“If expression needs a reason, expression itself is the reason.”
表达需要理由，表达就是理由
– Ai Weiwei’s first post on his Sina.com blog, Nov. 19, 2005
A Study In Perspective
(Ai Weiwei’s second post:)
AWWFinger.jpg
“Besides freedom, I don’t want anything.” (Ai Weiwei during interview with Jeff Kelly, BAM, Sept. 30, 2008)
Biography:
Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, photographer, curator, architectural designer and a prolific blogger. Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957; in 1958, his father, the poet Ai Qing, was declared a rightist by the government and sentenced to “reeducation through labour.” The entire family was sent to Xinjiang province, and Ai Weiwei was raised in a labour camp. During an interview at BAM, the artist recalled being forced to burn his father’s books before the Red Guards came. Ai Qing was forced to work as a hand labourer, cleaning public toilets. He was finally able to republish after 1979. As a young adult, Ai Weiwei studied film with the Fifth Generation of filmmakers at the Beijing Film Academy. He was involved with the art group “Stars” and the literature group “Today”, members of which were later repressed by the government. He left for the U.S. in 1981, and studied in Pennsylvania, Berkeley, and New York. He lived in the U.S. until 1993, when he returned to China to care for his ill father. He is married to artist Lu Qing and lives in Beijing.
Artist’s Online Presence:
* His personal website
* Blog on Sina.com. Launched November 19, 2005. To date, he has created approximately 2,400 blog posts. His blog consists of images of his artwork, photography, and documentation of his art performances, his thoughts and comments on news and events, thoughts on art, interviews, photos of his friends (of which there are many photographs of him cutting his friends’ hair), and photographs of a single candle flame.
* Blog on Sohu.com. Started November 20, 2007. To date, he has created approximately 800 blog posts.
(Please note: these two blogs are not identical, but sometimes contain identical posts. Ai Weiwei has stated that he has around four million blog visitors.)
* Blog on Bullog.com (shut down)
Ai Weiwei on Blogging:
I do my blog because this is the only possible channel through which a person can express a personal opinion in China. No newspaper, magazine or television channel would ever present your argument or ideas. I am the most interviewed person in China, even domestically, and yet even if I say something it cannot be published here: so I am talking to myself – it is ridiculous. So I felt that a blog might be a good way to create one forum in which to open one’s mind. Yet every time I sit to write I still hesitate: should I do it? What will the consequences be? I retain a simple premise in mind: my blog is an extension of my thinking – why should I deform my thinking simply because I live under a government that espouses an ideology which I believe to be totally against humanity? And this so-called communist ideology is totally against humanity. Many generations of people over decades in this nation have been hurt by this: many are dead, many have disappeared and many have been damaged, whether conscious of this reality or not. So my position is not just one person’s strange idea – these are our lives and we live in this part of the world. People in London are not going to take a position – they have other concerns. So for me this is not a ‘responsibility’: it is part of life. 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. (Index, p. 23)
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. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change. This has continued for generations – after just two or three generations deprived of continuity in education we inevitably become completely cut off from our own past. (Index, p. 25)
I grew up in this system and my father was a victim of this system and this history. If we do not access our rights it only makes their power stronger. (p. 28)
Ai Weiwei on Art:
His submission for Documenta 12 in 2007 was an installation entitled “Fairytale.” For this, he transported 1,001 people from China to the site of Documenta, the small German town of Kassell. He advertised for volunteers on his blog and received an overwhelming number of applications.
Birds Nest. info
Video discussing his disagreement with the Olympics:
Ai Weiwei refused to cooperate with government authorities. “I want to show them what arrogance is. Arrogance is not associating with the common value system. And I want to remind them what it is.” (Ai Weiwei, interview with Jeff Kelly, BAM, Sept. 30, 2008).
Please click here to read about Ai Weiwei on CDT.
