艾未未工作室：念 (nian)

A sound work by thousands of volunteers, each of who read out a name of the killed students by the 512 Si Chuan earthquake in 2008.
Ai Weiwei Studio.

BBC：艾未未专题纪录片（Ai Weiwei, Without Fear or Favor）

documentary

Ai Weiwei // concept

back

case study: Ai Weiwei // quotes: china

我说实话，我是确实不喜欢中国！在北京能说出这个话的，也就是我，我确实是不喜欢中国。因为这个中国，没有任何能让我喜欢的地方。尽管我想努力，但办不到。这并不是说因此我就要去选择外国，我没有这种愿望。

I am telling the truth, I definitely do not like China! In Beijing, no one else but me be able to make such a statement, I definitely do not like China. The reason being, this China, lack of anythings likable to me. Even though I like to try (to like China), but no can do. This is not saying like because of it, I would move overseas, well, I do not have such a desire.

case study: Ai Weiwei – Fairytale // quotes: art / identity

As for the meaning of "fairytale," Ai said it is "a simple desire for happiness."
"Fairytale is a work which relates to social, political and cultural aspects," he says.

"I don't even care whether it is an art work." 

“This process made people really realize what it means to be a man or woman as an identity and with a Nation: you have to go through the system, and the system can be simple or more complicated”.

"This becomes a very foreign experience in anyone’s personal life,” an experience that will help each participant to think differently. The logo designed for the project strictly follows this logic: I°I00I graphically links the number to the “F” in “Fairytale,” and at the same time conceptually emphasizes “1,” and not “1001”: 

“That means,” Ai Weiwei states, “that in this project 1001 is not represented by one project, but by 1001 projects, as each individual will have his or her own independent experience.”

Re: Ai Wei Wei

From Bonny Dot Cassidy & Rory Dufficy


From: bonnidot@hotmail.com
To: rory_dufficy@hotmail.com
Subject: Ai Wei Wei – what did you think?


Dear R,

Ai Wei Wei's Under Construction comprises just four outstanding works, to which the rest of the survey offers almost no comparison. These great aesthetic leaps in his work are difficult to account for. The first, Ruyi, is a porcelain rendition of something between a manta ray and an intestinal tract, flushed with bleeding streaks of pink, blue and yellow colour and arched as if it were still pulsing from a live body. The second, Bench and Bed, reconstitute timber from Qing dynasty temples into glossy, polished seismographic undulations. Their ends, with the wooden sections fitted together, make intricate parquetry maps that are disconcerting and fine. And finally, Fairytale, the multifaceted, living artwork documented in over three hours of gobsmacking film, is as fascinating and real as the porcelain organs, and just as gut-wrenching. Like the (somewhat inexplicable) photographs of Ai Wei Wei's installations in the Tate, the film is not the work itself but a remnant. What do we call the event that takes the title: a performance? Cultural intervention? Charity? Sensation? Or, to use the terms of our favourite Jesuit, Michel de Certeau, the everyday? With Fairytale Ai Wei Wei has taken his tired message and translated it through the bodies, minds and lives of 1, 001 people. It's at this point that his activism becomes truly interesting.

So what happens in between? A repeated narrative of the human effort to create foundations, specifically China's attempt to replace, refashion or raze its physical, aesthetic and historical bed. Ai Wei Wei finds a plethora of forms with which to reiterate this message - he's nothing if not technically flexible and confident - but this doesn't alleviate the heavy-handed and simplistic conceptualization of his Han vase emblazoned with 'Coca-Cola', or a photographic triptych of the artist smashing an ancient vase. The motif of salvaged Qing timber is arresting but the act itself, on which the work relies, doesn't have the same strength as 'Fairytale' to transport an audience further. I feel that Ai Wei Wei is a man of ideas and thought, not always of aesthetic finish; or is it that everything he's done until Fairytale has been a building-toward that work, with a few passing flashes that have anticipated its unique strength?

Love,


Bonny




From: rory_dufficy@hotmail.com
To: bonnidot@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: Ai Wei Wei – what did you think?




