Beyond the 'Fake Smile' - Ai Weiwei's Vision for Individual Rights in China

BY LIA VIVIAN MONTI Although he is presented as a maverick by the western media, the artist-activist Ai Weiwei is really just representative of the culminating frustrations of Chinese intellectuals concerning personal expression in China. Soon after the Chinese Communist Party rose to power in 1949, all artistic movements were subsumed by the soviet socialist style. By the time the Ai and the Stars Group made their debut in 1979, all remnants of the old traditions were rejected, and artistic endeavors were reduced to mere propaganda pieces glorifying the worker and promoting the cult of Mao Zedong. Thanks to the relative liberalism at the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping era, members of the Stars were able to explore the modes of western traditions and react to the more recent oppressive styles by expressing their individuality through impressionism, surrealism, and cubism. Still, they quickly learned that borrowing from the west was not enough to produce works culturally resonant for the people weary of meaningless communist propaganda in China. Ai Weiwei, deeply concerned with this notion, created paintings in the style of the father of impressionism, Cezanne. He suggested they start by taking the basic ideals of the western movements and combining them with their Chinese consciousness. However, after Deng Xiaoping eliminated the Democracy Wall in 1979, and the most prominent member of stars Wei Jingsheng was sentenced to 15 years in prison, Ai decided to move to America. If one place could nurture this fearless provocateur with abundant examples of scandalously audacious art, it was New York City. Yet even directly after he returned home to Beijing in 1993, his contribution to the “Fuck Off” catalog (co-curated with Feng Boyi) showed his moderate position and understanding of the complex history of personal expression in China. He positioned himself between two quotes attributed to Mao and Duchamp:

“Those comrades who are firm and determined in today’s ideological struggles and those who no fear of power and no compromise with vulgarization will be the hope of tomorrow’s new culture.” -Mao

“It’s just my own game. Nothing else.” –Duchamp (Merewether)

In the context of these greater artistic tensions, Ai Weiwei’s most resonant messages advocating for personal freedom in China come from his multilayered, politically nuanced moral and cultural critiques such as Fairytale, rather than his less aesthetic, overtly political statements that perpetuate Maoist doctrine of rebellion.

Historical Context: China and Freedom

Ai Weiwei and his artist-activism can be rightfully appreciated only when one understands what freedom means in the Chinese historical and ideological context. The dissolution of West-East notions of freedom due to globalization contributes to the extremely complex definition of freedom in China today. According to L. H. Taylor, freedom only has meaning in a particular context, which partially explains why pure European enlightenment ideals are not completely reconcilable within Chinese History. Despite the starkly different historical background of Chinese, however, its unique multidimensional views of freedom were not necessarily in total opposition to western enlightenment ideals during some points in history. The idea of individual freedom in China evolved in such a way that it is much too complex to be reduced to the simple tension between the interests of collective society above the individual. In light of the different historical circumstances affecting the Chinese personal-collective power struggle, one great Chinese thinker Hu Shi began to consider the relationship between the individual and the collective state (i.e. the collective self) as an organic, developing interaction (Fung 459).

In Traditional China, the rights of the people were provided for by the moral rule of the heavenly mandated emperor. According to Confucian statesmen such as Mencius, however, a tyrant who abuses his power could lose the mandate of heaven, be reduced to a mere criminal, and be rightfully overthrown by the people (1B:8). In Modern China, rebellion imperialism, tyranny, bourgeoisie thought, and exposure to some western philosophy all greatly shaped Chinese conceptions of freedom and liberty. During the May fourth and nationalist movement, Chinese viewed freedom in the context of citizenship and liberation. Yet, the May Fourth produced different versions of liberty than the Enlightenment because they were set in opposition to countless repressive institutions such as filial controls, feudalistic ritual, and intellectual monism and only defined as a negation of these ideas (Fung 460). This definition by negation grew into the idea of freedom as citizenship or loyalty to the nation and failed to draw a distinction between the public and private forms of freedom. In the early years of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-Sen’s notion of freedom, democracy, and human rights took precedent over others. When conditions worsened after his death, the war ravaged, and destitute Chinese populace were unable to concern themselves with these ideals, for they lacked the basic necessities. The CCP then quickly rose to power with the promise to rehabilitate the nation by placing the condition of the entire populace over just a few individuals. The idea of the “collective self” was not new; it is an idea that existed in even in ancient China and is actually very similar to Rousseau’s social contract. This rapidly became a platform for the suppression of all personal, spiritual, and cultural freedom. The Cultural Revolution and subsequent era of Deng Xiaoping began as movements toward individual autonomy, self-determination, and self-mastery, but movements like these are continually forced to capitulate to control of government that claims oppression is necessary to maintain order for collective Chinese citizenry. The omission of captions containing phrases like ‘universal human rights’ in the current exhibit on the Enlightenment in the National Museum of China captures zeitgeist of Communist repression of individualism still characterizing Chinese politics today.

