Originally appeared
in the artsfuse.org 8/11/12
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
This fine documentary opens with shots of the many cats with
whom Ai Weiwei, China's best-known artist/activist, shares his Beijing studio.
One feline has learned to open a door by leaping up to release the lever, after
which it saunters out. Ai Weiwei observes that having opened the door, the cat
never returns to close it.
Point nicely taken about activism and art.
This is followed by an orange tabby getting willfully
tangled up in a small wood model Ai Weiwei is assembling. He opines that the
cat won't destroy it. He's completely mistaken, and chuckles when kitty does.
Point taken about playfulness.
But it would be a mistake to think of Ai Weiwei, now in his
late fifties, as altogether kittenish. As the film documents, it is often fury
that drives him. That fury is on display when he goes back to Chengdu where a
beating by police in 2008 caused severe headaches later traced to a subdural
hemotoma, or bleeding into the brain. With Alison Klayman filming the
encounter, he flies at one of the cops, tearing the man's sunglasses off so he
could be plainly identified. Laying hands on a cop is dangerous anywhere, and
having a camera around is no guarantee of safety. Ai Weiwei's anger propels
him, and a sense of duty. When asked, at one point, why he seems so fearless,
he responds haltingly that, on the contrary, he's quite fearful but has concluded
that: "If you don’t act, the dangers become stronger.”
As a rule, he acts. But even he can be daunted, at least
temporarily. In April 2011, he was arrested in Beijing and kept under 24 hour
guard at an undisclosed location; he had, effectively, been disappeared. When
released 81 days later he was thinner and uncharacteristically reticent,
refusing to talk about the experience. But not for long: a few weeks later he
was back in full force on Twitter, which, now that his blog is banned, is the
social medium through which he connects with a large Chinese following.
Ai Weiwei is one of the artists Chinese authorities toy
with, bestowing freedoms then withdrawing them. Arbitrariness seems to be the
name of the game. The lesson is not so much about this law or that limit,
ill-defined as they are and are likely meant to be. It is about authority
itself — its tripwires, minefields and irritability.
Ai Weiwei was celebrated for his role in designing the celebrated
Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics but soon after denounced the
games as a "pretend smile." He told The New York Times that: “What
counts are the tens of thousands of lives ruined because of poor construction
of schools in Sichuan, because of blood sellers in Henan, because of industrial
accidents in Guangdong and because of the death penalty. These are the figures
that really tell the tale of our era.”
He had earlier spent a decade (1983-993) in New York City,
remarking that its lights, as his plane set down, looked to him "like a basket
of jewelry." A touch of New York at once nullified "twenty years of
[state] education." There he assimilated Western art and culture, with an
accent on Duchamp and Warhol, took and exhibited thousands of photographs, and
joined in protests and demonstrations. The film darts a bit too quickly past a
suggestive photo of Ai Weiwei, China's dissident to be, sitting alongside Allen
Ginsberg, who might be termed America's dissident laureate, were that not an
oxymoron. As it happens, Ginsberg, who seems to have known everyone, had met Ai
Qing, Ai Weiwei's, father, on a trip to China.
Ai Qing had been one of China's best known poets. Though he
sided with the Communist Party and had penned earnest praise songs to Chairman
Mao (probably not his best work), he spent much of Communist rule having rocks
hurled at him, ink poured on him for the sin of literature, while cleaning rural
toilets and almost starving. Ai Weiwei, growing up, witnessed these
humiliations. When Ai Qing was officially "exonerated" in 1978 and his
sentencing labeled a "mistake", his response, as per Ai Weiwei, was,
"For you it was a mistake, one word, for me it was 20 years."
Ai Weiwei had gone to Sichuan in 2008 to document the
effects of the earthquake, during which 70,000 people died, including thousands
of schoolchildren whose schools caved in on them because of notoriously shoddy
— "tofu" — construction. Ai Weiwei used thousands of multi-colored
children's backpacks to spell out in Chinese characters what one mother said
about her daughter: "She had been happy living in this world for 7 years."
This artist's work and his role are not fully translatable
into Western categories. There is no one quite like him here. The Chinese, of
course, are numerous, and numbers therefore play an appropriate part in his
work, as in the number of backpacks he used for his show about the earthquake.
When he returned to Chengdu, he ordered a feast for sympathizers — there is no
lack of food in this movie — consisting of thousands of river crabs. Weiwei
himself was not permitted to attend this mass dinner but his friends ate very
well.
Ai Weiwei speaks for an alternate China, another possibility
for it. In a sense, he is the anti-Mao. Alison Klayman's “Ai Weiwei: Never
Sorry” is an essential introduction to his work to date.
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