Dear Bon,

I agree with you almost wholly and am thus paralyzed. I'm further confound by what I see as two other problems in writing about Ai Wei Wei, the first being, as you suggest, the frustratingly ephemeral nature of much of the work on display (the photos of Wei Wei giving the finger to various western and eastern cultural monuments were particularly egregious). The second is the trouble in writing about Wei Wei in a way (way) that avoids the usual bromides about the 'lightning fast' change that is occurring in much of China. It is difficult to situate ourselves as (western) viewers without resorting to these clichés, and in some way I think he is deliberately setting out to problematise that relationship. In, for example, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Wei Wei seems to be challenging us with the deliberate destruction of what received opinion considers to be valuable cultural heritage - in each photo of the triptych he stares imperiously at the camera, challenging the viewer to come up with an appropriate response. Of course, the work, made in 1995, could also be read as a challenge to the Chinese viewer with an allegory of apparently pointless destruction, a thought that might occur to those in China watching the rapid erasure of heritage in the rush to modernize. The same ambivalence can be seen in Wei Wei photographs of construction sites and new high rises that already seem to be heading towards desuetude.


As for Fairytale, it too might be looking to complicate the viewer. In one way, of course, it is exactly what it says it is: a fairytale where poor Chinese get to see the world for the first time, riding on the coat-tails of an heroic artist. Wei Wei complicates this (again) by housing the holidaymakers in workhouse dormitories for the edification of well-heeled, culturally-sophisticated art viewers (the piece was, after all, for Documenta). This, then, is once again turned back in on itself by the incredibly moving documentary of these people’s experiences, and one feels that if the entire point of Fairytale was to tell their stories then it justified the enormous expense in way that art of this nature rarely does. Wei Wei's work might well be 'under construction', but this work, which was in effect demolished, is imperishable.

Love,
Rory

case study: Ai Weiwei – Fairytale // 99 questions

Apart from providing their basic information, applicants had to answer 99 questions, such as

"Have you been to Germany?", "What is a fairytale?", "Do you know how to cook?", "Can art change the world?" and "Do you believe in evolution?"

Ai says he read the answers of every applicant, but the answers are not directly related to whether an applicant would be accepted. His main standards in choosing the candidates are "those who are not able to travel overseas under normal conditions, or those to whom traveling overseas has a very important meaning." 

The 1001 Chinese travelers will be in this Documenta as tourists, viewers and as part of the artwork.
 
"In their mind, they had a chance to go to Germany because Ai is doing a charitable deed,"

Ai also asked Beijing-based artist Jin Le to invite four people from his home in the Xinlian Village, Yepu Township, Tianshui, of Northwest China's Gansu Province, to participate. In the end the whole village had a meeting to choose four people who could represent different age groups: Jin Nunu, 60, Jin Maolin, 45, Li Baoyuan, 43, and Sun Baolin, 27. 

When the four farmers came to Beijing to apply for visas, they brought Ai some presents: chili pepper, pickle, hand-made shoes, and a silk banner that reads "Gongde Wuliang" ("endless merits and virtues"). 

"Many people ask me what they are going to do in Kassel, and a woman asked me if she had to perform naked," said Ai.

"I told them they needn't do anything. I just want them to go to Kassel, be happy, relax, see the show, and come back safely."

In Kassel, Ai will meet people, conduct interviews, cook and maybe do a bit of hairdressing. "I used to cut hair for classmates when I was in boarding school, so I can be a barber," he said.

case study: Ai Weiwei – Fairytale // quotes

 

"Then the idea came to bring 1,001 Chinese people to view the exhibition as audience, and create a work of itself. The basic concept behind the work is to create a condition which encourages self experience and extends people's participation of art."

Ai Weiwei – Fairytale

Project for Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007

“Is modernity our antiquity?”, “What is bare life?” and “What is to be done?”,

 

 

Once upon a time, a big book was lying among piles of others on the large wooden table of internationally acclaimed polymath artist, curator, writer, publisher and architect Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing), one of the most complex and influential personalities in the development of Chinese contemporary art for over twenty years. It was a book about space. Ai Weiwei cheerfully showed his guests a quotation by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the pioneering Russian space theorist, printed on one of the first pages:

First inevitably comes the idea, the fantasy, the fairy tale. 

Then scientific calculation.
Ultimately, fulfillment crowns the dream.

