Nothing has been seen or heard of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei since his detention at Beijing Airport early this month for unspecified “economic crimes.” By itself the arrest of another dissident is hardly news since China’s recent crackdown on bloggers, writers, activists and intellectuals has provoked only the mildest criticism in the West. But Ai’s reputation – designer of the “Bird Nest” Olympic stadium, a current exhibitor at the Tate Modern – his fearless free thinking, and his mastery of modern communications technology makes his case somewhat unusual.
The son of a poet who was sent to a labour camp during Mao’s purges, Ai grew up with a skeptical attitude towards China’s political rhetoric. Unconvinced by Deng Xiaoping’s promises of reform, he has remained, three decades after the country began its cautious flirtation with capitalism, profoundly critical of the intellectual deformations brought on by totalitarian politics. The English poet William Blake memorably decried the “mind-forged manacles” of his age, in a poem that wandered through the “chartered streets” of London; Ai has carried out, in images, a comparable assault on the unexamined assumptions of contemporary Chinese society, especially the willingness among the country’s nouveau riche to tolerate a repressive state.
A disciple of the iconoclastic French artist Marcel Duchamp, Ai’s art is often leavened by an impish wit. In 2000, he upstaged the Third Shanghai Biennale by organizing an alternative exhibition with the critic and curator Feng Boyi. In Chinese the show’s title was “uncooperative approach” but its English name made plain its refusal to be lumped in with the boosterism of the Biennale. “F—- off” directly challenged the state’s ponderous narrative of harmony and progress. Prominent among its many thought crimes were Ai’s “studies in perspective”: photographs of famous monuments (the White House, the Eiffel tower, the Forbidden City) with a middle finger held up in the foreground, ostensibly to provide a sense of scale.
Duchamp once stirred up controversy by repainting Leonardo’s iconic `La Gioconda’ (better known as the Mona Lisa) with a moustache. He called the painting LHOOQ, a pun which, when pronounced as French letters, can be translated as “she’s got a hot ass.” Ai’s recent arrest may be the result of a far riskier play on words. A photograph of him leaping naked into the air, with only a white toy horse held up to cover his genitals carries a caption that can, apparently, be translated as another four-letter insult, this time directed more specifically towards the viewer’s mother, from the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party. It is easy to dismiss this mischief-making as the work of a “scholar clown” but Ai’s art can also be deadly serious – he once made a moving exhibit out of a collection of backpacks from children who died in the Sichuan earthquake (raising questions about how much which poorly-designed buildings had contributed to the death toll) much to the displeasure of the Politburo. He has smashed antique vases, repainted them with a Coca-Cola logo, transported 1,001 randomly-chosen Chinese citizens to Germany as part of a living art-exhibit and, most famously, scattered one hundred million ceramic “sunflower seeds” at the Tate Modern gallery, as part of his brilliant musings on mass consumption and the meanings of modern China.
Undeterred by the state’s previous efforts to intimidate him – which have included a beating so severe that he subsequently required brain surgery — Ai has used his blog, and Twitter, to broadcast his heretical individualism to millions of China’s netizens. In an interview with Index on Censorship, he explained this freewheeling approach: “If you live in self-punishment or self-imposed ignorance or lack of self-awareness it genuinely diminishes your existence. Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.” Later, he observed that “Totalitarian society creates a huge space that, as we know, is a wasteland. The great success of this system is that it makes the general public afraid of taking responsibility; afraid of taking a position or giving a definite answer; or even of making mistakes. There is no revolution like the Communist revolution.” Since his arrest, hundreds of art communities around the world have organized peaceful pickets outside the Chinese embassies in their country.
Thousands of cultural figures have supported calls for his release as well as that of other Chinese writers and intellectuals. To date, nobody has made the case for Ai’s release as eloquently as the director of Dia Art Foundation, Philippe Vergne: “When a regime imprisons its artists and its thinkers, it exercises brute censorship and demonstrates its fear. Not so much fear of the art or of the artists, but the fear of what the regime has become. It reveals its fear of losing control, its fear of what is different, and its fear of questions that might force a reconsideration of its values. Such regimes fear the barbarians within, the barbarians that they have become.” Eventually Beijing will realize that jailing dissidents is a fool’s errand, it brings attention to their work and broadcasts panic rather than authority. Faced with the ongoing crackdown on China’s writers and intellectuals, the West’s timidity in pressing for their release has been truly shameful. Beijing cannot be coddled indefinitely. Governments who cannot tolerate the right to free speech deserve, at the very least, the threat of an uncooperative approach.
