viz. - Ai Weiwei

Xi, It's Good to Have You Back.

Jay Voss — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:33:43 +0000

(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.

To give some sense of what the Chinese political machine was up against, it might be fun to quickly round up some of last week’s speculative headlines concerning Mr. Xi. On Tuesday, Jeremy Page reported in The Wall Street Journal that Xi was most likely suffering from “a back injury or a bout of illness.” On Wednesday, Malcolm Moore of the British daily The Telegraph reported that Xi had had a stroke. And by Thursday, The New York Times was reporting with some certainty that Xi had had a myocardial infarction. Later on Thursday, Mr. Xi’s nearly reappeared in the Chinese press when he made public condolences for some party members who passed away. This was the first mention of Mr. Xi in over two weeks, even though there was still no evidence of his existence. What gives? Xi Jinping is 59-years old, and it must be said that heart issues are not untypical of folks near that age. What is Beijing afraid of compromising with news that their future leader might be sick?

The article above was released on Thursday when Mr. Xi made his condolences.

(Image credit: http://www.gx.chinanews.com)

Xi Jinping reappeared in public for the first time in two weeks on Saturday, and he did nothing more than attend activities at China Agricultural University to mark this year’s National Science Popularization Day, according to the state news agency Xinhua. Xi made no comments at the event, and no explanation for the absence has been given since. I suspect that China’s Communist Party is determined to appear stolid throughout this issue for a couple of reasons. First, many of the news organs cited above have also frequently mentioned the fact that China’s Communist Party is currently rife with strife. Various factions within the Communist Party are competing to shape the party according to their wants, and this is clearly not something they’d like discussed. So, perhaps China’s determined to remain strong despite the fact that their future leader might be feeling quite the opposite. Secondly, in the Party’s dealings with public intellectuals such as Ai Weiwei (which I’ve posted about previously), they’ve at times appeared insecure about the stability of a modern Chinese state. They must know that they’re a rich minority when compared their 1.3 billion countrymen, and so an appearance of stability is probably meant to maintain their balancing act. In any case, it’s certainly auspicious that Xi Jinping’s already dealing with public relations questions before his term has even started. I suspect China will change greatly over the course of his presidency, and it’ll be interesting to see how the Communist Party adapts its image to cover the aspirations of a growing middle class.

艾未未

Jay Voss — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 22:43:08 +0000

(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: Loz Pycock)

As I’ve occasionally thought about this installation throughout the past two years, I’ve come to see it as a very beautiful thing. By asking the porcelain painters of Jingdezhen to help with this project, Ai has given autonomy to hundreds of workers who’d otherwise remain anonymous in China’s export economy – their names masked by the ubiquitous “Made in China” label. Each of the sunflower seeds, though similar in its general characteristics, is unique in its own pattern. The Jingdezhen artisans were trying to create similar seeds, but because each cornel is hand-painted, myriad differences in pattern distinguish them. Similarly, although China’s huge porcelain industry doesn’t allow its workers personal expression, each of the artisans is unique and special and talented, and Ai Weiwei is encouraging everyone to remember this. I can’t think of another contemporary studio artist who celebrates the machine world with such empathy, which is heartening in a socioeconomic cycle that increasingly celebrates the immediate.

(Image credit: tate.org.uk)

And so over the course of this past summer I anxiously awaited news of Ai’s tax evasion case. Back in April 2011 he was arrested at Beijing Airport just before boarding a flight to Hong Kong on vague charges. Every newspaper account of the arrest provides its own array of reasons for the detention, but at a certain point it's plainly obvious that the Chinese authorities simply felt threatened by the free-speaking artist. Their anxiety boiled over in the wake of the Arab Spring. They released Ai after several months in detention and slapped him with a 12 million yuan ($1.85 million) tax bill, although it’s impossible to know the veracity of this alleged malfeasance. Additionally, Ai was instructed to remain in Beijing for a year and refrain from posting on his Twitter account (he'd previously been an avid tweeter). A few months after all of this, Ai was tweeting again. As he has said, “Never retreat, retweet.” Ai’s appeal of his tax evasion case was rejected in court a few weeks ago, on July 20^th.

It strikes me that many Americans are unfamiliar with Ai Weiwei’s art. Well, at least those I’ve asked claim they are. Everyone who tuned into the 2008 Summer Olympics has seen some of Ai’s work: he was the artistic consultant for the great Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron when they designed the Beijing National Stadium. (Ai distanced himself from the project after helping to design the stadium, declaiming the way the Communist Party started using the Olympics as a piece or propaganda.) But the rest of Ai’s work is known to a relative few in the states, and this is unfortunate. Although the artist is often riffing on the oppression he feels in China, almost everything he creates encourages one to think about fundamental human rights and our tendency not to question the institutions we appreciate. Through Ai’s work on the Sichuan earthquake, for example, not only does one feel for the many who needlessly lost their lives in the poorly constructed public buildings, but we’re also compelled to question a political elite who’d cynically view such disaster as opportunity. In this hectic political season, no matter one’s persuasion, it might be worthwhile to meditate on Ai’s commentary about propaganda and institutional mandates. Perhaps the best any of us can do in such a complicated system is retweet, and understand that some of us won't be able to resist picking up a handful of sunflower seeds.

"She lived happily on this earth for seven years": Ai Weiwei's Subversive Homages

ebfrye — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:00:46 +0000

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.

Ai has come under intense scrutiny for speaking out against the Chinese government in recent years, and a studio that took him two years to build was torn down in January. The Frontline documentary by filmmaker Alison Klayman highlights many of his subversive actions and the ways in which he uses new media, particularly Twitter, to reach a broader audience and challenge the boundaries of censorship. Ai has advocated democracy in China and supported 2010 Nobel Prize recepient Liu Xiaobo (New York Times). Liu appears in the piece.

Image credit: Screenshot, pbs.org

Weiwei was particularly critical of the government refusal to take responsibility for what many viewed as flimsy construction of government housing and school buildings in the Sichuan province. After visiting the area and documenting its appearance, Ai was quite stunned by an image of children's backpacks (below):

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

In addition to surveying local survivors to document the number of deceased children and releasing those figures online, Ai a piece that functions as both an homage to the deceased children. The enormous installation covers a significant part of the exterior of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The backpacks spell out a statement made to Ai by a mother of one of the victims--"She lived happily on this earth for seven years."

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

I don't have an extended analysis to offer for any of these images, but I am struck by the potential of documentary image (and Ai's extensive record-keeping) both as a communicator of pathos and as essential to artistic process. Also worth noting is the ability of the everyday object, particularly in our commodity-driven cultures, to communicate when multiplied and poised in a certain context. Ai is often called the Chinese Andy Warhol, but his multiplication of a mass-produced item, here a backpack, still insists on a human attachment to the mechanically made. Rather than stop at criticizing mass production or inscribing it glamorous irony, Ai Weiwei insists on its dual ability to invoke destruction on a grand scale and evoke, without fully representing, the particular.