These words condensed the whole process, conceived as an artwork itself, of the large-scale, multi-faceted project about “possibility and imagination” that Ai Weiwei will present this summer at Documenta 12.

In reply to the three leitmotifs of the exhibition -

“Is modernity our antiquity?”, “What is bare life?” and “What is to be done?”,

Ai Weiwei will bring to Kassel, native town of the famed, fable writing Grim Brothers, an extremely extensive, variegated and inestimably valuable documentation of this moment in history, a concrete yet poetic evidence of the historical, socio-cultural, human landscape of today’s China. 

The project requires enormous financial, organizational, technical and human resources. With a 3.1 million Euro budget—sponsored by the Leister Foundation, Switzerland, the Erlenmeyer Foundation, Switzerland and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing-Lucerne—Ai Weiwei has merged his dream with reality, creating his Fairytale.

In terms of size and concept, Fairytale is the biggest and the most multilayered work ever developed by Ai Weiwei, and one of the most ambitious projects ever presented in the history of Documenta . Consisting of three installations, a part of the project will also include living individuals: Fairytale – 1001 Chinese Visitors is a living installation involving 1001 Chinese citizens who will visit the small town of Kassel (population 194,796) in a trip fully designed by Ai Weiwei and organized by the more than 30 people currently working in the FAKE team, the temporary travel agency that the artist set up for the occasion.

The 1001 Chinese travelers will be in this Documenta as tourists, viewers and as part of the artwork. The travelers will be divided into 5 groups, each group traveling in succession between June 12 and July 9, 2007, and were selected from the more than 3,000 people who enthusiastically reacted to the travel offer application published by Ai Weiwei on his personal blog (also a part of the project) over a three day period. Thanks to the support of the sponsors, as well as the Directors of Documenta, Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the German Ambassador to China, Volker Stanzel, Ai Weiwei was able to initiate an enormous process with several different aspects, including: the planning of the tourist and educational activities, the location of suitable infrastructures, the creation of proper living and sanitary conditions, the design of a specially created travel-set (luggage, clothes, computer related technology, etc.) and utensils and furniture, the recruiting of personnel (cooks, video makers, photographers, etc.), the processing of visa applications, the purchase of flight tickets, and travel insurance. 

Ai Weiwei’s travelers, whose ages range from 2 to 70, come from dissimilar social classes and have dissimilar occupations and lifestyles: among them, for example, are policemen, teachers, students, artists and designers, but also farmers coming from a remote minority village in Guanxi Province, where women, not having a fixed name or identity card, were out of the public register before starting the bureaucratic procedures connected with Fairytale. Ai Weiwei comments:

“This process made people really realize what it means to be a man or woman as an identity and with a Nation: you have to go through the system, and the system can be simple or more complicated”.

One of the topics stressed in Fairytale is the person as a single individual (as opposed to a mass or collective), with his or her own unique story, background, ways of thinking and fantasies. For this reason each participant was asked to fill out a form with 99 questions and is filmed during the preparatory stage, during the trip and after returning to China by Ai Weiwei’s professional documentary team. If Ai Weiwei decided to offer a journey to a place about which many applicants never even heard before, to which many would have never traveled by their own accord or because of financial restrictions, it is because, as he says, “this becomes a very foreign experience in anyone’s personal life,” an experience that will help each participant to think differently. The logo designed for the project strictly follows this logic: graphically links the number to the “F” in “Fairytale,” and at the same time conceptually emphasizes “1,” and not “1001”: “That means,” Ai Weiwei states, “that in this project 1001 is not represented by one project, but by 1001 projects, as each individual will have his or her own independent experience.”