Authorship, Subjectivity, Authenticity, and Value in Modern China

Like most Chinese artists, Ai Weiwei experimented with subjectivity and the role of authorship in relation to cultural authenticity and value from an early point in his career. Just as he searched for ways to express his individuality at 1980s Stars exhibitions, he continuously attempted to simultaneously produce something with relevant cultural significance. Ai became obsessed with the concept of the readymade after much exposure to Pop Art and Dadaism in New York City. The ‘readymade’ is a artistic medium popularized by Marcel Duchamp that challenged accepted notions of visual art by taking an object and modifying only slightly. Soon after he arrived back in Beijing in 1993, he produced two readymade works commentating on Chinese cultural heritage and the role of the individual (artist) in the new market-driven state: Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1994) and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). In Han Dynasty Urn with a Coca-Cola Logo, Ai focuses on examining the impact of commodity based culture on the aesthetic values of China. Chinese culture embodied by the urn is covered by the symbol of western materialism, the bright red Coca-Cola logo. The formative elements of the readymade juxtaposed with the inherent cultural assumptions about the urn’s origin express how western commodity culture literally subsumes Chinese culture as the logo wraps around according the natural curvature of the urn. Furthermore, the opposite side containing the slogan ‘the real thing’ challenges the authenticity of symbols of Han Chinese identity, as well as the way culture is redefined by branding.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn can be considered a follow up to the Coca-Cola Logo urn, since this photo triptych documents the relationship between ideas of cultural history and aesthetic values in Modern China. The first photo in the series depicts Ai holding an urn representing the preserved construct of collective Chinese identity. As he drops the urn in the second photograph, he lets go of these aspects of tradition and is perceived as an individual. In the third photograph the urn inevitably hits the ground and smashes to pieces just as the ideas it embodies dissolve and stop constricting progress. Ai’s expression throughout the entire sequence is consciously understated— his resolute, unsurprised face allows the viewers to formulate their own opinions about the statement it makes. His look also emphasizes that Ai’s intentions are not destructive or antagonistic in nature but removed while documenting the violence against the past in this dialectic between art and politics in China.

Later works such as Colored Vases (2003) and Color Test (2006) extend Ai’s readymade technique in order to discuss the Chinese government’s inclination to whitewash history. According to Ai, “you cover something so that it is no longer visible but is still there underneath, and what appears on the surface is not supposed to be there but is there” (Tinari). In these instances, he takes Ming and Qing Vases and temple ruins and covers them in gaudy bright hues in the same way the Chinese government positively covers up their errors. There are places where the original piece is visible from uneven dipping and scratches in the paint to illustrate current problems that the Chinese government cannot keep covered up, such as the Three Gorges Dam. In the spirit of the Color field movement, the paint also gives the previously dynamic artifacts a flat uniformity reminiscent of manufactured goods that lose their individual significance. His most extensive exploration of the state of individuality came a few years later in hisFairytale project.

