publicity all at the same time. Ai never signed up to be the cross-bearer for China's beleaguered dissident community and he has never claimed to speak for his countrymen. He is simply an artist who, through clever use of celebrity and a fearless disposition, has emerged as the face of China's disorganized opposition.
This phenomenon isn't unique to China. Russia's Pussy Riot, an anti-establishment punk group tossed in prison for performing at a Moscow cathedral, attracted widespread sympathy from the West as symbols of then-Prime Minister (now President) Vladimir Putin's repressive rule. Yet in a segment of Public Radio International's The World, Russian-American artist Alina Simone argues persuasively that Pussy Riot only strengthens Putin's hand by cheapening Russian norms of dissent. This view is by no means universally held, as the group has divided opinion in Russia. But their story does obscure the fact, that, as in China, many Russians have quietly suffered after challenging their country's authoritarian rule.
In a larger sense, what is happening with Ai in China touches upon the role of the artist in contemporary society. The intensity of critiques reflects the sensitivity of the question at the heart of Ai’s project: forcing intellectuals to examine their role in a nation that is not yet free but is no longer a classic closed society. Should art be used to spark discussion? Is it a vehicle of opposition? Is it no longer art if used in a political context? Must art take a side? The relationship between Chinese artists and the regime has changed dramatically in the past decade. For much of the nineties, authorities did their part to fulfil clichés of art and authoritarianism: arresting performance artists for appearing in the nude, shutting down experimental shows, and bulldozing underground artists’ villages.
For a person as famous internationally and politically sensitive in China as Ai Weiwei, it is not clear just what a normal life might mean. Despite his own addiction to attention, Ai has responded with irritation to his audience’s continued demand that he play the role of ‘Chinese dissident artist’ (especially when everyone knows and morbidly anticipates the inevitable denouement of that role). ‘Why should I be the old Ai Weiwei?’, he asked in response to suggestions that his stance has softened in recent months. ‘The attitude of these people is strange’, he declares. ‘Don’t they crave some sort of change? Don’t I have any sort of personal freedom? These people know nothing about the Ai Weiwei from before and even less about today’s Ai Weiwei’.[32]
Ai’s defensiveness calls to mind the Chinese folktale of the man who buried three hundred taels of silver and, in order to keep thieves from finding it, put up a sign: ‘There’s no three hundred taels of silver here. ’Ai’s insistence on his ‘personal freedom’ and his seemingly neo-liberal celebration of ‘change’ pinpoints perhaps the coordinates of his particular kind of un-freedom: Ai is caught between the conflicting demands of his international audience (and a sensation-hungry media) for him to ‘remain Weiwei’ and an even stronger imperative emanating from the Chinese authorities to become, and remain, a ‘new Weiwei’.
Ai’s own demand to be allowed to live a ‘normal life’ seems disingenuous. Notoriety and safety are often incompatible concepts, especially since one of the conditions for his freedom has been an undertaking he made to ‘not discuss politics’, the very thing that international Ai addicts have come to crave. In speaking to The New York Review of Books he also said: ‘I am alive. It’s a symbol of my life. If I don’t talk about it [politics] then it means I am dead. I try to talk less because in China we have an expression [from Confucius] called bu zai qi wei bu mou qi zheng ,“don’t meddle in affairs that are not part of your position”].’ By ‘speaking less’ will Ai be somehow ‘less alive’? In reality, Ai is as voluble as ever, it’s just that what he has to say is different.
Ai’s reorientation includes a reconsideration of the relationship between art and politics. Now, rather than being antagonists as of old, the artist and state seem to have become partners in a pact of mutual understanding. ‘Although they’re [the party-state] authoritarian, they’re rational’, Ai declares. ‘We should build trust. Rationality is our common treasure.'In contrast to his previous use of art as a catalogue of state violence, it is now a means by which the artist and state can find common cause:
Ai’s ‘new normal’ means that his past must be re-worked into a narrative of progress along a path to mutual understanding with the party-state.
On 13 August 2015, journalists for the weekly Die Zeit challenged Ai’s positive assessment of China’s commitment to the rule of law by calling his attention to the detention of over 200 lawyers the previous month, one of whom was Zhou Feng, Die Zeit‘s own lawyer. Ai responded by saying he was not familiar with individual cases and could not possibly comment. He insisted, however, that the general situation has improved over the past several years, especially when compared with the Mao era. This kind of rhetorical evasion is frequently employed by party-state apparatchiks.
Is Ai updating his understanding of the regime based on a consideration of changing conditions and new facts previously unavailable to him or, in the new normal of his post-incarceration life, is he just willing to see the old mechanisms of censorship and repression in a more generous light?
On 8 June 2015, the official-affiliated tabloid The Global Times, published a review of Ai’s ‘first’ solo exhibition in China held from 8 June to 6 September at the Tang Contemporary Art Center and Galleria Continua, both in Beijing’s 798 Art District. The title of the review, ‘Ai Weiwei Returns’, suggested that the arrant artist was a prodigal son. The government subtext seemed to be that, after a stretch in rehab, it would seem that Ai was now ready to re-enter the mainstream.
The Global Times described Ai’s grand Beijing opening as a ‘new start’, an opportunity for the artist to earn the acclaim of the Chinese people. In conclusion, the paper even noted that it might be time to move past the political controversy Ai had caused. The implication was that the artist had somehow become passé.
Again, on 8 August 2015, an editorial in The Global Times commended the artist for his patriotism while travelling in Europe.
What exactly his happening here? It would seem that after years of trying to forcibly browbeat him, then encountering a withering outcry when they tried to "disappear" him, the Chinese regime has elected to follow a far more subtle tack: make him the dissident mascot, treat him patronizingly, then dismiss him. Defang him by treating him with the same kind of veiled condescension reserved for eccentric uncles kept in the upstairs attic and allowed out on feast days.
It may have worked. These days Ai still spends time in Beijing, home to his octogenarian mother, but increasingly he spends lots of time out of China. He has a home and studio in Berlin, where his son attends an international school, and another studio on the Greek island of Lesbos, the center of his work with refugees. Ever since regaining his passport he has lived and worked all around the world, with so many exhibits going it is hard to keep track. He has also taken up the cause of the Syrian diaspora, calling attention to their plight via avant garde performances and a documentary.
It seems that Ai is making up for time lost due to his incarceration, and is seizing every opportunity in the event he is either re-imprisoned, or denied entry back into his homeland. Conversely, the PRC government seems content to allow him some leash, as they don't care if he bays at the moon outside their borders.
Weiwei addicts in the West yearn for another hit of the good stuff, wishing for the old agitative provocateur to re-emerge. Back in China, however, Ai, like so many creative men and women before him, has learnt about the workings of party power the hard way: for the artist to earn the right to address ‘the People’, he or she must first and foremost have nothing of their own to say.