(I°I00I)

Besides Fairytale – 1001 Chinese Visitors, the second large-scale installation by Ai Weiwei for Documenta 12 is Template, a work that will be exhibited in the courtyard of the greenhouse designed by Lacaton and Vassel also known as the “Crystal Palace,” a temporary building erected ad hoc for Documenta 12. The architecture of Template is comprised of late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden windows and doors which formerly used to belong to destroyed houses in the Shanxi area, Northern China, where entire old towns have been pulled down. Ai Weiwei bought the last fragments of that civilization and relocated them in a completely contemporary setting: “It really is a mixed, troubled,

questioning context,” explains the artist, “and a protest for its own identity.” Once counted, the pieces of which Template is made up surprisingly turned out to be exactly tantamount to 1001, a coincidence that Ai Weiwei finds significant. The wooden architectural elements of Template are joined together in five layers per side, forming an open vertical structure having an eight-pointed base. In spite of its large size (7.2 x 12 x 8.5 m), from afar the installation conveys the illusion of being something foldable, like a gigantic three-dimensional papercut. Where the external framework is massive and

regular, the internal part of each wall made out of windows and doors is shaped according to the volume of a hypothetical Chinese traditional temple, giving the impression that the whole wooden construction was assembled around a building that later has been removed. While standing in the middle of Template, the viewer is surrounded by a space that is fictional, abstract and ethereal. Ai Weiwei explains: “To me the temple itself—you know I’m not religious—means a station where you can think about the past and the future, it’s a void space. The selected area—not the material temple itself—tells you that the real physical temple is not there, but constructed through the leftovers of the past.”

In Ai Weiwei’s eyes, “events like Documenta or Fairytale are like temples.” This idea serves as the point of departure for Fairytale – 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs, the third installation of Ai Weiwei’s Documenta project. The work is comprised of 1001 late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden chairs that will be spread in groups around the different exhibition venues. Islands for discussion and communication, the groups of chairs were also conceived as “stations for reflection” not only for Ai Weiwei’s 1001 Chinese tourists, but also for the citizens of Kassel and all the visitors coming from all over the world in order to visit Documenta.

Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale will stage a massive encounter between totally different cultures, each confronting the Other and the unknown, in a context that is both familiar and strange. If Ai Weiwei will introduce the Chinese to the exotic, fabled land of Kassel, he will also bring the feared Asian dragons into the context of a small European town. “Kassel is a place where people gather, live and disappear on their own paths once the visit is over,” states Ai Weiwei, “I think that past and future, these two realities, which are both internal and external to each person, are all integrated in very different forms and possibilities that make each individual unique, with his or her own life, landscape, possibilities… To me it’s just reality. It can be sad, it can be magical, it can be wonderful, it’s a way for me to approach reality and to try and grab as much as possible. The whole West-East imagination or fear will be under the moon, across the street: they will meet. There is such a hype around China. Well, it is about 1/5 of the whole world’s population. There are a lot of fantasies and concerns about this country. I think that now it’s time that all these fantasies about life and art can meet.”

By Nataline Colonnello

All the quotations by Ai Weiwei are excerpts of an interview with the artist held in his Beijing studio on April 3, 2007.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne

case study: Ai Weiwei – Fairytale // Pictures

"... an experience that will help each participant to think differently"

Fairytale - 1001 Chinese visitors

 

documentary

photographs

 T Shirts

 USB-Bracelets

1001 Qing Dynasty wooden chairs

 

 Template

 

 "To me, events such as documenta or Fairytale are like temples."

Inside Out: New Chinese Art // chinese avant garde (chronologie)

Inside Out: New Chinese Art is the first major exhibition to present the dynamic new art being produced by artists in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and by selected artists who emigrated to the West in the late 1980s. Including works dating from the mid-1980s to the present (some commissioned for this exhibition), Inside Out focuses on works of art that explore the complex relationship between culturally specific issues and larger developments of a modern/postmodern age. Within this context, artists are appropriating and transforming both conventional Chinese aesthetic idioms and contemporary Western vocabularies to negotiate the cultural differences between past and present, self and other.

