profiles It’s Not Beautiful

An artist takes on the system. by Evan Osnos

he Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lives mold-breaking one of scholar-clown.” Recently, Ai was asked to create a and works on the northeast edge of At the age of fifty-three, Ai has a piece that could fill the prominent site TBeijing, in a studio complex that he de- capacious belly, close-cropped hair, a in Copenhagen usually occupied by Ed- signed for himself, a hive of eccentric meaty, expressive face, and a black-and- vard Eriksen’s statue of the Little Mer- creativity that one friend calls “a cross white beard that stretches to his chest. maid, which was being loaned to Shang- between a monastery and a crime fam- The full picture is imposing, until he re- hai. Instead of replacing it with a statue, ily.” Airy buildings of brick and concrete veals a sly and whimsical sense of humor. Ai decided to install a live closed-circuit surround a courtyard planted with grass “His beard is his makeup,” his brother, video of the mermaid in her temporary and bamboo. Ai and his wife, Lu Qing, Ai Dan, told me. home in China. The Danes thought the also an artist, inhabit one side of the In his first two decades as an artist, oversized surveillance camera that he yard, and several dozen assistants oc- Ai Weiwei (pronounced “Eye Way- designed was unattractive. “That’s our cupy the other. The place is organized way”) produced an eclectic, if erratic, real life,” he said. “Everybody is under in a spirit of radical openness: visitors stream of work: between gambling and some kind of surveillance camera. It’s roam unhindered, as does a geriatric trading antiques, he created installa- not beautiful.” cocker spaniel named Danny and a tribe tions, photographs, furniture, paintings, A few days before we talked, he had of semi-feral cats that occasionally de- books, and films—the record of “a fit- thrown his support behind a group of stroy Ai’s architectural models. Ai wan- fully brilliant conceptualist,” as Peter lesser-known Chinese artists who were ders among the buildings day and night, Schjeldahl put it in this magazine. But protesting plans to demolish their stu- making it difficult to discern when he is in the past few years Ai’s unrelenting dios in the name of development. Ai’s working and when he is not, a distinc- audacity and imagination have thrust place was unaffected, but the artists tion that has eroded further in recent him into a far more prominent role, as had approached him for advice. He told years as the line between his art and his China’s leading innovator of provo­ them, “If you protest and fail to pub- life has become indistinguishable. cation. This year, Ai will have fifteen lish anything about it, you might as well One morning in March, Ai was alone group shows and five solo shows, in- have protested inside your own house.” in his dining room, eating a bowl of cluding, in October, a coveted commis- Ai and the other artists staged a march noodles at the head of a wooden table sion to fill the cathedral-like Turbine down Chang’an Avenue, in the center long enough for a medieval banquet. Hall, at Britain’s Tate Modern. In an- of Beijing—an immensely symbolic Sunlight streamed through a two-story nouncing the commission, the Tate’s gesture, because of the street’s proxim- bank of windows. On the wall to his left director, Vicente Todolí, said that Ai’s ity to Tiananmen Square. Police blocked was a piece he made in 1993 by altering installations rank “among the most so- them peacefully after a few hundred a government poster about the dangers cially engaged works of art being made yards, but their bravado drew attention of fireworks in such a way that a large today.” far beyond the art world. Pu Zhiqiang, bandaged hand was now flipping the At times, Ai can seem congenitally a prominent legal activist, told me, “For viewer the bird. “My wife hates this one,” incapable of coöperation. He served as twenty years, I have thought that pro- he said. an artistic consultant to Herzog & De testing on Chang’an Avenue was abso- For Ai, however, the gesture resonates Meuron, the Swiss firm that designed lutely off limits. He did it. And what on the level of cosmology. The Museum China’s National Stadium for the 2008 could they do about it?” of Modern Art owns a series of photo- Olympics, in Beijing. But, before the Because of his overlapping identities graphs of the Eiffel Tower, the White Games began, he disowned the event as as activist and artist, Ai has come to oc- House, Tiananmen Square, and other a “fake smile” concealing China’s prob- cupy a peculiar category of his own: a places featuring his extended middle lems. When he is followed by plain- bankable global art star who runs the finger in the blurry foreground—a pro- clothes state security agents—as hap- distinct risk of going to jail. “There are fane travel album, of sorts, which he titled pens now and then—he likes to call the people who say that he is doing some “Study of Perspective.” In the Times, cops on them, setting off a Marx Broth- kind of performance art,” Chen Dan­ Holland Cotter wrote that the pictures ers muddle of overlapping police agen- qing, a Chinese painter and social critic, “give a sense of the versatility of an artist cies: “an absurdist novel gone bad,” as he told me. “But I think he long ago whose role has been the stimulating, puts it. surpassed that definition. He is doing

Ai Weiwei’s studio plays a role in the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Photograph by Ian Teh.

