China Digital Times

China news tagged with: Ai Weiwei (93)

• Art & Politics a Potent Mix

  

  The Sydney Morning Herald reports on “The Big Bang,” the White Rabbit Gallery‘s exhibition on contemporary Chinese art:

  Wang Zhiyuan’s Thrown to the Wind, a three-storey tower of plastic containers that spirals towards the roof of the gallery in Chippendale, dwarfed guests as they gathered to hear Judge praise the show last Thursday, which features the work of 40 artists from the collection of Judith Neilson, wife of the billionaire fund manager Kerr Neilson… Chinese consulate officials also wandered around, no doubt impressed by Ai Weiwei’s 500-kilogram pile of individually painted porcelain sunflower seeds. The artist, who was beaten by Chinese police last year and later had surgery for a cerebral haemorrhage, is not afraid of politics.

  “Art is connected to our lives,” he said. “Our lives are political, so it becomes political.”…The show also includes exiled My Identity, by the Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso, four photos of him in Tibetan, Chinese, Indian and English settings. The third photo features the Dalai Lama, which led to its ban in the Middle Kingdom.

  …Customs officials were not too happy about China’s rubbish being imported into the country for Zhiyuian’s sculpture either, (Gallery Manager Paris Neilson) added. They relented once they were told it was for art and, more importantly, that each container had been thoroughly scrubbed.

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  • September 4, 2010 9:16 AM

• Leading Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Claims Police Attacked Him (Updated with Video)

  

  Contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei claims that he was beaten again, after reporting a previous instance of police brutality. From the Guardian:

  Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist commissioned to create an installation for the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, says that plain-clothes police assaulted him and his assistant today as he attempted to file a complaint about a previous attack.

  The artist who designed the Beijing national stadium, known as the Bird Nest, said that he was kicked and shoved outside a police station in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China.

  “Some undercover police tore our shirts and tried to grab our cameras. There were maybe 10 of them. They pushed and kicked us,” he said in a telephone interview. “Now we are being attacked because we complained about last time. It is so ironic.”

  Watch video of the incident posted on YouTube:
  

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  • August 12, 2010 12:03 AM

• An Interview with Chinese Underground Rock Musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou (左小祖咒)

  

  On China Beat, Tim Hathaway interviews underground musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou about his recent collaboration with Canadian band The Cowboy Junkies:

  TH: Can you explain why you have such a distinct singing style? What reactions has it gotten?

  ZXZZ: I’ve always wanted to make art more intimate and use a singing style that’s relatively easy to communicate with and to distill my art. But you know, when it comes to the aesthetics, most people stop at the level of enjoyment or its purported educational value, so there are people who say they like what I do. Others admire it. Others are indignant. There’s all kinds of reactions.

  TH: How did you meet Michael Timmins of Cowboy Junkies?

  ZXZZ: We’ve never actually met, nor have we ever directly communicated because we speak different languages. For the last two years a rock critic named Eric Chen has been our go between and helped us communicate. I’m very thankful that Cowboy Junkies thought high enough of my work. Their cover of “I Cannot Sit Sadly by Your Side” has been better received than my own version.

  TH: How do you compare their sound and style to other Chinese musicians? Who do they remind you of?

  ZXZZ: Cowboy Junkies’ form is similar to Xu Wei. There’s just a touch of that in there. Xu Wei also does folk, but Cowboy Junkies do a different kind of folk. They can be fairly heady sometimes. They consider me a folk artist as well. I think I’m actually a bit more wild than that.

  TH: Why did you agree to work with them?

  ZXZZ: I heard a kind of benevolence in their music. They are very creative artists and their love for music is almost beyond imagination. They really know what they’re doing when it comes to making new music.

  Later, Hathaway asks Zuoxiao Zuzhou, who is also an artist and writer, about his friendship with Han Han and Ai Weiwei:

  TH: You said you had dinner once with Ai Weiwei and Han Han. When was this and what did you talk about? Can you compare your personality and work with theirs?

  ZXZZ: Han Han and I have admired each other for a long time now but we never actually met until last summer. I introduced him to Ai Weiwei that day, and they admire each other’s work too. I thought I should let them do most of the talking. Han Han and Weiwei spoke mostly of social problems. I spoke with Han Han largely about domestic life and interests. We could have gone on forever.