chronologies
1977
The Cultural Revolution (CR) ends with Mao Zedong's death in October 1976. But the change in leadership does not immediately result in new cultural values. From 1977 to late 1978, artists continue to produce work in the CR style, substituting new leaders for the former cast of characters. However, a few small-scale group exhibitions organized by artists feature landscape and portrait painting, challenging conventions that demand overt political/ideological subject matter in art.
...
The Stars are principally self-taught artists (i.e., not trained in the Academy) and are the first influential avant-garde group, challenging both aesthetic convention and political authority. Their use of formerly banned western styles, from Postimpressionism to Abstract Expressionism, is an implicit criticism of the status quo. The group's first exhibition, in September 1979, is a provocative display of work hung without official permission on the fence outside the National Gallery, Beijing. After the exhibition is disrupted by the police, the artists post a notice on Democracy Wall and stage a protest march. The Stars' first formal exhibition (Xing xing huazhan), held in Beihai Park, Beijing, in November, includes 163 works by 23 nonprofessional artists. 
... 
 1990
As a result of the post-Tiananmen tightening down, as well as ongoing commercial pressures, idealist avant-garde activity in China declines drastically and never fully recovers. Art publications suffer as well. In January, Fine Arts in China, which played an important role in the avant-garde movement, is closed by authorities. In September, the most popular art journal, Art Monthly, which had devoted considerable attention to the '85 Movement, is restaffed with conservatives. One of its editors, Gao Minglu, is ordered to stop all editorial work and spend time at home studying Marxism.
...
1994
Lack of government support and declining public interest forces avant-garde artists to find alternative venues for exhibiting their work: books, magazines, private homes, less populated rural areas. For instance, artists Zeng Xiaojun, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and art critic Feng Boyi fund the publication of Black Book (Heipishu), a parody of Red Flag (Hongqi), the official organ of the CCP.
...

 

matthew rodrigues comment Ai Weiwei's 'Dropping a Han urn'

present

Politics of Art

"Art affects this reality precisely because it is entangled into all of its aspects. It’s messy, embedded, troubled, irresistible. We could try to understand its space as a political one instead of trying to represent a politics that is always happening elsewhere. Art is not outside politics, but politics resides within its production, its distribution, and its reception. If we take this on, we might surpass the plane of a politics of representation and embark on a politics that is there, in front of our eyes, ready to embrace."

"It’s time to kick the hammer-and-sickle souvenir art into the dustbin. If politics is thought of as the Other, happening somewhere else, always belonging to disenfranchised communities in whose name no one can speak, we end up missing what makes art intrinsically political nowadays: its function as a place for labor, conflict, and…fun—a site of condensation of the contradictions of capital and of extremely entertaining and sometimes devastating misunderstandings between the global and the local."

See : Hito Steyerl
Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Postdemocracy

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
Read the full text of this article in the digital edition. (Subscription required.)

SHAREPRINTE-MAIL
SINGLE PAGE
RELATED LINKS
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.





Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos#ixzz1AfjYoHVF

Is ai weiwei a patriot?

IS AI WEIWEI A PATRIOT? AN ANSWER FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Posted by Evan Osnos
One of the questions I encounter most often about Ai Weiwei, the outspoken artist whom I profiled in the magazine recently, concerns his stance on China. When the question comes from the woolliest corners of the Chinese Web, as it often does, it is framed as an accusation, and a banal one at that. The more interesting version of the question is about the motivation behind his critique: Where does he place his greatest loyalty—in an idea, in the republic, in the Chinese people, or in something else?

I was reminded of that question recently, thanks to a symmetrical bit of history from the archives of The New Yorker. Ai’s father, the famous poet Ai Qing, spent two decades in domestic exile for the things he wrote, tormented by political accusations and reduced to cleaning toilets—an experience that was seared into his son’s memory.

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. Before they left, Kahn asked his guests about their time in the U.S., and Ai Qing left little doubt about feelings about China:

While they were in New York City, only Feng Yidai found time to look in on Bloomingdale’s big Chinese bazaar. “Too expensive,” he said. “Mostly, we’ve been meeting and eating. My wife told me when I left Peking, ‘When you’re in New York, I hope you smoke less, drink less, and eat fewer sweets.’ I’ve been smoking more and drinking more and eating much ice cream. You have very good ice cream.”
“This is Feng Yidai’s first trip out of China, and already he’s become American,” Ai Qing said. “I’ve been to Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and South America, but I’m still Chinese.” He offered us a strong Chinese cigarette.

“Ai Qing was a great friend of Pablo Neruda, and entertained Neruda three times in China,” Wang Meng said.

“What I like about you Americans is that you’re hardworking, aggressive, and tolerant,” Ai Qing said. “I am impressed that everybody here can study, young or old,” Wang Meng said.

