By Malcolm Moore
Shanghai
Correspondent, The Telegraph
11 May 2011
Ai Weiwei plays with his installation Sunflower Seeds, at its opening in the Tate Modern (REUTERS)On a clear and bright day last November, a few hundred of Ai Weiwei’s fans gathered on the
outskirts of Shanghai for a party. A
flash mob, they came from all over China after Ai
issued an invitation over the internet to
mock the local government. They
feasted on crabs at long
trestle tables, sang
protest songs and felt they had
scored a point against the
Communist party officials that had
solicited Ai, as a famous artist, to build a new studio in Shanghai and then
turned around and
ordered him to
knock it down when his
activism burned too brightly.
It was a happy day, but there was a
price to pay. A few days later, the police knocked on the door of Ai’s Beijing home. They told him he was “very close to going to jail”. The response was
characteristic of an artist who has increasingly
incorporated activism into his art. “I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I’m ready for it, because I believe the
core value of an artist must be to
express yourself freely and fight for the freedom of others.”
Unlike many of China’s other
activists, who have never been
heard of inside China because of the country’s
pervasive censorship, Ai Weiwei is a
celebrity. The son of a
revered poet, Ai Qing, Ai comes from the
Communist party’s equivalent of the
aristocracy.
For years, he has been
shielded by his fame and by his family connections. His father was standing next to Chairman Mao on the
podium in Tiananmen Square when the People’s Republic of China was
founded in 1949.
Wen Jiabao, the Chinese
premier, quoted Ai Qing’s poetry at a press conference four years ago when he was asked how China would make its people happy. “You may ask: what do you mean by being happy?” Wen said. “Let me quote a line from Ai Qing: ‘Go and ask the
thawing land, go and ask the
thawing river’.”
Since China
emerged from
isolation 30 years ago, there has been a continual and
lasting thaw. But in the last few years, since the Beijing Olympics, the mood has become less
optimistic. Encouraged and empowered by their success in delivering a smooth Olympic games, China’s security
apparatus has steadily expanded. The budget for security is more than 50 per cent higher than it was during 2008, the year of the games, and has now even
outstripped the budget of the People’s Liberation Army.
As China’s current leaders prepare to hand over power to their
successors in 2012, the
hardliners within the Communist party seem to have moved
decisively to the
forefront. Over the past few months, perhaps
unnerved by popular
revolts elsewhere, Chinese security officials have
detained or threatened
scores of activists, Christians and lawyers.
At times it has appeared to be a
carousel of
intimidation, with lawyers being dragged in, threatened and released only for others to take their place in the cells.
Against this backdrop, Ai Weiwei is perhaps the party’s biggest
scalp. While his protests have become steadily more
electric over the past few years, few expected that any action would be taken against him.
There are echoes of history in his
detention, however. His father, Ai Qing, said in 1946: "I believe that art and the
revolution must go together; they can never be separated. We are political animals, and sometimes we write as political animals. If the
revolution fails, the art will fail, but in as far as is possible the artist must be a
revolutionary. As a
revolutionary and as an artist he must
represent his times.”
Partly because of his strong opinions, Ai Qing was
exiled in 1958, when his son was just a year old, to the Gobi desert in the far west province of Xinjiang. In the madness of the
Cultural Revolution, Ai Qing was forced to clean public toilets while his son worked in the
fields. Only after Chairman Mao died was he
rehabilitated. In a letter from 1978 that Ai’s elder sister recently
released, the artist described those early days.
"We
drifted on a small boat for 20 years," Ai wrote. "If I say the past time left me with some memorable things, it has no mystical and magnificent sky, no beautiful and moving fairy tales, no endless warmth of home, no colourful flower, no graceful music."
"What is deeply
imprinted on my mind is: on the smoking dried land the slim and weak child carried heavy firewood; the
zigzag footprints left in the cold wind and the
blind nights; the sound of
smashing furniture and people
begging for
mercy; the cat being
hanged till it was dead and mudfish heads reaching out from the pond; the
bullying and
cursing in front of people. We were so young but we had to
bear all the
crimes," Ai wrote.
"If I can say I have some valuable things, those are my memories. Memories of the endless
muddy road, the wild Gobi Desert without any sign of people. The
bottomless memory poisoned our young souls like snakes, but we didn't die in it.
On the contrary, I want a better life for myself to control my own
destiny.”
For Ai, his
detention is the
price of his artistic
endeavour and his
determination to take action. “I do not believe in
so-called intellectuals,” he wrote in 2009. “I
disdain the fact that they only think rather than turning their thoughts into action.”
For the government, it is unclear why they have chosen to
act now, after years of
tolerating Ai’s
dissent. While Chinese officials talk of wanting to use “
soft power” to show China’s progress, the
hardliners who appear to be in the
ascendancy have perhaps
underestimated the global power of Ai’s art.