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TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 55—133SC.—Live art r19635—Critical photograph to be watched throughout the entire press run something more interesting, more am- “So-called human intelligence—we life. When he tries to make DVDs of biguous.” Chen added, “He wants to see shouldn’t overestimate it,” he said. his documentaries, duplicating services how far an individual’s power can go.” “When an accident happens, that can worry that they will be punished for asso- be nice.” ciating with him. “Not even the porno i Weiwei, whose father, Ai Qing, producers will do it,” Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a was among China’s foremost liter- i walked across the studio’s snow- rock musician who works on Ai’s media aryA figures, occupies an awkward niche streaked courtyard to the office, productions, told me. in the world of Chinese contemporary whereA half a dozen young Chinese and Ai stood up from the keyboard and art: he has never been invited to hold a foreign assistants were busy at comput- announced that it was time to go to the major exhibition in his own country, ers. Several were working on what Ai courthouse. Over the past year, his office and he has tepid relations with his calls his “Citizens’ Investigation” of the has sent more than a hundred and fifty peers. “Galleries and magazines send 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, an attempt letters to government agencies seeking in- him things, and he doesn’t even open to document how and why so many chil- formation about earthquake victims and them,” Zhao Zhao, a younger artist dren died in poorly constructed schools. construction problems, under the Free- who works as one of Ai’s assistants, Eighty pieces of paper were plastered to dom of Government Information Law. said. Chinese art has ballooned in value one of the office walls—a spreadsheet He has yet to receive a substantive re- in recent years—driven by speculators containing thousands of names and birth- sponse. Today, he was going to file suit and a generation of new Chinese ty- dates. Each day, Ai’s office posts to Twit- against the Ministry of Civil Affairs, for coons—but Ai has remained largely on ter a list of the students who were born not responding to his requests. He slid the fringes, and his work sells at prices on that day and died in the earthquake. into the passenger seat of a small black that have never matched the heights of “Today, there are seventeen,” Ai said. sedan, with a driver and a woman named his reputation: a pair of giant ceramic “The most of any day yet.” Liu Yanping, who oversees the letter- basins of freshwater pearls sold for two He slumped into a chair in front of a writing campaign. “According to the pol- hundred and nineteen thousand dol- computer and began to type. Since he dis- icy, they have to respond within fifteen lars at Sotheby’s last spring, and a three- covered Twitter, last spring, he has be- working days,” she said, clutching a sheaf legged wooden table, bent in the center come one of China’s most active users, of papers on her lap. I asked Liu if she was so that one leg rests high against the with about thirty-six thousand followers. a lawyer and she laughed. “For a long wall, sold for a hundred and fifty-three Twitter is blocked in China by the au- time, I was at home raising my child,” she thousand at Christie’s in February. thorities, but it can be reached by signing said. “On his blog, Ai Weiwei asked for Rather than sign on with a major dealer, on through a third-party server overseas, volunteers, so I wrote him an e-mail. The who could assure him higher prices, a simple technical step that has enabled work looked interesting, and I was curi- he sells directly to collectors or through Twitter to become a popular tool of com- ous.” It’s now her full-time job. (Last small galleries. “I don’t like the system,” munication in China. Ai usually spends at summer, after she publicized the trial of he told me. least eight hours a day on Twitter, and I Tan Zuoren, an earthquake activist, she Ai spends much of his time on the asked him how that had affected the time spent two days in police custody in Si­ road; he owns an apartment in Manhat- he devotes to his art. “I think my stance chuan, for “disturbing the social order.”) tan, in Chelsea. But when he is in China and my way of life is my most important We reached the Second Intermediate his orbit revolves tightly around his stu- art,” he said. “Those other works might be People’s Court of Beijing, a tall stone-gray dio complex, which has acquired a role in collectible—something you can hang on tower, with a grand arched entry and a the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of the wall—but that’s just a conventional modest office at the back, on the ground Andy Warhol’s Factory, as a magnet for perspective. We shouldn’t do things a cer- floor, for processing new cases. We passed creative people and patrons. As Philip tain way just because Rembrandt did it through a metal detector, where two young Tinari, the editor of Leap, a Chinese art that way. If Shakespeare were alive today, men in guards’ uniforms were engrossed in magazine, put it, “The ritual pilgrimage he might be writing on Twitter.” a comic book. There was a line of bank- to the House of Ai” has become a “re- Unsurprisingly, Ai has come under teller-style windows, and, at the one clos- quired stop on every foreign art-world greater government scrutiny of late. He est to us, a tiny old woman in a pink pad- itinerary.” wrote a popular blog for four years, until ded jacket was bellowing into a rectangular Ai and his wife have no children. last spring, when censors blocked it. A few opening in the glass. “How could the other He has an infant son from an extramar- months later, he discovered that his Gmail side win without any evidence?” she ital relationship with a woman who accounts had been hacked and the settings shouted. “Did they bribe the head of the worked on one of his films. They live altered to forward his messages to an un- court?” On the opposite side of the glass, nearby. He never intended to be a father. familiar address. Ai says that his bank has two women in uniform were listening with “She said, ‘Yes, I want to have the baby,’ ” received official inquiries to review his resigned expressions suggesting that she he told me. “ I said, ‘I don’t normally finances, and, last June, a pair of surveil- had been at it for a while. think I should have a baby, but if you lance cameras appeared on utility poles Ai and Liu lined up in front of win- insist, of course, it’s your right, and I outside his front gate, focussed on the dow No. 1 and, when it was their turn, will bear the full responsibility as a fa- traffic going in and out—notwithstanding slid the papers through the opening to ther.’ ” Ai, who sees his son every day, is the redundancy of monitoring somebody a middle-aged man in a tan blazer. He enjoying being wrong about fatherhood. who already broadcasts the minutiae of his looked glassy-eyed and exhausted. He