  I’ve known Ai Weiwei for 16 years. I met him when he came back from New York’s East Village and came to Beijing’s East Village to hang out. We have a really close relationship. I stayed with him the whole time in 2009 when he went to Chengdu to present evidence for Tan Zuoren. I’m the guy wearing the hat on cover of the documentary Laoma Tihua [老妈蹄花].

  Ai Weiwei and Han Han’s thinking have very strong logic, and their writing is clean and agile. They conduct themselves a bit more rationally than I do. I’m more carefree and emotive. I rely more on my instincts to create and do things. I don’t use plans. Also my age is right between theirs. Weiwei is about 12 or 13 years older and Han Han is that much younger. I’m honored to have them as friends and we get along well together.

  Listen to and download the Cowboy Junkies’ song A Walk in the Park, on which Zuoxiao Zuzhou sings back-up, via Amazon here. And watch a performance by Zuoxiao Zuzhou below:
  

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  • August 11, 2010 9:27 PM

• Little Ai

  

  Evan Osnos writes about Wu Yuren, the artist who is currently being detained after he was beaten in a Beijing police station:

  I met Wu in March, not long after that protest. I was researching a profile on Ai Weiwei, the artist and activist, and I arranged to have coffee with Wu to get his sense of how younger artists like him regarded Ai’s take on the role of intellectuals in today’s China. He is in his late thirties, with a rugged outdoorsy look that owes something to the years he spent in wide open spaces in western Canada. (His wife, Karen Patterson, is a Canadian citizen.) Some people had started calling Wu “Little Ai” because of his activism; his blogs had been shut down in recent years, and he told me that he had begun to see a growing sense of social awareness among his peers.

  “In China, you can sense there is a change,” he told me. In the past, people were content to “watch the flames from the opposite side of the river,” he said, using the Chinese idiom for regarding somebody else’s troubles with indifference. “We always viewed society like that. But now we are the ones who are on fire. Each of us can be a victim. This makes us want to fight.”

  Read more about Wu Yuren via CDT.
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  • July 13, 2010 12:18 PM

• Is Ai Weiwei a Patriot? An Answer from New Yorker Archives

  

  On his blog, New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos writes about a visit poet Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei’s father, paid to the New Yorker offices in 1981:

  In 1981, Ai Qing was seventy years old, and had been politically rehabilitated for only five years, when he made his first trip to the United States, as part of a small contingent of visiting writers from the People’s Republic, which was still climbing out of the depths of the Cultural Revolution. They visited Iowa, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Indiana, California, Washington, D.C., and New York, where they paid a visit to the office of The New Yorker. They were received by E. J. Kahn, who wrote for the magazine for fifty-six years.

  In the Talk of the Town that week, Kahn described their visit. Ai Qing was the eldest of the group, which also included the novelist Wang Meng and the translator and editor Feng Yidai. Kahn wrote:

  Ai Qing, every inch the Oriental elder, was wearing Chinese cloth shoes and a Chinese suit. We asked the poet what the acceptable term was these days, with the Gang of Four on trial, for a jacket like his—what we Americans had got used to calling a Mao jacket. All smiles vanished. “This was never a Mao jacket,” Ai Qing said after a reflective pause. “I am wearing what has always been a Dr. Sun Yat-sen jacket.”

  In the years since his death, Ai Qing’s torment has become a symbol in China for the price of honesty. I often hear Chinese people wonder if Ai Weiwei has been afforded some modest latitude to agitate because some in the leadership still can’t entirely bear to acknowledge the mistreatment of his father.

  The full New Yorker piece about Ai’s visit can be downloaded here (PDF).

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  • June 5, 2010 10:46 PM

• Evan Osnos: Does Twitter Matter in China?

  

  Evan Osnos looks at the impact of Twitter in China, where it is blocked but still accessible by proxy by those who make the effort to join. Osnos describes a Twitter encounter that happened while he was eating dinner with Ai Weiwei and his fans in Chengdu:

  While I was at the dinner table, gnawing on a pig’s trotter in broth, my cell-phone buzzed with a text message from a friend in Beijing, thirteen hundred miles away: “Are you in Chengdu with Ai Weiwei? People on Twitter have identified you in a photo.” Moreover, he said, people online were already hypothesizing correctly that it must mean that a profile of Ai Weiwei was in the offing. Even by the standards of the Web, it was a startling demonstration of the rhythm and mores of micro-blogging in China. Later that night, I went back for a forensic look at the Twitter traffic that had been circulating during dinner. I found that one of the Chinese diners had posted a grainy cell-phone picture of our table, with my face among a dozen tiny smudges. From there, Twitter users in Beijing and Cambridge, Mass., had picked out some faces they recognized, sent on the info in Chinese or English, where it caught the eye of my friend in Beijing, who closed the loop by sending me the text message. All before we had finished eating our pig’s feat.

