In what will be one of London’s biggest art shows this autumn, Ai Weiwei, China’s most internationally celebrated conceptual artist, activist, photographer, architect and thorn in the flesh of the Communist Party, will be honoured at the Royal Academy with a one-man show. Few artists have received this accolade, and the exhibition is a tribute to an artist whose range of ideas and bold vision have made him one of contemporary art’s most important figures.
His achievement is unrivalled at home, though it risks being overshadowed abroad by his political reputation. His critique of contemporary China through art, sculpture and the online documentation of his life has deep roots in China’s culture and aesthetic. He succeeds as an artist-provocateur by showing us his vision of a new China through his creative ideas, dark satire, philosophical and political commentary, and “social sculpture” sometimes involving thousands of people. For the forthcoming Royal Academy show, several tons of steel bars from the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake have been straightened and shipped. At the Tate in 2010, 100m ceramic sunflower seeds were individually painted by 1,600 craftspeople in China. In 2014, there was a huge solo exhibition in Berlin involving 6,000 wooden stools. Each of these contain both a critique of China’s current political system and look forward to the possibility of change in the future.
Ai’s work is not universally admired and clearly some of his ideas will last longer than others. Some of his more Rabelaisian jokes—the naked artist giving the finger to various centres of power, including Beijing’s Forbidden City—will survive, if at all, as evidence of an occasionally adolescent sense of humour. Some critics have complained that his ideas are repetitious and his work uneven. But it is difficult to imagine the history of contemporary China failing to include a chapter on Ai Weiwei. And he is more than simply a dissident artist to be valued for his political position: his work is original and provocative, especially in his use of online media.
Until late last month it seemed as if Ai would be unable to attend his own London show: the Chinese authorities had withheld his passport since his release from an 81-day detention in 2011. On 22nd July, however, he posted a picture of his returned passport on Instagram. This was a surprise because the atmosphere has grown steadily colder in Beijing for liberals. Three weeks before his passport was returned, 240 human rights lawyers were arrested, and one celebrated Beijing law firm was denounced on state media as an anti-party conspiracy. In today’s China, that is an uncomfortable label to wear.
"It is curious that the Chinese government should choose this moment to restore travel freedom to a man they regard as an increasingly troublesome talent"Ai’s lawyer Pu Ziqiang was detained more than a year ago for attending a private commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In May, after 11 months in jail, Pu was charged with the unlikely crimes of “inciting ethnic hatred” and “picking quarrels and provoking incidents” because of comments he had made on the internet. He is one of several hundred civil society figures imprisoned in the last three years.
It is curious that the Chinese government should choose this moment to restore travel freedom to a man they regard as an increasingly troublesome talent. More absurd was that the British government, whose China policy grows more confused and embarrassing by the day, issued a restricted visa to Ai on the incorrect grounds that he had failed to disclose a criminal conviction on his visa application form. (He was never formally arrested, charged or convicted.) He posted the British visa letter on Instagram, along with the information that Germany had given him a four-year multi-entry visa and a work permit.
Ai began documenting his life online in 2005 when sina.com, one of China’s largest internet portals, invited him to write a blog. He did not know what a blog was and could barely type, but the company offered to coach him. It was a wild success. For four years, Ai published photographs and videos along with text. Around 100,000 visitors checked in each day. When government censors closed the blog down in May 2009, he took to social media—Twitter, Instagram, and Chinese favourites Weibo and Weixin.
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His practice of documentation goes back to before the digital age, to the 12 years he spent in New York. He left China in 1981 with $30 in his pocket. If he did not know what awaited him, he was clear about what he was leaving behind: after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, popular demands for political, intellectual and cultural liberalisation had begun to surface. But in March of 1979, the democracy advocate Wei Jingsheng was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
In September that year, a group of young artists calling themselves the Xing xing (Star) group issued a challenge to the communist art academy’s stultifying orthodoxy of revolutionary romanticism. They hung paintings in a variety of long forbidden styles on the railings of the National Art Museum, and issued a call for individual freedom and creativity. Ai’s contribution was a watercolour landscape. The exhibition was a short-lived sensation. It was removed from the railings within days, but the group managed to organise an exhibition elsewhere in Beijing later in the year. In February 1989, 10 years after Xingxing’s challenge, China held its first official exhibition of avant-garde art. It was closed prematurely after Xiao Lu, one of the artists, shot a bullet at her own work. The relationship between the state and the art world is uneasy to this day.
