Like most years of late, 2017 wound down on a bittersweet note. This website celebrates one full year of existence in which our readership (hundreds strong per article, spread over most continents) has proven that there is room for a no-frills, modest electronic zine professing centrist beliefs to survive in this age of rage where people vent their spleen with frothing abandon. For this we thank our regular audience for their consistent support and, of course, Sir Tim Berners Lee, for essentially inventing the world wide web by which we disseminate our stories.
Yet, the very fact that we are free to write what we want, when we want, is reminder that there are many others shackled mentally and physically who are unable to express themselves without fear of censure or repression. Others still, unwilling to live “lives of quite desperation” as Thoreau would have put it, risk life and liberty to rage against the machines of state which seek to silence contrary opinions, unwilling to concede that there ever could be something like a 'loyal' opposition. These governments, afraid of their own shadows, do not realize that constructive criticism and contrarian views are often presented by people who care so much about their nations, they cannot keep silent. They may be right. They may be wrong. They are entitled to be heard in the public arena.
In that spirit, we return to fashion a sequel to one of our most popular pieces, revisiting a man who continues to fight back any way he can, the only way he can. It is our hope, that in the years ahead he and others will at the very least have their voices heard in their homelands. Robert Kennedy said, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
People like him, keep us going.
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On the surface of things, China has got what it wanted: AI Weiwei no longer lives exclusively within its borders. Nowadays, the artist cum-rabble rouser spends much of his time in Europe, specifically Germany, where he holds a visiting professorship. He describes his present base in Berlin as at best a dormitory existence, stating that he doesn’t speak German and rarely leaves his studio. He works through the weekend and says he never takes vacations. And all this is OK; the work itself keeps him occupied. “Also, it’s still very dangerous for me to go back to China. Twelve of my lawyers are still serving sentences. One for five years, another for 10. I call my mum on the phone; she’s well over 80. And she always tells me, ‘Don’t ever come back.’”
Yet, as indefatigable as the Energizer Bunny, Ai has proven that he can still produce stinging commentary with all the searing incisiveness of his past endeavours. The only difference is that, this time, his lens is turned onto the West. 'Human Flow', his debut feature, is a bold documentary about the refugee crisis. The film leaps from the cardboard cities of Europe to the blazing oilfields of Mosul and from the unmarked graves of Turkey to the Texas-Mexico border. It plays out across 23 different countries and contains a cast of thousands, many of them nameless. In 2010, the artist packed Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with 100m hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds that broke up underfoot and filled the air with dust. Here, he crams an entire global tragedy into 140 minutes.
If there’s a unifying thread in all this teeming human traffic, it’s the shambling, ursine figure of Ai himself. Onscreen, at age 60, he is a burly, furrowed-browed man handing out hot tea on the beaches at Lesbos, comforting a traumatized woman inside a makeshift studio and cooking kebabs on a barbecue at a dusty refugee camp. He says that he never wanted to appear as a tourist. His mission was always to find common ground. “I am a refugee, every bit,” he says. “Those people are me. That’s my identity.”
Even those who would struggle to name one of Ai’s occasionally opaque installations are familiar with the man’s history, as he has become a cultural, if not political, icon. He’s the dissident Chinese artist, at odds with his homeland; jailed (or kidnapped, depending how one looks at it) for 81 days back in 2011 and now, for all practical purposes, living in exile like some contemporary Ovid. 'ArtReview' magazine that year called him “the most powerful artist in the world”, a visionary who has taken a lifetime of social activism and conjured it into a kind of continuous performance piece. His critics view him rather differently: as a crude provocateur, trading in stereotypes and bankrolled by the west.
At the time, 'ArtReview’s decision was an unusual choice. Ai’s varied, scattershot work doesn’t fetch the highest prices at auction, and critics, while they admire his achievement, don’t treat him as a master who has transformed the art of his period. As a result of his unrelenting criticism of the Beijing regime, he has become a symbol of the struggle for human rights in China, but not preeminently so. He is too quixotic a figure to have developed the moral gravitas of the great men of conscience who challenged the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. For example, many do not consider him on the same level of saintly dissidence as the late Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, the former Tiananmen Square student and human rights activist essentially left to die of cancer.