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  • May 20, 2010 8:05 AM

• Unhappy Picture for Beijing’s Art Hotbed

  

  Asia Times looks at the impending demolition of Caochangdi, the Beijing artists’ zone founded by Ai Weiwei:

  …Like other artist communities that have come before it, Caochangdi is in jeopardy. In mid-April, residents were given notices of eviction and told that the suburb would be demolished to make way for government projects, business development and, ironically, a “Cultural District”.

  The notice, vague on timing and similar to one received last summer, originated from the village government office. “Following the progression of urbanization, our village has been listed for demolition and eviction, but the time has not been specified,” it read.

  The threat of demolition arrives as the bohemian art zone has started coming into its own. Last month, Three Shadows spearheaded the PhotoSpring photography festival, modeled after the Arles festival in France. PhotoSpring, which involves 27 galleries and over 200 artists, drew more than 5,000 people on opening weekend and will run until June 30.

  Read more about the demolition of artists’ colonies in Beijing via CDT.

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  • May 19, 2010 9:25 PM

• Ai Weiwei in the New Yorker: It’s Not Beautiful

  

  In this week’s New Yorker, Evan Osnos profiles artist and activist Ai Weiwei (by subscription only). On his blog, Osnos posts a video by Alison Klayman, who is producing a documentary about Ai to be released next year:
  

  Osnos also provides a useful run-down of readings by or about Ai and his famous family. From that list:

  - Karen Smith, the curator and critic, has done invaluable work on Chinese art for years, including a long essay last year about Ai Weiwei in a book from Phaidon Press: “Ai Weiwei” (2009). This valuable book also includes an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist and a detailed review by Bernard Fibicher. Smith also has a new edition out of “Nine Lives,” her group portrait of the birth of the Chinese avant-garde.
  - Philip Tinari is the editor of Leap magazine, a new bilingual journal of contemporary Chinese art. (3030 Press has an interview with Tinari about it.) He has written some of the best critical analysis of Ai Weiwei’s work over the years, including “A True Kind of Living,” which appeared in ArtForum.
  - For more of Ai’s own writing, keep an eye out for a forthcoming collection of his blog, interviews, and other important pieces, translated and edited by Lee Ambrozy, the Beijing-based art watcher who has already produced very valuable translations of Ai’s writing. She writes at Sinopop, among other places.

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  • May 18, 2010 1:04 PM

• Xu Hui (许晖): Twitter, the Symbolic Association of Grass Mud Horses

  

  Xu Hui (许晖), independent author, publisher, blogger and Twitterer, was born in the 1960s and currently lives in Beijing. He wrote the following post on his Sina blog, translated by CDT:

  Twitter, the Symbolic Association of Grass Mud Horses (1)

  May 5, 2010, 11:41 AM

  I have to thank my country. (2) Yesterday grass mud horses in both the north and the south held banquets. In the north, the Twitter tour arrived in Beijing and people gathered to eat dinner together and discuss the case of the three Fujian netizens who were accused on false charges. (3) However, the pandas (4) accused those present of “illegal gathering, eating and drinking.” They ordered the restaurant to cut off power and electricity and also expelled [the grass mud horses]—so in the end, the event was not a total success. In the south, Ai Weiwei rushed down to Hangzhou and invited people to dinner. Even though one would have expected a somber atmosphere after more than thirty twitterers had been “invited to teas” (5), there were still nearly two-hundred twitterers in attendance. And even though the pandas monitored the entire event, the atmosphere was still extremely lively and the proceedings were brought to a successful close.

  These two banquets gave birth to a new word, “illegal eating and drinking.”（6）Twitterers have eagerly shown a desire to continue the glorious tradition of “illegal eating and drinking” and to host more of these meal-drunk [pun for “criminal”] communal dinners.

  Look, Twitter Always Touches People Like This

  One day in April at around 5:00 in the afternoon, someone posted a tweet on Twitter, “Oh Twitter god, tell me are there any twitterers in Dali?” By 7:00 I was already sitting down to do some “illegal eating and drinking” with Anzhu (7) at a Guizhou mutton restaurant. This twitterer brought along his elderly father and a Taiwanese friend. During dinner, the Taiwanese friend could not really understand why Anzhu and I hit it off so well. She said that in Taiwan, Twitter is just an internet service. I told her that Twitter means something completely different in the mainland than what it means in Taiwan. That is why when Twitterers in the mainland run into each other they always have a special kindred spirit type of feeling.