Feng Yidai said, “In a San Francisco discotheque, I met a lady who was studying Chinese, and when I asked her how old she was, she said ‘Eighty-two.’ I was really amazed.” Our visitors conferred in Chinese, and then Feng Yidai said apologetically that they would have to take their leave—they had to get ready for a banquet being given in their honor in Chinatown. We asked as they were departing whether, with a new American President taking office, they anticipated any consequential change in Chinese-American relations.

“Impossible,” Ai Qing said without hesitation. “One or two individuals can’t decide that sort of thing. The trend has been toward friendship, and you can’t stop a trend.”

Thanks to Jon Michaud for help in finding this artifact, which we’ve made available here (pdf).

KEYWORDS Ai Qing; Ai Weiwei; New Yorker


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2010/06/is-ai-weiwei-a-patriot-an-answer-from-the-new-yorker-archives.html#ixzz1AfdkZesH

Galerie Urs Meile - artist in residence program

In January 2006, Galerie Urs Meile has inaugurated a new location in Beijing's quarter of Cao Changdi. The gallery's showrooms and residential complex include a living and working area for visiting artists.

Within the rapid multiplication in China of exhibitions, biennials, triennials and public spaces, Galerie Urs Meile sees its role to sustainably provide working conditions for contemporary artists which includes the support of artists in various media, experimental approaches, and their ideas.

The artist-in-residence program offers visiting artists a special opportunity to live and work in Beijing. The cultural environment stimulates new experiential horizons, perceptions, and creative processes. It offers thus conditions for the development of new artistic concepts and ideas. As a direct reaction to the unprecedented freedom and economic rewards Galerie Urs Meile is especially fostering critical discussions and developments of contemporary art by offering artists the opportunity to come up with new and interpretative concepts

The artist's residential and working space measures approx. 200 m2. The living area meets modern standards.

residency program AAA (Hong Kong)

Over the past seven years the AAA has built one of the world's most comprehensive collections of material for contemporary Asian art. We believe that the bringing together of this material offers exciting opportunities for new interpretations. For this reason, the AAA intends to establish an annual residency program in Hong Kong for artists, critics and curators working in the field. The goal of the residency is to encourage new readings of the physical material in the archive, to offer individuals the chance to work with material outside their usual comfort zones, and to support interesting ideas and projects around the idea of the ‘archive’. Individuals will be invited to Hong Kong to spend time conducting research at the AAA and work with the Research+ Department to come up with a new project idea. At the end of the residency the AAA will provide the support to present this project. In 2007, AAA held a pilot residency program for local art critic and curator Jaspar Lau Kin Wah. Entitled ‘HistoriCITY’, the program included a mini-exhibition at the archive, a series of reading groups, and a roundtable discussion on art historical writings in and on Hong Kong.

Problems of Translation

	select back to home Perspectives Call for Material Problems of Translation Performance Matters Interview with Alice Kok Donation of Material Photologue AAA Closed Screening Learning Lab
Problems of Translation
AAA presents a public discussion with Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lütgert (both 0x2620, Berlin) and Ashok Sukumaran (CAMP, Bombay), co-founders of the Pad.ma video archive. When: 11.30am-1.30pm, Thursday, 16 December 2010 Where: Asia Art Archive, 11/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Registration: enoch@aaa.org.hk Language: English Problems of translation occur not only between written or spoken languages (such as Cantonese or English), but are a much more common phenomenon. Translation is a challenge for all ‘gaps between disciplines’ (such as between art and technology). A closer look at the practices of programmers and painters, for example, might reveal that the principles and techniques they apply in their respective fields, have much more in common than is usually assumed. Problems of translation may not lie where most expected. In the art archive, the verb "archiving" implies many kinds of translation, of the qualities and potentials of artworks and related materials. In digital art archives, such translation of qualities is present in many everyday acts of scanning, tagging, and uploading. The transformation of analog art works into digital items not only changes storage mediums and handling qualities, but also enters work into completely new relations, exchanges, and equations. Digital materials tend to multiply and to leak, to both create great wealth, and to provide great distraction. ‘Digital labour’ or changed work habits is another consequence of this, which in turn changes how we think about the production and growth of such archives. To realise the digital archive's full potential means to take the idea of translation quite seriously, as a basic unit for all kinds of distributive and transformative forces, indirect effects, and creative misunderstandings. About PAD.MA PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use. Its founders see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video- making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political potentials for such material, and leads viewers into lesser-known territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or the online video clip. The PAD.MA project is initiated by a group consisting of oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View, and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP.