So what is it about Ai? What makes him, in Western eyes, the world’s “most powerful artist”? The answer lies in the West itself. Now obsessed with China, the West would surely invent Ai if he didn’t already exist. By this line of reasoning, China may well become the most powerful nation in the world. It must therefore have an artist of comparable consequence to hold up a mirror both to its failings and its potential. Ai is perfect for the part. Having spent his formative years as an artist in New York in the 1980s, when Warhol was a god and conceptual and performance art were dominant, he knows how to combine his life and art into a daring and politically charged performance that helps define how we see modern China. He’ll use any medium or genre -- sculpture, photography, performance, architecture, tweets, blogs, even rap music and now documentaries -- to deliver his pungent message.
Ai’s persona -- which, as with Warhol’s, is inseparable from his art -- draws power from the contradictory roles that artists perform in modern culture. The loftiest are those of martyr, preacher and conscience. Not only has Ai been harassed and jailed, he has also continually called the Chinese regime to account; he has compiled a list, for example, that includes the name of each of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died during the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 because of shoddy schoolhouse construction. At the same time, he plays a decidedly unsaintly, Dada-inspired role -- the bad boy provocateur who outrages stuffed shirts everywhere. (In one of his best-known photographs, he gives the White House the finger, an act one feels, he'd have no trouble repeating today with its present incumbent.) Not least, he is a kind of Barnum-like showman. He cultivates the press, arouses comment and creates spectacles. His signature work, "Sunflower Seeds" -- a work of hallucinatory intensity that was a sensation at the Tate Modern in London in 2010 -- consists of 100 million pieces of porcelain, each painted by one of 1,600 Chinese craftsmen to resemble a sunflower seed.
The question that is not often asked is whether Ai, as an artist, is more than just a contemporary phenom. Is "Sunflower Seeds", for example, more than a passing headline? Will Ai ultimately matter to China -- and to the future -- as much as he does to today’s Western art world?
Until he got his passport back, and was allowed to leave China, Ai lived (and still maintains a residence) in Caochangdi, a village in suburban Beijing favored by artists, where, like an art-king in exile, he regularly greeted visitors come to pay homage to his vision of a better China. He lived well enough, even under house arrest, but there’s little about him that’s overtly extravagant or arty.
His house, like many in the district, is gray and utilitarian. The neighborhood doesn’t have much street or café life; it’s the sort of place, one Beijing resident said, where people go to be left alone. His courtyard home consists of two buildings: a studio and a residence. The studio -- a large space with a skylight -- has a gray floor and white walls and seems much less cluttered than other artist studios. Both the studio and the residence have a neutral air, as if they have not yet been filled, but are instead environments where artists wait for ideas, or acts on impulse, or greets cats and visitors. Like Andy Warhol, Ai always has a camera at hand -- in his case, an iPhone -- as if he were waiting for something to happen, forever ready to document reality.
His life seems steeped in “befores” and “afters.” Before the modern era, he says, China’s culture had a kind of “total condition, with philosophy, aesthetics, moral understanding and craftsmanship.” In ancient China, art could become very powerful. “It’s not just a decoration or one idea, but rather a total high model which art can carry out.” He finds a similar and transcendent unity of vision in the work of one of his favorite artists, van Gogh: “The art was a belief that expressed his views of the universe, how it should be.”
Although he has a special interest in Jasper Johns, Warhol and Dada, Ai is not easily categorized. He has a wandering mind that can embrace very different, sometimes contrary, elements. The same artist who loves the transcendental oneness of van Gogh, for example, also admires the abstruse and sometimes analytical sensibility of Johns. Much of Ai’s best-known work is rooted in conceptual and Dadaist art. He has often created “ready-mades” -- objects taken from the world that an artist then alters or modifies -- that have a strong satirical element. In one well-known example, he placed a Chinese figurine inside a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch. Yet in contrast to many conceptual artists, he also demonstrated, early on, a keen interest in a work’s visual qualities and sent himself to study at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York.