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TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 56—133SC.—#2 page—text changes read the papers carefully and identified a the spirit of the revolution. He was espe- cumstances, so he altered the tone slightly problem: “You say that you need the cially impressed with Chairman Mao, for to make it into a different “wei,” , which Ministry of Civil Affairs to make this in- whom he wrote a poem of praise that means “not yet.” Their son thus became formation public, but why are you taking began, “Wherever Mao Zedong appears / “Not yet, not yet.” an interest in this?” thunderous applause erupts.” In 1956, The family was sent to Manchuria Ai leaned over to speak into the open- when he was forty-six, he married for a and then to the remote western region of ing in the window. “Actually, according third time, and the following year his wife, Xinjiang, where Ai Qing was assigned to the policy,” he said, “everyone has a Gao Ying, a young staff member of the the job of cleaning public toilets, thirteen right to ask for this information—not writers’ association, had a son. a day. For extra food, the family collected that you have to agree.” After some back At the time, the Anti-Rightist Cam- the severed hooves of sheep discarded and forth, Ai and Liu consented to write paign, one of Mao’s purges of intellectu- by butchers, and piglets that had frozen out a description of their goals, and they als, was gathering force, and Ai Qing’s to death. When the Cultural Revolution found seats in a waiting area full of peo- devotion to the Party was called into began, things worsened. Ai Qing’s tor- ple holding similar sheaves of paper. question. He had written a fable, “The mentors poured ink on his face, and chil- “They don’t want to accept this,” Ai said, Gardener’s Dream,’’ that highlighted the dren threw stones at him. He and his “because, once it is in the legal pipeline, need to permit a broader range of creative family were sent to an area known as Lit- they have to make some kind of judg- opinions. In it, a gardener who cultivates tle Siberia, on the edge of the Gobi Des- ment.” By the time Ai and Liu reached only Chinese roses realizes that he is ert, where they had to live in an under- the window again, an hour had passed. “causing discontent among all the other ground cavern that had been used as a Now they learned that they were using types of flowers.” A fellow-poet, Feng birthing place for farm animals. They the wrong color ink. Written materials Zhi, attacked Ai Qing, saying that he were there for five years. had to be in black, and they had used had fallen “into the quagmire of reaction- Ai Weiwei prefers not to talk about blue. They sat down again to rewrite ary formalism.” his father. He seems to know that the them. They got in line again. Ai Qing was stripped of his titles and narrative is ripe for manipulation into a “Kafka’s castle,” Ai said to nobody in ejected from the writers’ association. At cliché, and their relationship was remote. particular. Two hours stretched into night, he would bang his head against His deepest impressions were of watch- three, and I asked him why he was both- the wall and demand, “Do you think I ing his father clean the toilets. “That pe- ering with this if he did not expect a re- am against the Party?” Meanwhile, Gao riod in his life was the absolute bottom, sponse. “I want to prove that the system Ying recalled in a memoir, “Ai Qing and the most painful,” Ai Weiwei said. “He is not working,” he said. “You can’t sim- I,” published in 2007, she and her hus- attempted suicide several times.” ply say that the system is not working. band had to name their infant son. The As a child, Ai Weiwei distracted him- You have to work through it.” Twenty father simply opened the dictionary and self by working with his hands, mak- minutes before closing time, the man be- dropped his finger onto a character: , ing ice skates and gunpowder. He had a hind the glass finally accepted the filing, pronounced “wei,” which means “power.” weakness for mischief and playground and Ai and Liu, satisfied, turned to leave. The irony was too great, given the cir- politics that led his father to nickname The old woman was still yelling.

i Weiwei always sensed that he was born into the wrong family—or, at least,A an inauspicious one. His father, Ai Qing, who trained as a painter, moved to Paris in 1929, at the age of nineteen, to study. There he discovered the realism of Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev, who, as he later put it, “pulled away the cur- tain on the realities of society for me.” His greatest influence, however, was the Bel- gian modernist poet Émile Verhaeren, whose descriptions of the squalid under- side of European cities focussed Ai Qing’s attention on corruption and injustice in his homeland. He returned to China in 1932, but his involvement in leftist cir- cles drew the suspicion of the Nationalist Party and he was imprisoned. Unable to paint in jail, he dedicated himself to po- etry and, after his release, joined the Com- munist Party, where he earned a reputa- “If you don’t want the light to keep shining in your eyes, stop tion for clear, accessible verse imbued with asking me how much longer I’m going to read.”

TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 57—133SC.—live art a14996—#2 page—made chinese symbols black only Jasper Johns, but the images of maps and flags baffled him, and it went “straight into the garbage.”) To practice sketching, Ai visited train stations and zoos, where he could find subjects who would sit still for nothing. He enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy, not because of any inter- est in film but because it was one of few options. He found it stifling and doctri- naire, and he gravitated instead to a group of avant-garde artists known as the Stars, who challenged state control of the arts and marched beneath the slogan “We Demand Political Democracy and Artis- tic Freedom.” He also participated in an incipient political movement called De- mocracy Wall, in which activists pro- duced magazines and posters calling for reform. But their activism was circumscribed. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping put an end to Democracy Wall; its central figure, Wei Jingsheng, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, on charges of leaking state se- crets. “I felt I can no longer live in this country,” Ai said. His girlfriend at the time was moving to Philadelphia to go to school, and, in February, 1981, he joined her.

n America, Ai studied English and en- rolled at Parsons School of Design, in INew York. He was intoxicated by the en- ergy of the East Village, which, to him, •• felt “like a volcano with smoke always bil- lowing out of the top.” He found a cheap him Cao Cao, after a famously cunning By the time Ai Qing and his family basement apartment near East Seventh ancient Chinese statesman. Ai’s parents were allowed to return to Beijing, in 1976, Street and Second Avenue, and spent his could not shield their sons from what Ai many readers had assumed that he was weekends haunting the galleries, roaming Dan called “the pressure and humiliation dead. He resumed writing, and he never the city like “a mud-fish burrowing wher- and hopelessness.” Speaking of his lost his instinct for resistance. When stu- ever there is muck,” as his brother put it in brother, he said, “He was a sensitive, dent demonstrators filled Tiananmen “New York Notes,” a short book that he fragile child, so he saw and heard more Square in 1989, Ai Qing, then seventy- wrote after a visit. than other people.” nine and in a wheelchair, asked to be Parsons was a poor fit. Ai excelled in Ai Dan, who is five years younger than pushed out to the square. With other in- the studio but hated art history: “Whoever Weiwei, lives simply, in a courtyard-house tellectuals, he signed a statement declar- Picasso’s lovers were, I had no interest.” that he shares with their mother. He is a ing, “Freedom, democracy, and the rule of He dropped out and did odd jobs— writer, though I sensed the weight of Ai law are not things that will someday sim- housekeeper, gardener, babysitter, con- Qing’s legacy: Ai Dan hasn’t finished a ply be granted to the people from above. struction worker—and dedicated himself piece of writing in years. “The Chinese All truth-seeking freedom-loving people mainly to playing blackjack in Atlantic language is too complicated,” he said, with must strive to achieve what the constitu- City. He also earned money as a sidewalk a weak smile. Ai Dan told me that their tion promises.” He died in 1996. portrait painter, avoiding customers who father never gave up his faith in the Party, Ai graduated from high school the were immigrants, like him, because they and I asked how he had rationalized his year the family returned to Beijing. He tried to bargain down the price. suffering. “He believed that those at fault had already awakened to art, and a trans- Joan Lebold Cohen, a historian of were a few and that those who suffered lator friend of the family gave him banned Chinese art who knew many Chinese art- were many,” he replied. “Intellectuals like books on Degas and van Gogh, which he ists in New York at the time, recalls visit- him believed that their fate was no dif­ circulated like talismans among his ing Ai’s building. “The whole place reeked ferent from the fate of the nation.” friends. (He also received a book about of urine,” she said. “His apartment was a

