Ai Weiwei. ArtReview magazine has called him the most powerful artist in the world. He’s also been called the most dangerous man in China.
Ai Weiwei was born in 1957 in Beijing. His mother was writer Gao Ying. His father was the revered poet Ai Qing. The year after Ai Weiwei was born, his father was named an enemy of the people. He and his family, including 1-year-old Ai Weiwei, were sent to hard labor camp in the Gobi Desert in remote northwest China. Ai Weiwei spent the next 16 years of his life growing up in hard labor camps, with harsh living conditions and little formal education. The family had only one book: a large French encyclopedia.
At 19, Ai Weiwei and his family returned to Beijing, and he enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy to study animation. There, he became part of a group of avant-garde artists organizing against government control of the arts—their slogan, “We demand political democracy and artistic freedom.” He was also a part of a small political movement of students who produced posters calling for reforms, and pasted them on them on a brick wall that came to be known as the Democracy Wall.
When the leader of that movement was sentenced to 15 years in prison, Ai Weiwei decided to move to New York City. It was 1981. Ai Weiwei spoke no English, had $30 in his pocket. He settled in the Lower East Side and befriended Allen Ginsberg and other influential artists. He briefly studied at the Parsons School of Design, but dropped out after his professor told him his drawings had no heart. Instead, he held a string of odd jobs, working in construction, cutting grass, cleaning houses, babysitting, even winning money in Atlantic City as a blackjack guru.
In 1993, Ai Weiwei returned to China because his father was ill. He founded a highly influential architecture firm, named FAKE Design, and dedicated himself to art and writing. In 2008, after a massive earthquake in Sichuan, China, Ai Weiwei launched a citizen investigation to collect the names of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died, partially as a result of the highly shoddy government construction of the schools. Ai Weiwei was highly critical of the government’s response to the earthquake, saying, quote, “They intimidate, they jail, they persecute parents who demand the truth, and they brazenly stomp on the constitution and the basic rights of man,” unquote.
While his citizen investigation catapulted him to international fame, it also enraged Chinese government officials. In 2009, his popular blog was shut down. A few months later, police broke into his hotel room and attacked him, punching him in the face and causing cerebral hemorrhaging. He had to have emergency brain surgery, which he documented in his film So Sorry.
Then he launched his most famous installation to date: a massive mosaic of 9,000 children’s backpacks mounted on the exterior wall of the German art museum Munich Haus der Kunst. The backpacks spelled out in Chinese characters the words of one mother whose child was killed in the earthquake: quote, “She lived happily on this earth for seven years,” unquote.
In 2010, Ai Weiwei was placed under house arrest, after the Chinese government demolished his studio. Then, in 2011, he was arrested at the Beijing airport and held for 81 days without any charges. Chinese authorities seized his passport, refused to return it until 2015. Once that passport was returned, he moved to Berlin, Germany. He’s also faced constant surveillance, a topic which he explored earlier this year in his exhibition Hansel & Gretel, set in New York’s Park Avenue Armory, in which visitors are relentlessly tracked by cameras.
Among his other famous installations was his 2010 show Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Museum in London, in which Ai Weiwei filled a hall of the museum with more than 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds. He currently has a solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., called Trace. The exhibit features 176 portraits of activists and free speech advocates made of Lego bricks. He also has a major new exhibition opening next week here in New York City in which he’s erecting security fences and cages across the boroughs, including under Washington Square Arch and in Central Park near Trump Tower, to explore the rise of nationalism and the closure of borders worldwide. It’s called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.
Ai Weiwei is also the director of a major new documentary on the struggle, the journey of refugees worldwide, called Human Flow. For the documentary, he traveled to 23 countries, visiting dozens of refugee camps.
The United Nations says there are now more refugees worldwide than at any time since World War II. The journey and struggle of these 65 million refugees is the subject of Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei’s epic new documentary called Human Flow. For the documentary, Ai Weiwei traveled to 23 countries, dozens of refugee camps.
Ai Weiwei talking:
2015, I had got my passport back, so I can start to travel. I went to Germany. And in Germany, you’re facing the reality about 1.2 million refugees come to the land. So it makes me wonder: Who are they? And I decided to go to Greece. And the last was to really look at those people and how they get on the land. Lesbos, in Greece. So, on the shore, I met the first boat approaching the shore. And, you know, I see those people—women, children and old people. Some are crying—you know, it’s just an unthinkable situation—climbing down this little boat. And then another boat, another boat. You know, sometimes you have 30, 40 boats a day. And so, it made me really wonder and have a curiosity about what is really going on in the world today.
So I decided to move my studio to Lesbos. And, you know, we have 20, 30 people there, start filming. And eventually, we have to go to the other side, Turkey, and to go to the Middle East, and then go to Asia and Africa, to make this film. It’s a very big film. It takes us about one year to finish. We visited about 23 nations, 40 camps, and interviewed about 600 people, and has 900 hours of footage.
We went to, first, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel, Gaza. Then our team also go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. You know, all those places.
Gaza is a situation not people being pushed away from home, but being put in like a big jail. You know, millions of people stays in—basically in this—their border, and they cannot leave. So, the situation is extremely difficult. They only have very little resources, and many people survive only from the help from the United Nations. And the water, polluted. Electricity, only given a few hours a day. So, it’s an extremely difficult situation.
Israel, I’ve been Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and West Bank, you know, Palestine area.
Dr. Cem Terzi from the Association of Bridging Peoples, who works with Syrian refugees. “There is nothing in this agreement in favor of refugees. Turkish law system only allowed them under the temporary protection. It means they have no international rights here. One day, the government decides, “I will send them back.” The government can do this, because they are not defined as a refugee. No international rights for them. They need a social integration program, job permits. They need jobs. They need a standard income and to buy food or to pay their rent. The children need to go to school. Majority of them, last five years, didn’t go to school even one day.”
The doctors were in tears. And they have been a major force to helping the refugees in Turkey. And recently, he has been fired, and with 12 other professors, because a year ago they signed some peace treaty. So, many, many—even those doctors whose—his own life is threatened in Turkey. And their team really did a lot of work for helping refugees and, you know, to take medical care for them.
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Ai Weiwei
world-renowned Chinese artist and activist. In 2009, Ai Weiwei was arrested and beaten by Chinese police. In 2011, the Chinese government arrested and imprisoned him without charge for 81 days. Ai Weiwei has received numerous awards, including the 2015 Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International and the 2012 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the Human Rights Foundation. He is now the Einstein visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. He is the director and producer of the new documentary, Human Flow.
— source democracynow.org 2017-10-10