EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: AI WEIWEI
As an Ai Weiwei installation opens for Nuit Blanche, the artist talks about his confinement in China
The artist, whose work is the centrepiece of tonight’s Nuit Blanche, talks with the Star’s Murray Whyte about his house arrest in China and his burgeoning presence on the international scene,
From the courtyard of his Beijing studio, Ai Weiwei looks up to twin four-storey buildings, one in front and one in back. They weren’t there two years ago, before he was imprisoned on dubious charges of tax evasion by a ruling Communist party he’s made a habit of defying, and those two things are not unrelated.
“I don’t know what goes on inside — it’s very secretive,” he says in a telephone interview with the Star. “But I have a government report saying they were built just to put surveillance on me. When people told me this, I never would have believed it. But apparently, this is common, not a big deal for them.”
What is a big deal, though, is Ai’s burgeoning presence on an international scale, where his tireless defiance of China’s ruling party, both in his art and in simple, blunt critiques most often voiced online, have put him in the odd place of being his homeland’s public enemy No. 1.
In the past four years, Ai has been harassed, followed, placed under house arrest and surveillance, viciously beaten by police almost to the point of death, imprisoned, tortured and confined. For more than two years, with his passport in police hands, he has been forbidden from leaving China. In Toronto, this has meant receiving the past few months’ slate of Ai projects here with tempered enthusiasm: First, the installation of his Zodiac Heads at Nathan Phillips Square in July; then, the opening of his bracing survey show, According to What? at the Art Gallery of Ontario in August; and Saturday, the installation of Forever
Bicycles, an Ai work reconfigured as the centrepiece of this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.
What’s missing is the artist himself. Which, according to Ai, would be fine if not for the circumstances that make it so. “I don’t need any attention for this work,” he says. “I’m glad people pay attention to what I am saying, but I don’t care if they pay attention to me. If there’s any advantage to all this, it’s an advantage for people who can never have their own voice.”
Taking up the cause of anonymous suffering in China is something of an M.O. for Ai who, at 56, has slowly evolved from fascinating hybrid of east-west artistic sensibilities to a cause célèbre of human rights.
In his early work, Ai worked within the bounds of oblique criticism, plying the tensions between China’s headlong rush into a future of economic prosperity fuelled by massproduction and the intricate craftsmanship of its centuries-old past.
Ai evoked Minimalism and Dada, two pillars of what would become conceptual art, and infused them with his own cultural specifics. He dipped Han dynasty vases in bright paint, underscoring the gap between the grounding specifics of an ancient society and the generic throwaways of global commodity culture. Or, he simply dropped them on the ground to shatter, mimicking, in his way, the ruling party’s attitude toward his homeland’s rich past. Then, in 2008, the time for such quiet gestures was past. On the eve of the Beijing Olympics with the whole world watching, Ai, who was a co-architect on the Olympic “Bird’s Nest” Stadium, used his suddenly-global platform to speak out on China’s woeful record on human rights. “Before, I didn’t get involved in these issues — human rights, freedom of speech,” he says. “It was not in my interest to attack. But I had to be honest about what condition China was in.”
Speaking out gets Ai in trouble. It also sets him apart. In 2008, a cadre of Chinese artists had begun to enjoy enormous financial success internationally with cloying works of polite dissent, using outdated imagery from the decades-past Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Yue Minjuen, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and, most famously, Zhang Huan, who was greeted here as a welcoming hero last year, made tremendous fortunes with such work, effectively functioning as straw men for a still-brutal regime. Ai has his opinions on that. “Zhang Huan, he really just licks the boots of the government,” he says. “People like that are just opportunists. I would call them liars, using other people’s tragedies to sell their work. They’ve never raised a single issue and they pretend they’re victims. I would be ashamed to have a show with any of them.”
As to other people’s tragedies, Ai knows something about that, and firsthand. In 2009, when the Sichuan earthquake left more than 5,000 schoolchildren dead when their substandard school buildings crumbled on top of them, Ai launched a personal investigation into the death toll and the corrupt coverup of its causes.
“When I got out (of prison), so many people wanted to know what it was like.”
AI WEIWEI
DISSIDENT CHINESE ARTIST
It earned him that beating at the hands of police, a near-death experience when his brain hemorrhaged while travelling in Europe shortly afterward, and the eventual descent into a public example of what happens when a well-known cultural figure in China dares forget their place. Even so, Ai refuses to walk that line. At the Venice Biennale this year, he caused a sensation when his piece
S.A.C.R.E.D., installed in a Renaissance-era cathedral, bluntly laid out the circumstances of his detention. There was nothing oblique here. In a series of dioramas, the likes of which you might see in a natural history museum, Ai recreated scenes from a dissident prison: Ai stripped naked and forced into an icy shower; Ai trying to sleep under the glare of a bare light bulb; Ai being interrogated, all of it under constant, close watch by two uniformed soldiers. “When I got out, so many people wanted to know what it was like,” he said. “And every time I talked about it, I felt ashamed, because it was so awful. At the same time, I felt a responsibility to show people. I can’t come out from those conditions and go on like before. There are so many people still inside and those conditions continue: young people, people with much less ability to express themselves than me. They lose their whole lives and nobody knows who they are. So I tried, honestly, to memorize every detail and to show it, simply, like it is. I didn’t feel it needed my personal touch. All by itself, it’s already completely absurd.” Just as absurd to some, maybe, has been Ai’s determination to stay put in a land that would prefer to see him vanish entirely. (“There is no media in China that can even mention my name,” he chuckles. “Not even to criticize me. So really, I don’t exist here.”)
And indeed, in his global crisscrosses of the past decade, staying put in the free world would have been easy enough. “I could have had an American passport, many times,” he said. “But I never did that. If I did, I would be on the beach in Hawaii.”
But for Ai, it makes perfect sense. “It’s simple,” he says. “If I leave, my work is not real. I would rather there was no such thing, that I don’t have to talk about these things. But that is not possible. So I go on.”
To what, he can’t know. But he can guess. “There are 80 million people in the Communist Party. They have all the armies, all the police, all the resources.
“Why are they so scared of me?” Ai Weiwei’s Forever Bicycles at Nathan Phillips Square is an extended project of Nuit Blanche, on view until Oct. 27.