{"id":36533,"date":"2012-08-02T13:00:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-02T17:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=36533"},"modified":"2012-08-02T13:12:58","modified_gmt":"2012-08-02T17:12:58","slug":"i-am-the-artwork-ai-weiwei-on-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/08\/02\/i-am-the-artwork-ai-weiwei-on-film\/","title":{"rendered":"I Am the Artwork: Ai Weiwei on Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In November 2010, ArtReview<\/em> magazine published<\/a> its annual Power 100, a list of the most powerful people in the art world. The highest-ranked living artist, coming in at number thirteen, was the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Two months later, the Chinese government demolished Ai\u2019s brand new, two-thousand-square-foot studio in Shanghai in one day\u2014this despite the fact that officials had approved (and by some accounts invited) Ai\u2019s plans for the studio, which took a year and almost a million dollars to build. Then, in April 2011, Chinese authorities took Ai into custody. Without announcing charges against him or when he would be released, they held him in detention for eighty-one days, during which time guards watched him constantly, even when he went to the bathroom or slept. He was released in June and, a few months later, charged with \u201ceconomic crimes\u201d and an accompanying bill of $2.4 million.<\/p>\n

Last year, ArtReview<\/em> ranked<\/a> Ai Weiwei number one on its Power 100 list. At the time, this pronouncement seemed hugely problematic, if not potentially idiotic. Ai, who had been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government since 2007, emerged from his detention visibly rattled\u2014he refused to speak to the press and stopped using social media, on order from the authorities. Although he returned to Twitter and began giving interviews again soon after, questions lingered: Was this indeed a powerful man? What does it mean to have power when you\u2019re fighting an entity that has more? Can one be simultaneously powerful and powerless?<\/p>\n

Yes would seem to be the answer to that last question, at least according to Alison Klayman\u2019s documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry<\/em>. Klayman followed Ai for a crucial two-plus years of his life, starting in 2008, when his political activism began in earnest, and ending not long before his detention. Granted incredible access to the artist and his family and friends, and making use of Ai\u2019s own material, much of it digital (his documentaries, Twitter feed, blog posts, media interviews),\u00a0Klayman constructs a compelling portrait of an immensely popular and provocative man who exists in a power limbo. Ai is forever on the edge, both touched and untouchable\u2014a man who comes across as fearless but characterizes himself as fearful. \u201cMaybe being powerful means being fragile,\u201d he tells a BBC interviewer.<\/p>\n

Ai speaks like this throughout the film (in both English and Mandarin, his native language), frequently expressing thoughts in wise aphorisms. No wonder his fans and followers call him \u201cteacher Ai.\u201d He inspires them, too, through his actions, which, importantly, often involve larger calls to action. After 2008\u2019s 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan Province, government officials refused to give Ai a list of the names of students who had died (they called it a \u201cstate secret\u201d). This prompted him to found the investigatory Sichuan Earthquake Names Project, for which he collaborated with more than fifty volunteers and researchers. On the second anniversary of the quake, he launched an online project asking people to record themselves reading the names of victims aloud. And when the artist found out that his new Shanghai studio would be demolished, he decided to throw a giant party to celebrate the destruction, a river crab feast\u2014in Chinese, the word for river crab, hexie<\/em>, sounds like the word harmony<\/em>, which, the Telegraph<\/a><\/em> explains, is \u201cthe ideological buzzword of the current regime.\u201d At the last minute, the government placed Ai under house arrest and wouldn\u2019t let him attend, but hundreds of people showed up anyway to eat and document the event.<\/p>\n

Combine wisdom-at-the-ready with these sorts of bold, provocative actions and you have the makings of a folk hero. And some of the fandom Ai generates does indeed carry a whiff of hero worship. At one point Klayman speaks with a young woman about her veneration of the artist. She giggles and tells the filmmaker, quite proudly, that she and the others are called \u201cAi fans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will these Ai fans risk their lives to change China? That\u2019s the question underlying Ai\u2019s peculiar brand of fame\u2014and it is<\/em> a brand, as, increasingly, Ai\u2019s face is plastered on posters and his name comes to stand for something more than the artist himself. Klayman asks Ai at one point if he thinks he\u2019s become a brand, and he responds in the affirmative. For what? \u201cLiberal thinking and individualism.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to miss the irony: branding by definition is about making things easily digestible. It\u2019s about encouraging people to follow and asking them to buy in. Branding is necessarily a reduction and a simplification\u2014not exactly the best way to promote individualism.<\/p>\n