  Many years ago when I commented on controversy surrounding Peking University’s ranking of “The Ten Most Uncivilized Behaviors” (8) I wrote the following: “Human bodies will forever keep the dictators awake at night with a mixture of love and hatred. Fleshy human bodies are the vessels of ingratiation but are also the tools of sedition. Without these bodies the rulers would have nothing to rule over. However, what fills them with silent dread are associations amongst these human bodies. From the perspective of an autocracy, “excessive closeness” between two human bodies is not permitted because it may set off a sort of avalanche effect—it may cause “excessive closeness” between even more and more human bodies which will set off “excessive closeness” between innumerable human bodies. Dictators despise this sort of outcome. Associations between human bodies are the source of their paranoia and will forever keep them worrying awake at night.

  This is the autocracy’s Achilles’ heel; they are delighted when with the wave of a hand they can control gatherings of people such as reviews of the troops or patriotic assemblies. What they fear the most are gatherings of people that they cannot control with the wave of a hand, such as any manner of protests, such as twitterers’ scrutiny of the case of the three Fujian netizens who were wrongly accused, or such as the two grass mud horse banquets that were held last evening.

  I call Twitter the “symbolic association of grass mud horses.” It is just like Michael Anti (9) said, Twitter is the first uncensored, public, free speech zone in China’s autocratic history. Besides Twitter, no other domestic microblog can say the same. According to somewhat incomplete statistics, there are approximately 150 thousand Chinese Twitter accounts, of which about 80 thousand are active. This small bunch of people from varying backgrounds each find their own way over the Great Firewall of China (GFW) to gather together on this small Twitter platform. There, they speak unrestrainedly, no topic is off limits. What a harmonious scene of free speech! This is what I told Anzhu’s Taiwanese friend: because people in Taiwan have free speech, they look at Twitter as just a kind of internet service; however, we do not have free speech, that is why this small group of “free speech pioneers” naturally have this special kindred spirit feeling amongst themselves.

  These meetings together in real life of twitterers who harbor basically the same demands has emerged as a kind of symbolic “association.” Even though this is just a symbolic “association” it is enough to distress the dictators’ delicate hearts. It has caused them to tighten things up as they face imaginary foes whom they treat as formidable enemies. Perhaps that’s because they know that revolution is all about inviting friends to dinner parties. (10)

  Translator’s note:
  1 The grass mud horse, which sounds nearly the same in Chinese as “f*** your mother,” was originally created as a response to government censorship of obscene content. It has since developed an additional meaning than its homonym; one who is a “grass mud horse” is someone who is web-savvy and critical of government attempts at censorship.
  2 The phrase, “I have to thank my country” is a sarcastic phrase used after mentioning an action taken by the state with only minor benefits and substantial losses or costs. For example, “The world should really thank the country for spending USD 58 billion on such a great World Expo,” or “Kim Jung-Il should really thank the country for showing him such a good time while he’s in China.” It can also be used when the government takes small measures to address a problem the government is accused of being responsible for. For example, “I have to thank my country for ending the cultural revolution,” or, “I have to thank the country for punishing the two people who were responsible in the tainted milk scandal.”
  3 The three Fujian netizens, “Fan Yanqiong (范燕琼), Wu Huaying (吴华英), and You Jingyou (游精佑) were convicted of ‘slander’ for posting articles and video online urging government officials to investigate the alleged rape and murder of a young woman.” From http://chrdnet.org/2010/04/16/three-fujian-digital-activists-convicted-as-thousands-gather-in-landmark-protest/
  4 The panda is one of China’s national treasures (guobao). Incidentally, “national treasure” sounds the same in Chinese as the Domestic Security Department, or DSD. The DSD（国内安全保护支队）is a branch of the police force within the Ministry of Public Security, specializing in collecting intelligence, infiltrating and dealing with political dissidents, human rights activists, petitioners, religious groups as well as “subversive” activities in the cultural, educational and economics domains.
  5 Drinking Tea” (喝茶) is now a common vocabulary in online political discourse. It refers to the widespread practices by DSD police or other authorities to harass, intimidate and conduct information-gathering on citizens for their political activities. For an account of one of these “teas” see CDT’s post here.
  6 The phrase ”Illegally doing something” originated from an event in which a group of netizens went to Google’s China office to dedicate flowers when they heard that Google wass pulling out China, and the building security guards told them that their action was the “illegal laying of flowers.” After that, “illegally laying flowers” became a hot phrase online, especially among Chinese twitterers.
  7 Anzhu (literally “peaceful pig) is a netizen’s screen name.
  8 In 2005 Peking University ranked the Ten Most Uncivilized Behaviors. There was some discussion about the fact that “excessive closeness amongst lovers” made the list. The other nine uncivilized behaviors were; being late to or skipping class, carelessly spitting phlegm, stepping on the lawns, disturbing others’ rest in the dormitories, littering, cheating on exams, reserving seats in the library for excessive amounts of time, destroying public property, and not turning off cell phones in the classroom or library.
  9 Michael Anti is a Chinese journalist and blogger. His Chinese blog can be found here.
  10 This is a parody of a famous quote by Mao Zedong in which he said, “Revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

