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| The Clown Scholar: Ai Weiwei |
| By David Barboza and Lynn Zhang |
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 he brick faced studio and courtyard complex that the conceptual artist and architect Ai Wei Wei built near Beijing’s Dashanzi Arts district, is painted a beautiful light grey. The building’s lines and contours are simple and minimalist. And so is its interior. Airy. Open. Clean. White. And subversive.
Inside, Ai Weiwei appears quiet and gentle as he sits down for a lengthy interview. But over his shoulder, one cannot help but notice a poster he created, which features a large, bandaged middle finger, vulgarly sticking up, basically telling the Chinese authorities to shove it. On a nearby wall is his 1985 art piece, “Violin,” in which the handle of a shovel (symbol of the workman) is grafted onto the body of a violin (symbol of the elite).
 Elsewhere, Ai Weiwei has hung photographs of himself holding, and then smashing to pieces, a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty vase. There is also his book, “Fuck Off,” a collection of avant-garde art works from the 1990s. And in a small workshop nearby, there is a Qing Dynasty table that the artist has artfully reassembled and reconfigured to demonstrate that he can literally turn tradition -- and history -- upside down. Two of the legs, in his version, are grounded on the floor; two others stand up against a wall.
This is what Ai Weiwei does: He questions authority, defaces traditional or classical objects, savages pieties and fuses old world artifacts with symbols of the modern, consumerist age.
“I'm not sure I'm good at art, but I find an escape in it,” says the burly, bearded 49-year-old artist. “This is one way you can release yourself.”
Ai Weiwei doesn’t need to be modest. He is widely considered one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary art, and one of the country’s most innovative thinkers.
 This is the man, after all, who experts say helped change the course of Chinese modern art. He was among the first artists to break away from Soviet realism and the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution. He was also among the first to challenge Mao’s official portrait.
In the late 1970s, he was a member of the famous – or infamous – “Stars” group of self-taught artists who made history by displaying their provocative art works on the steps of the National Gallery in Beijing. And after a lengthy sojourn to New York City, he returned home in the 1990s to found the experimental East Village community in Beijing, which produced shocking performance art and provocative paintings, photography and installations.
Today, Ai Weiwei is not just one of the country’s best-known artists, he’s also passing himself off as an architect. Working with the Swiss architectural firm, Herzog & de Meuron, he helped design Beijing’s new $375 million national stadium for the 2008 Olympics, the so-called “Bird’s Nest.” And his own art works are in great demand, like his “Map of China,” which was carved from wood salvaged from an old temple. The piece was auctioned off by Sotheby’s for $228,000.
Some critics say Ai Weiwei’s works, like his photographs, are often simplistic political jabs at the government, or authority. Others say some of his most creative work deconstructing traditional Chinese furniture was first done by the artist Shao Fan. 
But some insiders here say Ai Weiwei was a master at borrowing from other artists, and selling his ideas to a wider audience of curators, collectors and journalists. Holland Carter, an art critic for The New York Times, has called Ai Weiwei’s works “stimulating,” and perhaps the works of someone jesting as a kind of “Scholar Clown.”
Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China and one of the biggest collectors of Chinese contemporary art, calls Ai Weiwei a genius.
“He has a profound knowledge of Western and Chinese culture, and a profound knowledge of Chinese tradition. And he continues to play this game between all these different worlds,” Mr. Sigg says in an interview. “He comes up with these seemingly simple objects and solutions that are more complex than they appear. And he has a broad range of artistic expression that is always intelligent.”
 His Beijing studio is now a regular stop for art collectors, foundation executives, visitors from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern and even former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. He’s a jury member of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, which was founded by Uli Sigg.
And his gallery, the Chinese Art Archives & Warehouse, is partnering with Galerie Urs Meile of Lucerne, Switzerland, to show some of China’s most adventurous and avant garde artists.