Ai’s interest in design and architecture led him, in 2006, to collaborate with HHF Architects on a country house in upstate New York for two young art collectors. The house is four equal-sized boxes covered on the outside in corrugated metal; the small spaces between the boxes permit light to suffuse the interior, where the geometry is also softened by wood and surprising angles. The award-winning design is both remarkably simple and -- in its use of light and the grouping of interior spaces -- richly complex.
But Ai’s interest in design and architecture has less to do with being a conventional architect than with rebuilding -- and redesigning -- China itself. Returning to China in 1993 from a somewhat unsuccessful sojourn in New York, when his father fell ill, he was discouraged by two new forms of oppression: fashion and cronyism. “Deng Xiaoping encouraged people to get rich,” he said, adding that those who succeeded did so through their affiliation with the Communist Party. “I could see so many luxury cars, but there was no justice or fairness in this society. Far from it.” New consumer goods such as tape recorders brought fresh voices and music into a moribund culture. But rather than struggle to create independent identities, Ai said, young people instead settled into a new, easy and fashion-driven conformity. “People listened to sentimental Taiwanese pop music. Levi’s blue jeans came in very early. People were seeking to be identified with a certain kind of style, which saves a lot of talking.”
Ai responded to the new China with acidic satire, challenging its puritanical and conformist character by regularly showcasing a rude and boisterous individuality. He published a photograph of himself in which he is shown naked, leaping ludicrously into the air, while holding something over his genitals. The photo caption --“Grass mud horse covering the middle”--sounds in spoken Chinese like a coarse jest about mothers and the Central Committee. He formed a corporation called “Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd.” He mocked the Olympic Games, which, in China, are now a kind of state religion. The CCTV tower in Beijing, designed by the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is regarded with great national pride; the Chinese were horrified when a fire swept through an annex and a nearby hotel during construction. Ai’s response? “I think if the CCTV building really burns down it would be the modern landmark of Beijing. It can represent a huge empire of ambition burning down.”
Ai’s resistance to all forms of control -- capitalist and communist-- manifests itself in one poignant way. He refuses to listen to music. He associates music with the propaganda of the old days and prefers the silent spaces of independent thought. “When I was growing up, we were forced to listen to only Communist music. I think that left a bad impression. I have many musician friends, but I never listen to music.” He blames the Chinese educational system for failing to generate any grand or open-ended sense of possibility either for individuals or the society as a whole. “Education should teach you to think, but they just want to control everyone’s mind.” What the regime is most afraid of, he says, is “free discussion.”
Ai will occasionally say something optimistic. Perhaps the Internet will open up the discussion that schools now restrain, for example, even if the blog he ran has been shut down. For the most part, though, Ai’s commentary remains bleak and denunciatory. Few people in China believe in what they are doing, he says, not even the secret police. Though he has been interrogated, they all told ‘This is our job.’...They do not believe anything. But they tell me, ‘You can never win this war.’”
Not soon anyway. In the West, the artist as provocateur -- Marcel Duchamp, Warhol and Damien Hirst are well-known examples -- is a familiar figure. In a China just emerging as a world power, where the political authorities prize conformity, discipline and the accumulation of riches, an artist working in the provocative Western tradition is still regarded as a threat. Chinese intellectuals may support him, but the Chinese generally have no more understanding of Ai than a typical American has of Duchamp or Warhol. “There are no heroes in modern China,” Ai said.
The West would like to turn Ai into a hero, but he seems reluctant to oblige. He lived in postmodern New York. He knows the celebrity racket and the hero racket. “I don’t believe that much in my own answer,” he said. “My resistance is a symbolic gesture.” But Ai, if not a hero, has found ways to symbolize certain qualities that China may one day celebrate him for protecting and asserting. Free discussion is one. An out-there, dark and Rabelaisian playfulness is another. But the most interesting quality of them all is found in his best works of art: a prophetic dream of China.
Much of Ai’s art is of only passing interest. Like so much conceptual art, it seems little more than a diagram of some pre-conceived moral. Art with a moral too often ends with the moral, which can scupper the imagination. Consider Ai’s amusing and well-known Johnnie Walker piece. Is it suggesting that China is enveloped within -- and intoxicated by -- Western consumer culture? Of course it is. Once you’ve seen it, you don’t have to think about it anymore. Jokes, even serious jokes, are like that. They’re not as good the second time around.