The Fairytale of Individual Chinese Identity

Fairytale, the multilayered piece created for the Documenta X11 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, epitomizes Ai’s most effective use of art as a platform to critique Chinese socio-political challenges to individualism. Ai called the piece an invasion of the West to showcase Chinese culture. The piece involved three major layers that comprehensively encapsulated the complexities of Chinese identity “beyond the physical limitations of place” (Merewether 125). The first involved the organization, preparation, and realization of sending 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel in order to observe and be observed. The logo “1=2001[s2] ” that appears as an F and a number one emphasizes the personal experience, individual status, and distinctive imaginations of each individual were the focus of the piece. Meticulous detail was paid to every aspect of the organization to emphasize each individual journey on the trip within the communal aspects of the voyage. Every participant’s story was captured individually through film, photography, and interviews. They all received uniform luggage with a unique fabric pattern designed by Ai on the front along with specifically designed t-shirts and colored USB bracelets labeled with the 1=1001  logo. Within the common living space, Ai designed every bedspread to be distinctive from one another. The lack of tension between individuals in the common space exhibited the possibility of retaining an ordered society when people have the freedom to pursue individual paths. The people chosen for the project range from rural peasants to art students from Beijing with different intentions about participating in Fairytale. One writer tells the camera in the documentary that this could be his rebirth: “I’ve painted myself into a corner. I’m no longer in control of my own fate.” Apart allowing extreme subjectivity in his art, Ai shows how reciprocity with China is possible through contact with Chinese people: “The whole West-East imagination or fear will be under the moon, across the street: they will meet…there area lot of fantasies and concerns about this country. I think that now it’s time all these fantasies about life and art can meet” (Merewether 126).

The second layer of the work involved 1,001 Qing Dynasty Chairs, which were scattered around the exhibit in clusters to make spaces for individual and collective places for people to lounge and meet. He also exposes a tension between appropriated visual forms representing the continued appropriated forms of Chinese material culture (the chairs) and the conversant that stops to interact with them. Each chair received the same individual attention as the 1,001 visitors with pronounced difference every other in the work. The cultural and historical significance paired with the sheer magnitude and attention to detail on these projects make them the crown jewel of Ai’s readymades. At their core, these are symbols of Chinese authenticity because they represent the last remnants of traditional Chinese culture that were demolished in the 1911 revolution. Still, the Chinese tendency to sit upon these ideas of authenticity to rebuild China and to legitimize the subsequent political institutions is literally expressed in the form of the chair. According to Philip Tinari, “it is in the poetry of this relational move—from gesture to appeal, from exposition to exhortation—that Ai Weiwei’s vision of a self-conscious modernism begins to bloom.”

Template, the third part of the Fairytale installation, is a five-layers-thick structure constructed out of 1,001 Qing dynasty windows and doors. The negative space in the center forms the silhouette of a traditional Chinese temple, further augmenting his message through the 1,001 Visitors and chairs; salvaging the past does not only involve hoarding relics and placing them in museums, but rather learning from history and taking it to produce something new. The negative space shows how one cannot rely solely on the past because then new structures cannot exist, although there is no denying that the past always influences the present. The past should only mold and support present endeavors not constrict them. Ai was ecstatic when the piece, already deemed structurally unsound by the Documenta crew, collapsed in on itself during inclement weather, an event, which he thought made the piece drastically more interesting. He was convinced this would show how institutions like these built on the past could not survive the natural passage of time. The combined presentation of these parts of Fairytale epitomizes the perpetual themes that Ai is obsessed with—the “interrogation” of artist expression and the role it should play in relation to China. Through Fairytale, Ai encapsulated and addressed almost all aspects of the complex dialectic between individual and collective identity in China today. He was adamant in interviews that he had no specific standpoint concerning the nature of the piece and was interested only in watching the contradictions that naturally emerge (Ambrozy 124). This multidimensional approach and the freedom, with which each part was allowed to develop individually, ultimately gave Fairytale the power and significance that made it arguably one of the most important effective works of the 21st century.