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TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 58—133SC.—live art a14733 single room, no furniture, just a bed on was thrilling to Chinese artists raised on wanted a commitment. “So I said, ‘O.K., the floor, and a television. And he was riv- academic realism. One of Ai’s earliest let’s get married,’ ” Ai recalled. “For me, eted to the television.” She went on, “It pieces was a wire clothes hanger bent into it’s just a promise. I mean, what is mar- was, I think, the Iran-Contra hearings. the shape of Duchamp’s profile. riage, right?” On a trip to New York, they And he was so excited about the idea that Ai began taking photographs, and sold gathered some friends as witnesses. “We the government would go through this breaking-news pictures to the Times. He went to New York City Hall and regis- cleansing, this agony, this ripping itself documented protests in Tompkins Square tered there.” apart. He just couldn’t believe that this Park, and had his first run-ins with the At the time, in the early nineties, the was all done publicly.” police. “Being threatened is addictive,” he Chinese avant-garde was atomized and Eventually, Ai’s English became fairly later told China’s Southern Weekend news- uninspired. “The whole scene had stag- fluent, and other Chinese artists began paper. “When those in power are infatu- nated,” Feng Boyi, an independent cura- seeking him out for help in navigating ated with you, you feel valued.” Then he tor and critic, recalled. Feng and Ai wanted the cultural quarters of New York. His tried his own hand at protest. When news to ignite interest, but they didn’t have the apartment became a famous footnote in reached New York of the crackdown in money or permission for a show. So, to- Chinese art history—a way station where Tiananmen Square, Ai went on a hunger gether with Xu Bing and Zeng Xiao- many of China’s future stars camped out, strike for several days. (After Tiananmen, jun—artists living in New York—they including the filmmakers Chen Kaige he received a U.S. green card.) decided to publish a book of images and and Feng Xiaogang, and the composer The market for Chinese contemporary essays. It was a subversive idea to print Tan Dun, who arrived in New York at art, however, was bleak. Joan Cohen re- anything without official approval, and no the end of 1985. “He started to introduce called, “One curator I approached said to publisher in Beijing would take the risk, so me, not just geographically but also spir- me, ‘We don’t show Third World art.’ ” they found a printer in the southern city of itually,” Tan told me recently. “I would When Cohen contacted the Guggen- Shenzhen, who produced two thousand ask Weiwei, ‘I want to see John Cage. I heim, she says, “not only would the cura- copies of what became known as the want to see Laurie Anderson.’ And he tor not see me but his secretary wouldn’t “Black Cover Book” (1994). They gave it would always try to find some way to see me.” Ethan Cohen struggled to find away to artists, critics, and others. They help me.” collectors for Ai’s work: “I twisted their followed it with a “White Cover Book” Ai was painting at a furious pace, but arms and said, ‘You’ve got to put up five and a “Gray Cover Book,” a trilogy that he had no buyers, so every time he moved hundred dollars to buy Weiwei’s hanger.’ ” became highly influential among the art- he would throw away his paintings and When, in April of 1993, Ai got word that ists of their generation. In his writings, Ai start over. Soon he abandoned painting his father was ill, he returned to Beijing. took aim not only at China’s suppression and began exploring the possibilities in of creativity but at another sensitive target objects. He took a violin from a friend, i moved into his parents’ courtyard, as well: fellow-artists who “fail to deliver pried off the neck and strings, and re- and artists often dropped by to hear independent criticism” and find refuge placed them with the handle of a shovel. aboutA the New York scene. One day in in a “philistine style of pragmatism and (The friend was not pleased.) When Ai’s 1994, the visitors included Lu Qing, a opportunism.” mother sent him a pair of leather shoes— soft-spoken artist born in Shenyang, who By 1995, Ai had attracted some pow- a prized possession in Beijing—he sliced was seven years younger than Ai. That erful patrons. Uli Sigg, the Swiss Ambas- them and stitched them together to cre- year, she appeared in one of Ai’s most sador to Beijing, who was amassing a vast ate a single shoe with a toe at each end, widely recognized works: a black-and- collection of contemporary Chinese art, which he called “One Man Shoe.” In white photograph in which she is stand- became an avid booster and introduced 1988, Ethan Cohen, Joan’s son, put the ing amid tourists in Tiananmen Square, him to, among others, Harald Szeemann, violin, the shoe, and other pieces into Ai’s lifting her skirt to reveal her legs and un- the curator of the 1999 Venice Biennale. first solo show, which Artspeak called “a derwear. (The timing—June, 1994—was In 2000, Ai and Feng Boyi organized a neo-Dadaist knockout.” a nod to the fifth anniversary of the Ti- show as a counterpoint to the Shanghai At a poetry reading at St. Mark’s In- ananmen demonstrations.) Ai never Biennale. The show—which they called the-Bowery, Ai met Allen Ginsberg, who planned on marriage—“the final resting “Non-Coöperative Approach” in Chi- had come to know Ai’s father on a trip to place of the wretch,” as he put it to his nese, and “Fuck Off ” in English—was Beijing. He began spending time with brother—but, after he and Lu Qing had calibrated for maximum antagonism: the Ginsberg. “He read his poems to me,” Ai been together for three years, Lu Qing most controversial piece was a photo- said. “One of the ones he wrote for his graph of the artist Zhu Yu eating what mom”—“White Shroud”—“and I didn’t was identified as a dead baby. quite understand it, but he loved reading With an emerging international repu- it.” Ai was accumulating influences. The tation, Ai sensed that it was probably time first book he read in English was “The to move out of his mother’s house. He Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to leased some vegetable fields in the village B & Back Again).” (“It was easy to under- of Caochangdi, beside the Fifth Ring stand; it was written in Twitter language.”) Road, on the fringe of Beijing, and But nobody affected him as deeply as Du- sketched out a studio complex in an after- champ, whose subversion of orthodoxy noon. Construction took sixty days, at a