But several Ai works are fundamentally different in character. They’re made of more than morals and commentary. They’re open-ended, mysterious, sometimes utopian in spirit. Each calls to mind -- as architecture and design can-- the birth of the new. The oddest instance is the “Bird’s Nest” stadium of the 2008 Olympics. While an impassioned critic of the propaganda around the Olympics, Ai nonetheless collaborated with the architects Herzog & de Meuron in the design of the stadium. What kind of China is being nurtured, one wonders, in that spiky nest? To a western eye, his homeland looks to be relentlessly rising in power, wealth and influence. It is well placed to profit from the actions of a wayward, bellicose US administration; poised to become the undisputed global superpower.
“Can China be a global power? I don’t think so. It can gain an advantage, that’s true. But it doesn’t have soul. It doesn’t have heart. It doesn’t trust its own people. So it has no self-identity in the sense that it has never accepted human rights as common values. No freedom of speech, no independent judicial system. If those don’t exist, how can you have creativity? How can you be a country? So forget about China. China is an illusion. It’s there, it’s large. But nobody can tell you what it is.”
According to Ai, governments cannot hide forever from what he calls “principles” and “the true argument.” He decries the loss of religion, aesthetic feeling and moral judgment, arguing that “this is a large space that needs to be occupied.” To occupy that space, Ai continues to dream of social transformation, and he devises actions and works that evoke worlds of possibility. For the 2007 Documenta -- a famous exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany -- Ai contributed two pieces. One was a monumental sculpture called Template, a chaotic Babel of doors and windows from ruined Ming and Qing dynasty houses. These doors and windows from the past seemed to lead nowhere until, oddly enough, a storm knocked down the sculpture. His second contribution was a work of “social sculpture” called Fairytale, for which he brought 1,001 people from China -- chosen through an open blog invitation -- to Documenta. He designed their clothes, luggage and a place for them to stay. But he did not point them in any particular direction. On this unlikely trip through the woods, the Chinese pilgrims might find for themselves a new and magical world. They too might discover, as Ai did when he went to New York, “a bowl of diamonds.”
'Human Flow' is in this tradition, albeit far more visceral, literal, less metaphorically lyrical. This is suffering writ large and represents a newer, edgier exile’s view of life. But if it does not spare both the Western powers that dawdle on solutions for the refugee crisis as well as the original governments which caused the people to flee, it is no less sparing of himself and the inherent hypocrisy of an ‘establishment’ professional dissident.
The film is a sweeping humanitarian epic with its feet firmly on the ground and dirt under its nails -- front-line and not pretty In one memorable shot, taken by a drone over a camp in Iraq, the beige tents are arranged like some vast abstract canvas. Then it drops by degrees to show us all the people who live there. Ai seeks to puts faces to statistics, tells individual stories and shrewdly decides not to spare his own blushes. At one stage, he playfully swaps passports with Mahmoud, a refugee fleeing Syria. Mahmoud, for his part, is happy to do so. He adds they should probably swap houses as well: a nice, warm Berlin studio in return for a hot, crowded tent. The director chuckles gamely, but won’t take him up on the offer. It’s a moment that exposes the gulf between them.
“Yeah, that was the worst feeling. That really got me. Because [if] you’re passionate, you think you mean what you say. You tell these people that you’re the same as them. But you are lying because you are not the same. Your situation is different; you must leave them. And that’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”
Sunflower Seeds, his most celebrated work, yields similar questions. The painting of so many individual seeds is a slightly mad tour de force. But the scale of the work, which is at once tiny and vast -- raindrop and ocean -- seems no strange than a “Made in China” consumer society and its bottomless desires. Does the number of seeds reflect the dizzying amount of money --millions, billions, trillions -- that corporations and nations generate? Do the seeds simultaneously suggest the famines that mark Chinese history? Do they evoke China’s brief moment of cultural freedom in 1956 known as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign?” Do they represent both the citizen and the nation, the individual and the mass, endowing both with an air of germinating possibility?
Will Ai's homeland ever bloom, one wonders, with the gloriously joyful intensity of van Gogh’s sunflowers?