Galleria Continua Bejing

Galleria Continua - Ai WeiWei

Group exhibitions

REM(A)INDERS
AI WEIWEI, SUBODH GUPTA, LIU JIANHUA,
MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO, SUN YUAN & PENG YU, PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU,
NARI WARD, ZHUANG HUI & DAN'ER

10/04/2010 - 29/08/2010

REM(A)INDERS - AI WEIWEI - “《》”
2008, variable dimensions bicycle pieces

Nedko Solakov

Nedko Solakov China autumn/winter

I don't see it as politics....

See Ai Weiwei's expo with Acconci in Parasite, Hong Kong

Ai Weiwei in the wall street journal

http://www.metropolism.com/fresh-signals/ai-weiwei-in-the-wall-street-jou-1/

11/02/2010

By AI WEIWEI
China may have become the second-biggest economy in the world, but its political system remains stuck in the early 20th century. Even as Chinese people's horizons are broadening, the government clings to a one-party ideology that is hostile to personal freedom. Technology is making possible greater expression and political participation, but that has only prompted the authorities to work harder to stifle these impulses.

All this makes Google's decision to stop censoring to protect its China operations especially significant. First, it is encouraging for the Chinese people to see that a leading Internet company recognizes that censorship is a violation of basic human rights and values. Such controls damage the core ethos underpinning the Internet.

To stand up and speak out in a society in which those values are under constant attack requires courage and deserves moral support. Politicians and enterprises should not trade those basic rights for profits, because any short-term deal will only lead to long-term losses.

In several cases the judicial system has used information from an accused person's email as evidence of attempting to overthrow the government. This is a clear case showing how an authoritarian state can use technology not to benefit social life and improve political participation, but rather to violate the privacy of individuals and control their thinking, communication and expression.

From last October, I found that two of my Gmail accounts were being hacked by unknown intruders, and my Gmail messages were being automatically transferred to an unknown address. Other activists have reported the same intrusions to their Gmail accounts.

Most discouraging to those of us who are fighting for increased freedom is the tendency for developed nations to lower the bar to please China. They make excuses not to concern themselves with violations of human rights. To espouse universal values and then blind oneself to China's active hostility to those values is irresponsible and naïve.

When American officials come to China with a pretty smile and the soft tone of a so-called "friendly gesture," this only tells us how fragile and vulnerable these moral standards can be. It makes the people still in the struggle feel disappointed.

In recent months China has tightened its censorship over every medium, from the Internet to the mainstream media to instant messaging over mobile phones. This is the mark of a government that has lost confidence in its own ideology and is nervous about its power to control its own people. Stopping the free exchange of information ultimately hampers economic growth and opportunity, which is the Chinese government's main claim to legitimacy. The question then is how a state based on limiting information flows and freedom of speech can remain powerful. And if it can, what kind of monster it will become.

Mr. Ai is a Beijing-based artist and activist.

Tate

http://aiweiwei.tate.org.uk/content/635326970001

For Ai Weiwei, voicing opinions and communicating with one another is of great importance.

From October 2010 to May 2011, visitors to Sunflower Seeds can record a video; either asking him their question or answering one from him. All the videos will appear here and Ai Weiwei will respond to a selection of questions.

Tate Channel: TateShots: Ai Weiwei in NYC

Tate Channel: TateShots: Ai Weiwei in NYC

Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern: the curator’s blog | Tate Blog

Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern: the curator’s blog | Tate Blog

Gabriel Orozco

19 January – 25 April 2011

About | Visiting information | Book tickets | Events & Education

Exhibition organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in association with Tate Modern.

Creative, playful and inventive, Gabriel Orozco creates art in the streets, his apartment or wherever he is inspired. Born in Mexico but working across the globe, Orozco is renowned for his endless experimentation with found objects, which he subtly and playfully alters.