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  • May 15, 2010 9:32 PM

• Ai Weiwei (艾未未): Commemoration (念)

  

  Ai Weiwei’s latest performance piece is a three hour and forty minute recording of the reading the names of all 5206 children who died in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan:
  

  If the embedded video does not work, it can be heard here.

  All the children’s names are listed here.

  From ChinaGeeks:

  “Reading”, posted to the web in the form of a three-and-a-half-hour-long MP3, is a recording of netizen volunteers reading the names of every single student who died in a school in the Sichuan earthquake1.

  Ai posted the recording with the following message:

  “Presenting to friends a work that shows the voice of the students killed in the Sichuan earthquake: “Missing”. It represents the memory of the lives that have been lost and the anger at the covering-up of the tofu-buildings2. Respect life, refuse to forget.”

  Ai Weiwei also has being using Twitter to re-publisize names of students died in the collapsed schools in the Sichuan earthquake. The following screenshot is from blogger ijay:

  

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  • May 12, 2010 6:30 PM

• Lunch with the FT: Ai Weiwei

  

  The Financial Times interviews artist and activist Ai Weiwei during a trip to Hong Kong:

  As our soup – a vivid orange colour worthy of splattering on canvas – arrives, I ask him about his distaste for nostalgia. His Paris-educated father was denounced during the anti-rightist movement of the late 1950s when Ai was just one year old, and sent into internal exile with his family to Manchuria and the deserts of Xinjiang. During the Cultural Revolution, Ai’s father spent years cleaning toilets as part of the campaign against bourgeois intellectuals. “Of course, I had to help my father burn all the books and destroy all the artefacts,” he says, pausing, with a piece of focaccia hovering above his soup. “Anything related to humanity was destroyed,” he adds, stressing the word “humanity”, the quality he feels most lacking in modern China.

  Rather than wallow in nostalgia, he wants to ransack the past and strike out into the future. Enthusing about the potential of the internet to connect people and unleash a spirit of inquiry, he says: “We are in a new world, and this new world offers the opportunity for us to reconnect our knowledge and to start anew.” But, I wonder, didn’t his childhood experience during the Cultural Revolution teach him to treasure history, not to splatter it with paint or to cover it with the Coca-Cola logo? (As an artist he has done both to Ming vases.) “We are learning from the past,” he says emphatically. “You have to know it to destroy it. You only can destroy something by being an expert in it. An ordinary person can’t destroy a bridge. Only a structural engineer can do that.”

  Even I can smash a vase, I say, alluding to his 1995 work. “Well, you never did it,” he retorts. “People just can’t release their hands and let gravity do the work. I never hesitated.”

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  • April 23, 2010 6:36 PM

• Ai Weiwei: Social Media a Great Agent of Social Change in China

  

  Via Shanghaiist, Thomas Crampton interviews artist activist Ai Weiwei about social media:

  Journalist-turned-digital-media-man Thomas Crampton speaks to Ai Weiwei, one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese government in the art world, about social media and the impact that it’s having on contemporary China.

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  • April 19, 2010 3:57 PM

• Ai Weiwei (艾未未): Laoma Tihua (老妈蹄花) (Video) (Updated)

  

  Artist/activist Ai Weiwei has produced an eight-part documentary about his last trip to Chengdu in August 2009 to testify on behalf of imprisoned activist Tan Zuoren. The video includes footage of the incident in which Ai was beaten by security guards. Ai later underwent emergency brain surgery while traveling in Germany due to injuries sustained during the beating.