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TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 59—133SC.—Live spot art r19639g—Please inspect and report on quality cost of about forty thousand dollars. Ai In 2005, the Chinese Web site Sina ents who demand the truth, and they had no training as an architect, but after invited Ai to host a blog. He wasn’t in- brazenly stomp on the constitution and designing his studio he received a flurry of terested. “There was a computer in my the basic rights of man.” commissions for buildings and public-art office, but I had never touched it,” he In December of 2008, he launched installations. He launched one of China’s said. Sina promised to teach him, and Ai his campaign to collect as many students’ most influential architecture practices, realized that the blog “had a lot of good names as possible. He signed up volun- which he named FAKE Design. In Chi- possibilities.” At first, he used it in an odd teers and sent them to Sichuan to inves- nese, the name is pronounced a lot like way—posting dozens, sometimes hun- tigate. They collected fifty-two hundred “fuck,” though it is also a nod to Ai’s en- dreds, of snapshots each day, depicting and twelve names, and cross-checked during fascination with questions of au- his visitors, his cats, his wanderings. He them with parents, insurance companies, thenticity. “I know nothing about archi- was putting his life under surveillance, and other sources. (The government later tecture,” he liked to say. though he did not always bother to men- released its own list, of fifty-three hun- The architect Sir Norman Foster, a tion that to his guests. When a delega- dred and thirty-five names.) On May 27, collector of Ai’s art and an admirer of his tion from MoMA’s International Council 2009, police visited Ai and his mother to buildings, told me that Ai’s style was “in- stopped by his studio, he stashed so many ask him about his activities. He re- dividualistic and wonderfully effective.” cameras and microphones around the sponded with an open letter online: “De- The buildings, he said, “in some ways re- complex that they picked up the bus leting my blog I tolerated. Tapping my mind me of the early works in brick of driver grumbling, “Fuck! It takes them so phone I tolerated. Surveillance of my res- Alvar Aalto in Finland, and I say that as a long just to go to an artist’s studio.” idence I tolerated. But charging into my compliment.” By Ai’s count, the firm built The blog gave Ai a far wider audience house and threatening me in front of my sixty projects in eight years. Then, in than he had ever encountered, and soon seventy-six-year-old mother I cannot 2007, he abruptly announced that he was he was commenting on subjects ranging tolerate. You don’t understand human getting out of the architecture business. beyond art. In March, 2006, he wrote of rights, but do you know anything about “Architecture needs great care and a lot of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky the constitution?” The next day, his blog detail,” he told me. “If we can’t take full re- and brainless gluttons” who “spend two was shut down. sponsibility, then we’ll drop it.” hundred billion yuan on drinking and A couple of months later, Ai was in Turning back to art, he played with dining and an equal amount on the mil- Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, to at- the boundaries of what constituted art itary budget every year.” He fixed on one tend the trial of Tan Zuoren, the earth- work at all. For his contribution to Docu- sensitive issue after another. His assistant quake activist, who had been accused of menta 12, in 2007, he proposed an expe- Zhao Zhao said, “He’d be reading the inciting subversion of the state. At 3 a.m. dition that would bring a thousand and news and he’d say, ‘How can this be?’ on August 12th, while Ai was asleep in one average Chinese citizens to Kassel, And then the next day, and the day after his hotel, police knocked on the door and Germany, to view the festival—an “inva- that, he’d still be saying the same thing.” ordered him to open it. He replied that sion,” as he put it. (He called it “Fairytale,” He skewered a high-profile government he had no way to know if they were who in reference to Kassel’s being the home of project imbued with patriotic pride: a they said they were, and he picked up the the Brothers Grimm.) It was social sculp- new railroad to Tibet, which, he wrote, phone to dial the police. (He also turned ture on a Chinese scale, and the logistics would “unavoidably accelerate the disap- on an audio recorder to capture the would have staggered Joseph Beuys, the pearance of a culture.” He subverted the scene.) Before his call could go through, German conceptualist who held that usual Chinese mode of dissent: favoring the police broke down the door. A strug- “everyone is an artist.” Most of the Chi- bluntness and spectacle over metaphor gle ensued, and he was punched in the nese applicants had never had a pass- and anonymity. He shamed the system face, above the right cheekbone. “It was port. “Some were from minority groups in with his own transparency. In the view of three or four people,” he told me. “They which women didn’t have a formal name,” the Beijing-based critic and curator were just dragging me. They tore my Ai said, “so we had to make up a name to Karen Smith, the author of a book on Ai shirt and hit my head.” get a passport.” He raised money from Weiwei published last year, Ai was turn- The police took him and eleven of his foundations and others for the air travel, ing his blog into a public space as vibrant volunteers and assistants to another hotel, and his office designed every detail of the as “any church or grand piazza was in and detained them there until the end of expedition, down to matching suitcases, High Renaissance Italy.” the day, when Tan’s trial was over. Ai bracelets, and dormitory-style living and his staff, as usual, videotaped their spaces outfitted with a thousand and one en months after the huge earth- detention, and he edited the footage into restored wooden chairs from the Qing quake in Sichuan, the Chinese gov- a documentary, which he posted online. Dynasty. The piece had a special reso- ernmentT said that it still did not know Four weeks later, Ai, in Munich to in- nance in China, where validation from how many students had died in collapsed stall a show, felt a persistent headache and the West, including visas, once carried schools, much less their names. In lan- weakness in his left arm. He went to a near-mythic value. “For the past hundred guage that was unusually harsh even for doctor, who discovered a subdural hema- years, we’ve always been waiting for the him, Ai wrote of the officials in charge of toma—a pool of blood on the right side Americans or the Europeans or whom- the disaster area, “They hide the facts in of his brain—caused by blunt trauma. ever to call our names,” Chen Danqing the name of maintaining stability. They The doctor considered it life-threatening told me. “You. Come.” intimidate, they jail, they persecute par- and performed surgery that night. From

60 tHE NEW YORKER, MAY 24, 2010

TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 60—133SC. his hospital bed as he recovered, Ai posted to Twitter copies of his brain scans and sketchbook by barry blitt the doctor’s statements. (Seven months later, Ai says that he has recovered, except that he tires easily and has trouble sum- moning words.) Then he went ahead with the biggest exhibition of his career: a vast installation that blanketed an exterior wall of the Munich Haus der Kunst with a mosaic of nine thousand bright-colored custom-made children’s backpacks. In giant Chinese characters, the bags spelled out a statement from the mother of a child killed in the quake: “She lived happily on this earth for seven years.”

