viz.

(Image credit: The New York Times)

With last week’s tempestuous events in the middle east, the subsequent chaos on the U.S. presidential campaign trail, and news of a professional peeping Tom in the south of France, much was lost on the American public concerning the strange and unexplained absence of Xi Jinping, the man in line to be the next president of China. Mr. Xi disappeared completely from public view on September 1^st, leaving only wanting pundits to explain what they thought might be reality. Think about it. Imagine if we lived in an ascendant country and our leader-in-waiting suddenly vanished from the public eye for longer than two weeks. Furthermore, imagine if we lived under a government that lacked any sense of transparency, and under which a freethinking blog post such as this one might warrant imprisonment, all the while the ruling elite might not proffer any explanation concerning our presumptive leader’s whereabouts. We’d be anxious, and the Chinese were last week. Anyways, the reason I bring this event up isn’t to inform the average American about global events (that’s their own responsibility and their newspaper’s job), but rather, I think the whole circus surrounding Xi’s absence provides a unique insight into the ways that China’s ruling elite attempt to visualize their control.

(Image credit: hyperallergic.com)

I’ve been a fan of Ai Weiwei’s work ever since the Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate (October 2010). In that work, Ai commissioned 1,600 Chinese artisans from the town of Jingdezhen (a town that’s been producing pottery for nearly 2 millennia) to hand-paint 100,000,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, and the pieces were then scattered evenly on the floor of the museum’s great hall. Visitors were initially allowed onto the seeds, making the spot a lovely place to pass an afternoon. What drew me to the exhibit and its creator were not the political implications of the installation (which I’d come to respect later) or the smart way in which Ai decided to fill the Tate’s space, but rather the fact that 8 million extra seeds had been created to account for visitors taking a handful on their way out. It’s probably fair to say that most artists invited to fill the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall are rather finicky about their work, but here was someone honest enough to account for the fact that visitors might be tempted to take a piece home with them.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.