Yet this contradiction reflects the way Ai has built up his reputation and gained a large following in China: first, via a personal blog and, after that was shut down (in May 2009), via Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, and Twitter. Ai has always made himself a\u2014if not the<\/em>\u2014central element of his project. He doesn\u2019t pen political manifestos or organize protests; instead, he snaps a photograph<\/a> of himself and local policemen in an elevator shortly after they beat him in his hotel room in Chengdu, and he posts it on Twitter. At one point in the film, Ai perfectly encapsulates this defining element of his political fight (and consequently his art and his life): \u201cIf it\u2019s not publicized, it\u2019s like it never happened, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

The brilliance of this tactic is that it undermines the surveillance that has long been the hallmark of the repressive state. Klayman returns time and again to the government cameras that surround and monitor Ai\u2019s studio and movements, vaguely ominous shots of them shifting and zooming around. But the most telling scene is less literal: Ai and some of his entourage are having dinner outside a restaurant in Chengdu, to which the artist has returned to file an official complaint about his beating. Ai had publicized the dinner on Twitter, leading some fans, and then the police, to show up. While one officer questions him about the group\u2019s plans (\u201cWhen will you be done?\u201d), another stands in the street filming the scene. Klayman leaves the dinner to focus her lens on the latter, and the two cameras become involved in a kind of filming standoff. Then Ai\u2019s videographer joins in and begins filming the police officer as well, standing less than a foot away from him and sticking the camera in the officer\u2019s face with deliberate intrusiveness. The moment is hilarious, but it\u2019s also a clever inversion of the workings of the police state: Ai has the same dirt on them as they have on him, and he\u2019s not afraid to share his with the world.<\/p>\n

Given all this, it\u2019s not surprising that the artist has become a kind of celebrity activist (a term more often applied to people like Angelina Jolie). Whether or not this approach can create real change is another question. What is enlightening, however, and gratifying, is the artist’s humanity and humility. In part, this is Klayman\u2019s doing: she avoids hagiography and devotional awe, making sure to show his complexity, not shying away, for instance, from the fact that he has a child with a woman who isn\u2019t his wife. But Ai also comes across as soft-spoken and, like so many admirable resistors, unassumingly determined, at times almost fatalistic. This is simply the way it has to be, he seems to say. \u201cIf they want to get me, they will,\u201d he says at one point to his mother. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing we can do about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Ai\u2019s art is<\/em> his politics and, in turn, his life. \u201cAre you doing any artwork?\u201d someone asked him on Twitter<\/a> this past May. \u201cI am the artwork,\u201d he replied. Ai is by no means the first artist to tread this path, but the mainstream, largely commodity-based Western art world still can\u2019t seem to figure out what to do with it. Hence the grandiose titles, the need to categorize. \u201cAi\u2019s activities have allowed artists to move away from the idea that they work within a privileged zone limited by the walls of a gallery or museum,” declared ArtReview<\/em> when bestowing his power ranking. “In the process, Ai has promoted the notion that art\u2019s real context is not simply \u2018the market\u2019 or \u2018the institution,\u2019 but what\u2019s happening now, around us, in the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This type of idealistic, simplistic language glosses over the truth, which is that much of the art world has little to no interest in\u2014or perhaps the more apt phrase is knowledge of<\/em>\u2014the real world. Crowning Ai as most powerful may make sense in the context of the art bubble, where his work commands high-profile attention, exhibitions, and prices. But in the film you can feel the extreme disjunction between that world\u2014Ai visiting Munich and London to install his exhibitions\u2014and the one he lives in, China, where he seems to spend every day battling the police. In the latter, his influence is cemented, but his power is much more precarious.<\/p>\n

Jillian Steinhauer is a Brooklyn-based writer and assistant editor of\u00a0Hyperallergic.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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In November 2010, ArtReview magazine published its annual Power 100, a list of the most powerful people in the art world. The highest-ranked living artist, coming in at number thirteen, was the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. 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