s Ai’s life and work have become more politicized, he has fallen far- Ather out of step with peers in the Chinese art world. I asked Feng Boyi, the curator and critic who worked with Ai on the “Fuck Off ” show, to describe how other intellectuals regard Ai. “Some really ad- mire him, especially young people outside of art circles,” Feng told me. But among some artists another view prevails. “They attack him,” Feng said. “They say he sim- ply wants to make a fuss. They don’t ac- knowledge his approach.” To his detractors, Ai is too quick to satisfy Western expectations of “the dis- sident,” too willing to condense the com- plexity of today’s China into black-and- white absolutes that attract foreign sympathies. The fact that Ai exhibits mostly abroad fuels the criticism that he is happier allowing foreigners to project their moral longings onto him than en- gaging with China’s ambiguities. (At one point, so many commentators online were speculating that he had renounced his Chinese citizenship that Ai felt compelled to post images of his Chinese passport.) After the artists’ march on Chang’an Avenue, an artist named Yu Gao posted a widely read rebuke that called Ai a “trai- tor,” whose flamboyant gesture of protest had “destroyed the platform for discus- sion” with the government. “Whoever wants to pass himself off as a hero, pro- tecting people’s rights, go ahead, but it is just the mask of a clown,” she wrote. The intensity of that critique re­ flected the sensitivity of the question at the heart of Ai’s project: forcing Chi- nese intellectuals to examine their role in a nation that is not yet free but is no longer a classic closed society. The rela- tionship between Chinese artists and

TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 61—133SC.—Live art r19655_RD—Please pull kodak approval proof for press color guidance the regime has changed dramatically after years of threatening to demolish Two years ago, Xu startled the Chi- in the past decade. For much of the Factory 798, a former military electronics nese art world by shedding his outsider nineties, authorities did their part to plant that had been turned into a cluster status and returning to Beijing to become fulfill clichés of art and authoritarian- of galleries and studios, the Beijing mu- the vice-president of the Central Acad- ism: arresting performance artists for nicipal government designated it a cul- emy of Fine Arts, the nation’s top official appearing in the nude, shutting down tural landmark. It is now a tourist-friendly art school. I asked Xu what he made of experimental shows, and bulldozing “creative industry area.” Ai’s political activities. “He has held on to underground­ artists’ villages. To understand the critique of Ai’s certain ideals, like democracy and free- But profitability has shuffled priorities position, I visited Xu Bing, who rose dom, that made a deep impression on on all sides. By 2006, paintings by lead- to prominence in the eighties, when he him—things inherited from the Cold ing artists such Zhang Xiaogang, Yue produced some highly controversial War era,” Xu said. “These things are not Minjun, and Chen Yifei were selling at work, including “A Book from the Sky,’’ without value—they have value—and in auction for more than a million dollars a set of hand-printed books and scrolls today’s China he has his function. It is apiece, and in 2007 auction houses in composed entirely of fake pictograms— meaningful and necessary. But when I mainland China and Hong Kong leaped a critique of China’s hidebound liter- came back to China I thought that China to third place in the world in sales reve- ary culture. Xu moved to America and is very different than it was when he came nue, behind America and the United thrived, earning a MacArthur award back to China. This place, in fact, still has Kingdom. Government censors still in- and commanding high prices for his art. a lot of problems, like the disparity be- terfere—satirical portraits of Mao, for At one point, he and Ai were close tween rich and poor, and migrant-labor instance, are not allowed in mainstream friends—he took over Ai’s apartment issues, and on and on. But it really has galleries—but the state has discovered in the East Village when Ai left, and solved many problems. China’s economy that the best way to deprive Chinese art he had worked on the “Covers” trilogy is developing so quickly. I’m interested in of its rebellious energy is to embrace it: of books—but they have grown apart. why that has happened. “My school has meetings constantly,” he went on. They are a fact of life in a state-run organization. “The meetings, you discover, are really boring and useless. Sometimes, in meetings, I write literary essays, and people think I’m taking notes, that I’m especially dedicated. But some- times I think about the fact that China is holding meetings every day, and even though these meetings are meaningless China has still developed so fast. How has this happened? There must be some rea- son. This is what interests me.” He added, “We can’t hold on to a Cold War attitude, particularly in today’s China, because China today and China during the Cold War are worlds apart.” Before I left, Xu said, “Not everyone can be like Ai Weiwei, because then China wouldn’t be able to develop, right? But if China doesn’t permit a man like Ai Weiwei, well, then it has a problem.” In- deed, the degree to which China ulti- mately allows Ai to continue will be the true measure of how far China has—or has not—moved toward an open society. So far, it seems, he has been insulated by his famous family name, his own celeb- rity, and, despite his antics, a subtle sense of what is truly off limits. (He has never, for instance, promoted any political chal- lenge to the primacy of the Communist Party.) As the liberal legal activist Pu Zhiqiang put it, “He knows full well what can be done and what can’t be done. Both “Iron Man—why didn’t I think of that?” he and I are trying to widen the space for