His sculptures, often made of everyday things that have interested him, reveal new ways of looking at something familiar. A skull with a geometric pattern carefully drawn onto it, a classic Citroën DS car which the artist sliced into thirds, removing the central part to exaggerate its streamlined design, and a scroll filled with numbers cut out of a phone book are just some of his unique sculptures.

Orozco’s photos are also on display, capturing the beauty of fleeting moments: water collecting in a punctured football, tins of cat food arranged on top of watermelons in a supermarket, or condensed breath disappearing from the surface of a piano show Orozco’s eye for simple but surprising and powerful images.

His art also shows his fascination with game-playing, for example a billiard table with no pockets and a pendulum-like hanging ball, or Knights Running Endlessly, an extended chess board filled with an army of knights, both of which are well-known games to which he has added an element of futility. This kind of unexpected twist makes Orozco’s work interesting to both contemporary art lovers and also anyone who wants an unusual and captivating art experience.

Global exhibition sponsor: Fundación Televisa and the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA), Mexico.

Wang Du

Le travail de Wang Du est une critique évidente de l’hégémonie des mass medias, comme principale force à la fois de manipulation sociale et économique et de mobilisation politique. Ce qu’il y a là d’intéressant, c’est que Wang Du commence sa critique en indexant l’aspect le plus « terre-à-terre » du mécanisme des médias. Autour de 1994, au début de ce travail de sculpture, il a collecté, dans les journaux et les magazines, les images des événements et personnalités les plus triviaux pour en faire des statues plus ou moins sérieuses et parfois monumentales. Ce geste de retourner sens dessus dessous les valeurs sociales les plus communément acceptées, compromettant la stratégie manipulatrice des mass médias, provoque souvent une vague de rire dans le public. Pour autant, personne ne doute qu’il implique également, de manière plus significative, une mordante critique des médias et de leur toute puissance hégémonique dans la société contemporaine.

Par la suite, Wang Du s’est consacré aux événements les plus sensationnels relayés par les médias, principalement ceux relevant du star system de la culture populaire, mais aussi ceux appartenant aux conflits géopolitiques. Il poursuit sa collecte d’images provenant de supports médiatiques variés pour en faire de grands collages. Ces images assemblées, allant de la banale anecdote à l’événement politique capital, de l’histoire vraie à la fiction, deviennent à leur tour les scénarii, voire les encyclopédies, d’un monde « réinventé » par le biais des médias eux-mêmes. Le travail de Wang Du, s’il est ouvertement provocateur, n’est pas moins amusant et visuellement rafraîchissant, que ce soit en termes de contenu – les images qu’il choisit pour constituer ses collages du monde médiatique – ou en termes de formes – le vocabulaire sculptural, l’échelle et la disposition dans l’espace, etc. Dans cette tension entre provocation et divertissement, on peut sentir une claire méfiance envers les relations artificielles entre image et sens tel qu’elles sont propagées par les médias, afin d’exercer leur pouvoir hégémonique.

Cette méfiance révèle une position tout aussi ouvertement provocatrice et avant-gardiste qui ne risque certainement pas d’être accusée de « politiquement correct.


Texte de Hou Hanru tiré de Wang Du Magazine « Je veux être un média »

CHINESE MENSENRECHTEN ONDER DRUK

http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.921411

China houdt dissidenten weg uit Oslo

China houdt dissidenten weg uit Oslo

Ai weiwei Youtube channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/aiweiweidocumentary#g/a

http://www.youtube.com/user/aiweiweidocumentary#g/a

Shangai Studio

Ai Weiwei's Shanghai Studio from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Ai Weiwei

Ai WeiWei from WKCDialogues on Vimeo.

Ai Weiwei / River Crab Feast @ Shanghai Studio

Ai Weiwei / River Crab Feast @ Shanghai Studio from An Xiao Mina (An Xiao) on Vimeo.

Peter Weibel - Dead in the head

Peter Weibel - Sex in der Stadt

Joseph Beuys - Whiskey Ad

Joseph Beuys - Sonne statt Reagan 1982

Gwangju Design Biennale

An anthropology of Youtube

Ai Weiwei - Without fear or favour (2010)

Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour (2010)

'Op losse schroeven' & 'when attitudes become form'

Book exhibiting the new art op losse schroeven and when attitudes become form 1969

FAKE COPY