  On Twitter, Ai Weiwei said today that he returned to the Xi’an Road police station in Chengdu, together with lawyer Xia Lin, Professor Ai Xiaoming, and three documentary filmmakers to file a report about the beating. He spent four hours filling out forms. The police brought one video camera and Ai’s crew had four, so the two sides videotaped each other throughout the process.

  The video below has English subtitles. Thanks to Diane Gatterdam for providing the links.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Update: ChinaGeeks summarizes the key moments of the film, and gives an update on Ai’s recent activities, here.

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  • April 5, 2010 9:53 PM

• Ai Weiwei’s Barely Something Exhibition Opens at the DKM

  

  The Art Daily reports on the opening of the new Ai Weiwei exhibit, “Barely Something,”  at the Museum DKM in Duisberg, Germany:

  The exhibition at DKM, realized on the occasion of Ruhr 2010, does not seek to downplay the sheer fascination that Ai Weiwei’s work generally musters. Rather it proposes the next step which is to challenge those Western perceptions of China and its political system which are nothing than misunderstandings. As a figure, Ai Weiwei is neither the exemplary dissident, the lonely hero in the face of a sinister system, nor is he Mr. Big – the sole survivor of the historical avant-gardes. These roles he can play (and he plays them with acumen and cunning) but they are not the real thing. They do not match the artist’s conceptual intelligence.

  Ai Weiwei’s vision is marked by a high degree of sobriety and scepticism, and both are evident in his understanding of how precarious all things material can be. Besides showing new pieces, Barely Something draws mainly on early work from the 80s, a period that the artist spent in New York. It also traces his activities as a figure on the unofficial Chinese art-scene – such as curating subversive exhibitions or editing anthologies, the explicit purpose of which were to address a lack of artistic education in China, particularly in relation to Modernism.

  In order to communicate the depth, range and precision of this artist’s work to Western audiences it has been essential to stick to certain core concepts. Subsequently, a common thread appears in the exhibition, a thread that connects old Chinese craft (in porcelain and wood), the formation of groups (with 1001 Chinese visiting documenta 12 in Kassel), and the initiative for informal, anti-systemic research (about the schoolchildren that died in the Sichuan earthquake but have been officially neglected). Faced with the spectacle of violent destruction, be it in the form of the Cultural Revolution’s collective brainwashing or through capitalist modernization à la China, Ai Weiwei adheres to what Charles Merewether calls the “newness of tradition”. DKM which houses a considerable collection of antique Chinese artefacts, serves as a proper, living context for a presentation of the artist’s work.

  See also past CDT posts on Ai Weiwei.

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  • March 21, 2010 9:28 AM

• Ai Weiwei: ‘I Have to Speak for People Who are Afraid’

  

  In the Guardian, Tania Branigan profiles Ai Weiwei, who is currently in the U.S. where he has done several interviews about the role of social media such as Twitter:

  Indeed he has so much to say that the 53-year-old is not only China’s most famous living artist, but also a constant irritant to its authorities. When Tate Modern announced recently that it had commissioned him to fill its Turbine Hall later this year, it was a welcome reminder of his work, which in recent times has become almost overshadowed by his social and political criticism. Ai is now perhaps best known for his angry and sustained denunciations of officialdom through interviews, documentaries and above all the internet.

  Around 26,000 people follow his volley of outrage and satire, facts and aphorisms, on Twitter: “No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy; no melees can be more exciting than those in cyber space,” read one recent missive.

  “People often say I started to become too outspoken after a certain period. It’s all because of the internet – if we didn’t have this technology I would be same as everybody else; I couldn’t really amplify my voice,” he says.

  But the voice itself was forged in his earliest childhood. “I experienced humanity before I should. When I was very young,” he says. If that sounds grandiloquent, consider his history: Ai spent years of his childhood in a labour camp in the far north-west of China, on the edge of the Gobi desert. His father, Ai Qing, was an artist and one of China’s most revered modern poets, but fell foul of the late 1950s anti-rightist campaign. Life was precarious, and his parents had little time to spare for their offspring. “It was like being a little boy in the centre of a storm. Just always scared or surprised by surroundings that you cannot make sense of. And you have no comparisons because you have no memory of what another life can be,” he says.

  Watch the Guardian’s video report here.

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  • March 18, 2010 2:45 AM

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