TNY—2010_05_24—PAGE 62—133SC.—live art a15177—#2 page—text changes legal rights to the absolute limits. I am not “Of course you are afraid,” she said. “You derly scene, and Ai pulled out his phone and willing to be an enemy of the government, are afraid that one day you’ll get in trou- entered an update into Twitter: “Raised the and I don’t believe Ai is, either.” ble, but you can’t let this fear stop you issue, being received reasonably and kindly.” from doing what should be done to form After some back and forth, Ai and his law- few weeks after the visit to the court- a normal society. What we want is nor- yer were led to a small office down the hall house, Ai flew to Chengdu, the city malcy, just a normal society in which we with bare white walls and a computer, and Awhere he was punched and detained last can express sorrow and mourn death, a pair of police officers began to take down year, to visit a bronze foundry that was where those who do wrong are punished, his complaint. fabricating a series of sculptures for him. and those who do good for society are en- By this point, all four of the videogra- He was travelling with an entourage that couraged, not jailed.” phers with Ai that day had followed him was large even by his standards; it in- At one point, Ai stepped away from the into the police station and were recording cluded his assistant Zhao Zhao, who was table for some fresh air, and I asked him the questioning. Three of the cameras were videotaping his every move, and three about the criticism that he is out of touch squeezed into the room at odd angles, while other videographers, from separate docu- with China’s real gains, that he is pushing the fourth poked its lens in through the mentary projects. too far and too fast. He shook his head. He window. Then a third police officer arrived, Returning to Chengdu carried a cer- gestured toward the restaurant full of peo- with his own video camera, and began tap- tain symbolism, and throughout the day ple. “They are people sharing the same ing Ai and his entourage. Finally, he was Ai posted updates to Twitter about the kinds of values,” he said. “It’s not like I joined by another police officer, carrying yet trip. After the foundry visit, he went to made these up. And they’re very grateful another video camera, and he, too, began to the site of a school that had collapsed in for the cause I’ve been working on.” As Ai tape. Looking at the scene, I realized that Ai the earthquake, then drove to a cemetery sees it, the undeniable improvements in had inverted the usual logic of art and poli- where students were said to be buried, but Chinese life do not relieve intellectuals of tics: instead of enlisting art in the service of a guard told him it was closed. Whether the responsibility to agitate—on the con- his protest, he had enlisted the apparatus of it was his caravan or his Twitter messages trary, they make the need more urgent authoritarianism into his art. Dissidents, that drew attention, by midafternoon­ we than ever, because most of society will be like artists, need an audience, though I were being conspicuously tailed by a black satisfied enough by the accretion of oppor- couldn’t tell if that meant I was the press or Volkswagen hatchback, driven by a lone tunity to mortgage the prospect of a truly a prop, or both. man with a comb-over. At one point, Ai open society. “I think a lot of people—es- The officer at the computer turned to Ai pulled his car over and ran back to the pecially artists and intellectuals—just try to and began his questions: “What is your Volkswagen, which sped away. Ai make excuses,” he said. work unit?” Tweeted about that, too. “He fled helter- Some of his supporters worry that he “I don’t have one,” Ai said. “I am an art- skelter,” he wrote. has lost sight of the risks, that he could ist.” He thought for a moment and added, All afternoon, Ai had been inviting end up in jail or be prevented from return- “Freelance.” people, via Twitter, to join him for dinner ing from an overseas trip, and I men- After a while, the police shooed every- at a local restaurant that featured pigs’ trot- tioned this. “I don’t really care,” he said. “I one out of the room except Ai and his law- ters in broth, a Chengdu specialty. Sure think it’s very much because of my fa- yer, and told the videographers to stop tap- enough, his fans began showing up in ther—he faced the worst of these social ing. A pair of officers asked to see my twos and threes, a lively crowd of mostly enemies all his life. So I don’t think too passport and then told me to delete the young professionals, including lawyers, much about this.” contents of my handheld audio recorder. I Web designers, and journalists. The res- On his last morning in Chengdu, Ai resisted a bit, but not much; there were four taurant eventually ran out of seats, so it set made a final stop: the police station on video recordings to choose from, and, be- up folding tables and plastic stools out Xi’an Road, where he wanted to file an sides, American police would probably not front, and soon Ai’s group stretched along official complaint about being hit by the have been pleased with me taping inside a the sidewalk. It was a digital free-for-all, officers last year. He wasn’t sure how station, either. with everyone at the tables snapping pho- the police would respond. The police sta- Another hour passed, and the door to tographs and sending updates to Twitter tion was a small courtyard office, painted the police office reopened. Ai stepped out from cell phones. It was easy to forget that blue and white, with a line of police bi­ and grinned. “Finished!” he announced. Twitter is officially blocked in China. cycles out front. Ai, accompanied by a The police had accepted his complaint. He I sat next to a soft-spoken lawyer who lawyer, among others, approached the lifted his arms from his sides and did a small introduced herself by her Twitter handle: front desk, and an officer asked what he happy dance—something between a bow maplered. I asked her why she had come. wanted. “I was detained and beaten in the and a penguin attempting to take flight. He “Ai Weiwei is constantly seeking more Hotel Anyi,” Ai said. “I’ve come to file a grabbed his phone and thumbed out an up- open information,” she said. “He works complaint.” date to Twitter. “Moved forward a little bit for society. I admire him. I should learn The officer looked puzzled. “Who was today,” he wrote. In the parking lot, the from him.” beaten?” he asked. cameras resumed taping.  A plainclothes security agent was vid- “I was,” Ai repeated. His presence caused eotaping the dinner gathering from across a small commotion behind the desk, as newyorker.com/video the street, and I asked the lawyer if she officers tried to figure out how to handle the was worried about being seen with Ai. large man with the entourage. It was an or- Ai Weiwei in Beijing and Chengdu.

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