#So Sorry: Blogs, Twitter, and Politics

Ai Weiwei departs from his profound philosophical commentary visible in Fairytale to overtly political protests in his more recent work, which culminated in his arrest on April 4, 2011.  For the “So Sorry” Exhibition, at the already politically charged Third Reich propaganda center Haus der Kunst, Ai used around 9,000 children’s backpacks to spell out the words of a mother who had lost a child in the Sichuan Earthquake, “she lived happily for seven years in this world. His message may still be along the same lines of his earlier works as he wrote on his blog on May 22, 2008, “the emptiness of collective memory, the distortion of public morality, drives people crazy,” but here visual presentation is extremely one-dimensional. His “Citizen’s Investigation” and protest overshadow his art, especially the more potent moral, artistic critiques inside the exhibit. Contrastingly, the formal structure of the Bird’s Nest stadium, which he designed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, employs unique, unrepeated curving structures into its design, which meant to give each spectator the feeling that they have the best vantage point. These elements described by the design team as “organized chaos” are recognizable symbols of a tolerant, democratic society. The significance to this permanent contribution to the skyline of Beijing, however, was dwarfed beneath Ai’s protest of the Olympics on his blog.

Ai’s online writing sparks an entirely new debate in the art world concerning the artistic worth of his blog. Curator and Critic Karen Smith claims his online contributions to online public space should be considered artwork as brilliant as “any church or grand piazza was in High Renaissance Italy” (Osnos). One thing is certain; these sites definitely played a large part in expanding and publicizing Ai’s activism. During an interview with NPR, Ai told a reporter that “activism is art; the two are inseparable.” Ai’s blog, which he spent about 8 hours a day on, ran from 2006 to May 28, 2009 when authorities shut it down. This gave Ai the opportunity to experiment with Twitter, where he now has 83,593 followers in a country where public networking sites like this are still illegal. Unfortunately, in terms of his artistic development, these networking sites not only stole time from his art, but also caused his activism to become the starting point for much of it. Once his ideas became more publicized on the Internet his activism began overshadow his art.

As Ai Weiwei has been transformed more and more into the poster boy for freedom of expression in the international media, the art world in China has both lamented and attacked his increasingly politicized style. Artist Yu Gao for example called him a “traitor” whose extreme methods (such as the Ch’ang Avenue protest) ruin “the platform for discussion” with the government (Osnos). Moreover, art critic Philip Tinari, while reviewing Ai’s display of backpacks from the “So Sorry” Exhibition, perceptively stated how the intensity of Ai’s more recent works exhibit a combination “where art and politics, seem uncomfortably mixed, to the benefit of neither.” The Artist Xu Bing,Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and also former colleague of Ai Weiwei, explains why not everyone can embrace the methods of Ai: when that happens, China will never develop. Since a pure Cold War-distinction between democracy and communism no longer exists and is much more ambiguous, China will need to develop in its own way. Ai’s response to these ideas is that they are excuses for artists afraid to do their duty to create change. In an interview about the Birds Nest before the Olympics, he told reporters, “‘reform’ is the changing of ugly habits, ‘opening up’ is the introduction of other modes of thought and technology. This process will inevitably be painful” (Ambrozy 167).

Conclusion

Ai’s detainment, however, is evidence that China still has a long road ahead before it can call itself an open society. Although his art loses much of its dynamism when it becomes overly political, Chinese models of personal freedom from Mencius to Hu Shi would consider Ai’s right to express his dissatisfaction with obviously corrupt government systems legitimate since it is in the best interests of the collective. Critics of Ai who consider him a rabble-rouser and anarchist or even a celebrity constructed by the western media should take a critical look at his own words from his blog and twitter. It is obvious that Ai Weiwei successfully found the voice between Mao and Duchamp in his art and remains committed only to the idea of China where individual rights are not constantly compromised. His commitment and love for his country is further illustrated in his first public sculpture piece Zodiac Heads, which just opened in New York City during his detainment. The piece consists of enlarged versions of heads that once belonged to Qianlong meant to admonish collectors for trying to purchase these national treasures. Ai blogged in early 2006, “to speak of beautiful dreams and grand ideals is safe—you could go on forever. But to realize them through action is dangerous” (Ambrozy 13). The arrest of Ai Weiwei and other outspoken citizens like him exhibits how China continues to take two steps backward for each step forward just as they did during the eras of both Mao and Deng Xiaoping. Only when the Chinese government learns to treasure criticism as a mechanism for cultural improvement, will China be sincerely able to call itself modern.

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