Ai’s outsider status offers a clue to his artistic development. His father, Ai Qing, had also begun life as a painter and was studying in Paris when the Japanese invasion of Manchuria brought him home. He was jailed for three years for his left-wing sympathies, and in prison took to poetry. On his release, he made his way to Mao’s Red Army redoubt in Yan’an and, after the communist victory in 1949, he was recognised as a leading poet. He was in trouble again by 1957, condemned by the communists as a “rightist”; he spent 18 years in “reeducation through labour.” When Ai was an infant, the family was exiled to Xinjiang in the far northwest. He remembers his father, who attempted suicide several times, scrubbing the village latrines.
Ai’s time in New York meant he was free to explore the ideas, artists and influences that would shape his creativity: Andy Warhol, Josef Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Dada and many others. Like Warhol, he began to document his life in photographs. Like Bueys, he would become an artist who expanded the boundaries of artistic practice into his own version of social sculpture, something he would take to an extraordinary scale.
He enrolled in the Parsons School of Design in New York, but rarely attended: his real education was in the voracious consumption of the art in galleries and museums, in the freedom of a hand-to-mouth existence, and the liberty to reinvent himself. (In one characteristic episode, he corralled a group of friends into posing as triad gang members for a Japanese film crew for whom he was working as a fixer.) He watched the Iran-Contra hearings on television, and was impressed by a political system that put itself on trial.
Back home, China was experiencing its most liberal decade of the 20th century, a few precious years of cultural and intellectual exploration that came to a halt on 4th June 1989. Ai joined a hunger strike in protest against the Tiananmen massacre and it seemed unlikely that he would return to China, but in 1993 his father fell ill. Ai went home. His father died in 1996.
By the mid-90s, Chinese contemporary art had expanded beyond its initial small circle of expatriate patrons and was building a broader international reputation. China was entering a turbo-charged period of growth that also entailed the destruction of most of its existing urban fabric. Everything was changing at dizzying speed, except for the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. Ai became known as one of China’s most interesting avant-garde artists, overseeing, as Warhol did, a large-scale workshop called Fake, full of artisans and craftsmen working to realise a flood of ideas across a wide range of artistic media; he wrote three influential books on conceptual art; he was a publisher, sculptor, designer, architect and curator. His ascent was confirmed by his partnership with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to design the Bird’s Nest, the central stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
His projects become more ambitious. In 2007, invited to contribute to a show held in the Grimm Brothers home town in Germany, he elected to fly in 1,001 ordinary Chinese to take party in Fairytale, the largest performance art work in history. In early 2008, Shanghai invited him to build a studio there to raise the city’s cultural profile. He was successful at home and abroad, and was not in political trouble. It didn’t last.
In May 2008, an earthquake in Sichuan killed 70,000 people. The dead included thousands of schoolchildren whose shoddily built schools had collapsed. When parents demanded accountability, the regime punished them, but not the corrupt officials responsible. Ai mobilised hundreds of volunteers to document the names of the victims and created an art installation with the children’s schoolbags. He was attacked by police in Sichuan, an assault that required him to have emergency brain surgery in Germany. Again, he documented every step online.
By the time the Olympics opened in August, he had denounced the use of the games for state aggrandisement. A year after the earthquake, he had collected the names of 5,212 dead children and posted them online. The government shut down his blog and installed surveillance cameras in his home. He posted pictures of the surveillance cameras and in 2010 created a marble version, later exhibited in the Lisson Gallery in London. In 2011, the Shanghai authorities ordered the demolition of the studio they had invited him to build.
His detention was not a surprise. He was held without charge for 10 months before the authorities brought a tax case against the company he was involved with—a communist version of the Al Capone prosecution. Since his release, he has been effectively confined to his studio, but his international career has barely faltered, with larger and more ambitious installations, including one in the abandoned prison of Alcatraz that featured 175 portraits of political activists and prisoners of conscience made of 1.2m Lego pieces.
Nothing short of permanent detention will stop Ai’s flow of creativity. China’s dilemma is that it is straining to capture the world’s affection through state directed culture, but is unable to celebrate and can barely tolerate, one of its most gifted sons.
