Big Character
Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng
Ài Wèiwèi has had several run-ins with the authorities. His heroic effort to list by name, despite an official blackout, all the children killed by collapses of shoddy ‘tofu dregs’ school buildings in the 2008 Sìchuān earthquake and his public support for the late Liú Xiǎobō (刘晓波), the imprisoned democracy activist awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, led in 2011 to an 81-day detention and a subsequent charge of tax evasion with a demand for the equivalent of US$2.4 million. Ài denies the charge and has contested it, although if he hasn’t evaded taxation in one way or another that would make him just about the only rich man in China not to have done so and one of the very few indeed not to have got away with it. He was kept under lengthy house arrest at his Cǎochǎngdì studio which the government has since demolished.
Ài deserves attention, having transformed himself from an overly-visible and rather gadfly presence to a significant dissident voice whose long freedom from reprisal in spite of publicly expressed anti-government positions mystified many. Some put it down to his lineage as the son of poet Ài Qīng (1910–1996), who was tortured and imprisoned by the Nationalists in the 1930s for opposing them, but who, having joined the Party in the early 1940s, was swept away by the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the 1950s and spent much of the rest of his life forbidden to publish and in exile in Inner Mongolia and Xīnjiāng. It was suggested that the Party’s bad conscience allowed the younger Ài more latitude than others, an argument rather weakened by the Party’s failure to have a bad conscience about anything else it has done wrong.
Aì’s immunity came violently to an end when while attempting to defend another man engaged on the Sìchuān counting project, he was badly beaten by police and subsequently underwent emergency surgery to staunch a cerebral haemorrhage caused by the beating.
Although an early star in the recent sudden popularity of Chinese art, Ài came to broader notice overseas for an involvement with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron’s National Stadium (‘Bird’s Nest’) project (see Olympic Green), often claiming input of varying degrees to the design, but in fact merely acting as a go-between between the architects and the Chinese government. Later he became disenchanted with the 2008 Olympics and spoke out publicly about its shameless adoption as a vehicle for Party self-promotion (for which the spineless International Olympic Committee must bear much responsibility).
Ài was for a long time prevented from travelling and was under instruction to keep quiet, but continued to speak out on both art and politics in China, writing in The Guardian newspaper in 2012 that ‘Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country… Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.’
This has also been said of his own work, and a New Yorker critic rightly described the works in a 2012 retrospective as ‘making up in splendor what they lack in fertility.’ He appeared the same year as the subject of Alison Klayman’s highly successful big-screen documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.
See also Instagram and Twitter: aiww
Next in Běijīng Suburbs and Beyond: Sòng Zhuāng Artists Village 宋庄画家村
Previously: Cǎochǎngdì Art District
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
