An artist takes on the system

IT’S NOT BEAUTIFUL
An artist takes on the system.
by Evan Osnos
MAY 24, 2010
Evan Osnos, Profiles, “It’s Not Beautiful,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2010, p. 54
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Video: Ai Weiwei in Beijing and Chengdu.
KEYWORDS
Ai Weiwei; Chinese Artists; Beijing, China; Lu Qing; MOMA (Museum of Modern Art); Provocateurs; Activists
ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM BEIJING about artist Ai Weiwei. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and his wife, Lu Qing, also an artist, live in a studio complex that Weiwei designed on the northeast edge of Beijing. Ai has produced installations, photographs, furniture, paintings, books, and films—the record of “a fitfully brilliant conceptualist,” as Peter Schjeldahl put it. But in the past few years he has become China’s leading innovator of provocation. This year, he will have fifteen group shows and five solo shows, including, in October, a commission to fill the Turbine Hall, at Britain’s Tate Modern. He recently joined a group of lesser-known Chinese artists as they staged a march down Chang’an Avenue—an immensely symbolic gesture, because of the street’s proximity to Tiananmen Square. Because of his overlapping identities as activist and artist, Ai has come to occupy a peculiar category of his own: a bankable global art star who runs the distinct risk of going to jail. Ai has never been invited to hold a major exhibition in his own country, and he has tepid relations with his peers. He spends much of his time on the road, but when he is in China his orbit revolves tightly around his studio complex, which has acquired a role in the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Several assistants in Ai’s studio were working on his “Citizens’ Investigation” of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, an attempt to document how and why so many children died in poorly constructed schools. Since Ai discovered Twitter, last spring, he has become one of the country’s most active users, even though it is officially blocked in China. Unsurprisingly, he has come under greater government scrutiny of late. He wrote a popular blog for years, until censors blocked it last spring. Mentions a lawsuit Ai filed against the Ministry of Civil Affairs, for not responding to his requests seeking information about earthquake victims. Describes how his father, Ai Qing, was a victim of Mao’s intellectual purges. Ai Weiwei moved to New York in 1981, and his apartment in the East Village became a way station where many of China’s future art stars camped out. In 1993, he returned to Beijing. By 1995, he had attracted some powerful patrons, and, in 2000, Ai and Feng Boyi organized a show, “Fuck Off,” as a counterpoint to the Shanghai Biennale. Mentions Documenta 12. In 2005, he began hosting a blog on the Chinese Web site Sina. He subverted the usual Chinese mode of dissent: favoring bluntness and spectacle over metaphor and anonymity. In August of 2009, Ai was in Chengdu to attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, the earthquake activist, when police broke down his hotel door and beat him. Four weeks later, doctors discovered he was suffering from a subdural hematoma caused by blunt trauma. As Ai’s life and work have become more politicized, he has fallen further out of step with peers in the Chinese art world. There is sensitivity around the question at the heart of Ai’s project: forcing Chinese intellectuals to examine their role in a nation that is not yet free but is no longer a classic closed society. Mentions Xu Bing. The degree to which China ultimately allows Ai to continue will be the true measure of how far China has—or has not—moved toward an open society.





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