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Citizen Ai: Warrior, Jester, and Middleman
Ai Weiwei is famous for crossing boundaries, especially the boundary between art and politics. To appreciate the often contradictory nature of Ai's work, this essay employs multiple narratives: “Ai the Heroic Warrior” who criticizes the Chinese government; “Ai the Court Jester” who plays with the Chinese state and Western media; and “Ai the Middleman” who acts as a broker between China and the West, between young and old people, and between civil society and the state in the PRC. The essay concludes that a fourth narrative can bring together these three stories in a multicoded understanding of Ai's work: “Ai the Citizen Intellectual” who sometimes works with the state, and at other times against it—but always for the good of China. By comparing Ai's work with that of other public intellectuals and placing it in the context of debates about civil society, the conclusion argues that “citizen intellectual” also tells us about a broader movement of activists and public intellectuals who are creating a new form of political space in postsocialist China.
Journal Article
Ai Weiwei : Beijing photographs, 1993-2003
An autobiography in pictures: photographs taken by Ai Weiwei that capture his emergence as the uniquely provocative artist that he is today. Ai Weiwei: Beijing Photographs 1993-2003 is an autobiography in pictures. Ai Weiwei is China's most celebrated contemporary artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. In April 2011, when Ai disappeared into police custody for three months, he quickly became the art world's most famous missing person. Since then, Ai Weiwei's critiques of China's repressive regime have ranged from playful photographs of his raised middle finger in front of Tiananmen Square to searing memorials to the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died in shoddy government construction in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Against a backdrop of strict censorship, Ai has become a hero on social media to millions of Chinese citizens. This book, prohibited from publication in China, offers an intimate look at Ai Weiwei's world in the years after his return from New York and preceding his imprisonment and global superstardom. The photographs capture Ai's emergence as the uniquely provocative artist that he is today. There is no more revealing portrait of Ai Weiwei's life in China than this. The book contains more than 600 carefully sequenced images culled from an archive of more than 40,000 photographs taken by Ai: a narrative arc carefully shaped by an artist keenly aware of photography's ability to tell stories. It includes a shattering series of photographs taken between 1993 and 1996 devoted to the final illness and death of Ai's father Ai Qing. The book is a sequel to Ai Weiwei: New York 1983-1993, a privately published book that collected photographs taken by Ai during his years on the New York art scene.
Book
The political space of art
This book studies the tension between arts and politics in four contemporary artists from different countries, working with different media. The film directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne film parts of their natal city to refer to specific political problems in interpersonal relations. The novelist Arundhati Roy uses her poetic language to make room for people’s desires her fiction is utterly political and her political essays make place for the role of narratives and poetic language. Ai Weiwei uses references to Chinese history to give consistency to its ‘economic miracle’. Finally, Burial’s electronic music is firmly rooted in a living, breathing London built to create a sound that is entirely new, and yet hauntingly familiar. These artists create in their own way a space for politics in their works and their oeuvre but their singularity comes together as a desire to reconstruct the political space within art from its ruins. These ruins were brought by the disenchantment of 1970s: the end of art, postmodernism, and the rise of design, marketing and communication. Each artwork bears the mark of the resistance against the depoliticisation of society and the arts, at once rejecting cynicism and idealism, referring to themes and political concepts that are larger than their own domain. This book focuses on these productive tensions.
eBook
Humanity
Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time. Ai Weiwei (b.1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale.This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless.Select quotations from the book:\"This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment.\" \"Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era.\" \"Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art.\" \"I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice.\"
Book
Weiwei-isms
This collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of Ai Weiwei's thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The short quotations presented here have been carefully selected from articles, tweets, and interviews given by this acclaimed Chinese artist and activist. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections.
Together, these quotes span some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei's eventful career--from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011--providing a window into the mind of one of the world's most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists.
Select Quotes from the Book:
On Freedom of Expression
\"Say what you need to say plainly, and then take responsibility for it.\"\"A small act is worth a million thoughts.\"\"Liberty is about our rights to question everything.\"
On Art and Activism
\"Everything is art. Everything is politics.\"\"The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.\"\"Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don't feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.\"
On Government, Power, and Making Moral Choices
\"Once you've tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country.\"\"I feel powerless all the time, but I regain my energy by making a very small difference that won't cost me much.\"\"Tips on surviving the regime: Respect yourself and speak for others. Do one small thing every day to prove the existence of justice.\"
On the Digital World
\"Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what's on his mind. A fairy tale has come true.\"\"The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It's as simple as that.\"\"The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China.\"
On History, the Historical Moment, and the Future
\"If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.\"\"We need to get out of the old language.\"\"The world is a sphere, there is no East or West.\"
Personal Reflections
\"I've never planned any part of my career-- except being an artist. And I was pushed into that corner because I thought being an artist was the only way to have a little freedom.\"\"Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom.\"\"Expressing oneself is like a drug. I'm so addicted to it.\"
eBook
Ai Weiwei's Blog
In 2006, even though he could barely type, China's most famous artist started blogging. For more than three years, Ai Weiwei turned out a steady stream of scathing social commentary, criticism of government policy, thoughts on art and architecture, and autobiographical writings. He wrote about the Sichuan earthquake (and posted a list of the schoolchildren who died because of the government's \"tofu-dregs engineering\"), reminisced about Andy Warhol and the East Village art scene, described the irony of being investigated for \"fraud\" by the Ministry of Public Security, made a modest proposal for tax collection. Then, on June 1, 2009, Chinese authorities shut down the blog. This book offers a collection of Ai's notorious online writings translated into English--the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language.The New York Times called Ai \"a figure of Warholian celebrity.\" He is a leading figure on the international art scene, a regular in museums and biennials, but in China he is a manifold and controversial presence: artist, architect, curator, social critic, justice-seeker. He was a consultant on the design of the famous \"Bird's Nest\" stadium but called for an Olympic boycott; he received a Chinese Contemporary Art \"lifetime achievement award\" in 2008 but was beaten by the police in connection with his \"citizen investigation\" of earthquake casualties in 2009. Ai Weiwei's Blog documents Ai's passion, his genius, his hubris, his righteous anger, and his vision for China.
eBook
A Turn to the Many: Ai Weiwei
“Crowdsourced,” frequently recycled, made in large quantity, and easily transmittable across analog and digital borders, Ai’s art and activism mark the turn(s) of global contemporary art toward the remixing, the participatory, the media-savvy, and the socially engaged—turns that were gathering strength for more than a century but began to coalesce into powerful discourses in the 1990s.
Journal Article