In 2011, the editors of Art Review magazine named the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei the most powerful artist in the world.
Also in 2011 for an independent documentary, Ai spoke about the destruction of artists’ neighborhoods
and freedom of expression in China, saying, “If you are being treated unfairly,
you have to let your voice out, and let other people know it. You cannot just be silent. “
He continued:
“I do have a responsibility because my father’s generation failed.
They never really successfully made their voice, and I don’t want that to happen to the later generations. I
am here now, and I can do something now about it, and I will.
- Ai Weiwei as a baby in 1959 is with his father Qing in exile
“I think China will eventually become a democratic society,
and have much freedom for the young people who want to learn more information.
Who can build up their knowledge, to meet the competition, and have a better life. Nobody can stop it. It’s just a matter of time.”
Police visited Ai’s Beijing studio during the filming of that interview, and shortly afterwards, the government detained Ai for more than two months on charges of tax evasion.
He has said the accusations were politically motivated. He subsequently paid a $2.4 million fine,
and the government confiscated his passport, preventing him from travel for several years.
At the time, Ai said he had been beaten by police, put under house arrest,
and the government installed cameras outside of his home, to monitor his movements.
On China’s current crackdown on freedom of expression and civil society, Ai told NPR,
“Any authority that cracks down on artists, journalists, intellectuals, and lawyers has completely lost its legitimacy to rule.
It is evidence of vulnerability and fragility in facing the challenges of today and the future, and an inability to do so with a peaceful mind or a rational manner.”
In 2015, Chinese authorities returned Ai’s passport, and he moved to Berlin shortly afterwards,
living in self-imposed exile. Ai has since turned his attention to the plight of global refugees,
which is the topic of his latest documentary, Human Flow.
Even though Ai’s work doesn’t fetch the highest prices at auction, and critics,
while they admire his achievement, don’t treat him as a master who has transformed the art of his age
– the choice as a powerful artist seems glaringly correct.
The Smithsonian attempts to explain why …
So what is it about Ai? What makes him, in Western eyes, the world’s “most powerful artist”? The answer lies in the West itself.
Now obsessed with China, the West would surely invent Ai, if he didn’t already exist.
China, may after all, become the most powerful nation in the world.
It must therefore have an artist of comparable consequence to hold up a mirror both to China’s failings and its potential.
Ai is perfect for the part.
Having spent his formative years as an artist in New York in the 1980s, when Warhol was a conceptual and performance artist ,
he knows how to combine his life and art into a daring and politically charged performance that helps define how we see modern China.
He’ll use any medium or genre—sculpture, ready-mades, photography, performance, architecture, tweets and blogs—to deliver his pungent message.
Ai’s persona—which, as with Warhol’s, is inseparable from his art—draws power from the contradictory roles that artists perform in modern culture.
The loftiest are those of martyr, preacher and conscience.
Not only has Ai been harassed and jailed, he has also continually called the Chinese regime to account; he has made a list, for example,
that includes the name of each of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died during the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 because of shoddy schoolhouse construction.
- If you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger.
At the same time, he plays a decidedly unsaintly, Dada-inspired role—the bad boy provocateur who outrages stuffed shirts everywhere.
Not least, he is a kind of visionary showman. He cultivates the press, arouses comment and creates spectacles.
His signature work, Sunflower Seeds—a work of hallucinatory intensity that was a sensation
at the Tate Modern in London in 2010—consists of 100 million pieces of porcelain,
each painted by one of 1,600 Chinese craftsmen to resemble a sunflower seed.
As Andy would say, in high deadpan, “Wow.”
The historic, nearly 2,000-seat Carnegie Music Hall, in Oakland was sold out for the appearance
of Chinese dissident artist and international icon Ai Weiwei.
Ai Weiwei’s installation “Trace” (2014) on view at Alcatraz in San Francisco.CreditCreditAi Weiwei Studio
With such a iconic presence in the room, one might expect high-brow intellectualism and somber discussion.
But Ai brought a down-to-earth, warm presence and sense of humor.
He kept the audience laughing, delivering one-liners to Shiner’s lighthearted questions.
In response to Shiner’s inquiry about the many cats at his Beijing studio
(which Shiner compared to Warhol’s affection for cats),
Ai said, “We all have our weak points
.” Asked what Warhol would have thought of his work, Ai speculated,
“He’d say, ‘geez, that’s great.”
The crowd enjoyed a particularly amusing moment when Shiner brought up Ai’s Lego episode leading up to the Melbourne show —
in which the company would not fill his order because his artwork with them would be political.
The incident led Lego to change its policy on bulk ordersand to stop asking customers what they are using them for.
But Shiner and Ai’s talk wasn’t all humor. Ai minced no words when he began to speak about the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe.
“This is a tragedy of our humankind today, and anybody pretending not to know it is a crime
,” Ai said. “As someone called an artist activist, I have some kind of obligation to this.”
Ai set up a studio on the Greek Island of Lesbos, where many Afghani, Iraqi, Syrian and other refugees are disembarking from overloaded dinghies.
Ai’s Instragram account is full of photos from his visits to refugee camps.
Another poignant, socially conscious moment happened at the beginning of the program when surprise-guest,
Jasiri X performed his new work “Our Generation,” calling attention to institutionalized racism and sexism as well as labor issues.
“Our generation … we will dismantle institutions based on patriarchy … and build new ones,” he recited to the crowd.
At the end of the program, Shiner thanked Ai for taking time from his work on the refugee crisis to visit Pittsburgh, and the artist walked off stage to a standing ovation.
The Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei exhibit is at the Warhol until Aug. 28.
Additionally, Ai’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is on exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Architecture until Aug. 29.
In August of 2018,Chinese authorities raised one of his Beijing studios. Ai Weiwei
said that demolition crews showed up without advance warning, and began the process of tearing down the studio.
Ai has been a longtime critic of the government, and in August, he began posting videos to his Instagram feed,
of the studio’s destruction. “Farewell,” Ai wrote. “They started to demolish my studio ‘Zuoyuo’ in Beijing with no precaution.“
which he says , can easily become a dangerous precedent .