In a country where the government still looks down suspiciously on contemporary art – and often closes exhibitions – Ai Weiwei is a peculiar figure. He questions the government, thumbs his nose at authority of any kind, and delights in creating art works that are as much about deconstructing traditional objects as they are about creating modern art works.
And much of what he creates, he hints, is simply created on a whim. When asked, for instance, what was the thinking behind his series of photographs that show him holding – and then dropping – a Han Dynasty vase. He shot back to one reporter: “To show that gravity works.”
This is how Ai Wei Wei sometimes talks – cleverly, brashly – and then modestly.
 To hear Ai Wei Wei tell his story, the listener might conclude that it was all an accident, an accident of time and history that brought him to this point. The stories he tells seem to place Ai Wei Wei and his family at the mercy or history – a group of people that simply traveled in time, following the convulsions of Chinese history. Somehow, they survive. And somehow, Ai Wei Wei, after years of wandering in search of ideas, finds himself at the center of an artistic whirlwind that is sweeping China.
“It's getting weird, getting crazy,” he says. “Every day people from big art museums, foundations, writers, photographers, filmmakers. They all come and they all want to find out what's happening in China,” he says. “You can't imagine – all these people. They don't even go to the Great Wall. They come here.”
II. The Son of Ai Qing.
 i Weiwei was born in 1957, the year Mao and the Communist Party unleashed the “anti-Rightist” campaign. After allowing intellectuals and others to criticize the Party, the government quickly grew impatient and troubled by a barrage of critiques and suddenly began labeling intellectuals “Rightists,” or enemies of the state. Many were imprisoned or subjected to hard labor.
 Ai Weiwei’s father – the renowned poet Ai Qing – criticized the Communist regime and became one of the campaign’s first victims. He was banished from Beijing and sent to labor camps in northern Heilongjiang Province and western Xinjiang Province.
“He was an enemy of the state, an enemy of the people. As a youth, I lived as the son of an enemy of the state,” Ai says brimming with emotion in his Beijing studio. “He cleaned toilets. My whole family lived in horrible conditions. But this was the road this nation took.”
When Ai Weiwei tells his own story of growing up in China, he returns to his father’s story, again and again, often jumping back in time to recall in great detail the cruelty of his father’s life in exile, and his own anguish.
At the time of Ai Weiwei’s birth, his father was one of the country’s best-known poets. He had studied painting in Paris in the 1930s. His best-known poem, “Dayanhe,” appeared in 1936, during the Japanese occupation. His father had at one time been imprisoned by Chiang Kai Shek and the Koumintang; and then, later, by the Communists. His fortunes rose and fell with the nation that was, more often than not, divided.
 "In 1942, there was a literary meeting in Yan’an,” Ai Weiwei says. “My father was at that meeting. The Communists were still in Yan’an. He had a photograph of it when I was growing up. Back then, art and literature was very simple. Everything is either you’re pro or against. So literature was class struggle. For one sentence, you could sacrifice your life.”
After nine years in Xinjiang, the family was sent to a military re-education camp near the Gobi Desert. And there, for the next five years, Ai Weiwei says his father did nothing but clean toilets. The great poet who inspired generations of writers was also nearly beaten to death.
A break came in the 1970s, when according to some account, a foreigner asked Premier Zhou Enlai whatever happened to the poet Ai Qing. Before long, Ai Qing was allowed to return to Beijing and the home he had purchased in 1957. He was exonerated in 1978, and resumed writing til the end of his life.
III. The East Village: New York and Beijing.
i Weiwei returned to Beijing too, in the 1970s, and he began to take up art, often encouraged by friends of his father, who had seen his drawings and sketches.
 When China re-opened colleges after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Ai Weiwei managed to defy the odds and gain admittance to two of the country’s most prestigious schools: the Beijing Film Academy and the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
He enrolled in the film school along side Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who are now acclaimed directors and members of the so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers. But his film studies were cut short.
“After two years of study I was so bored. We were all very excited to get in, but I was very unhappy,” he says. “We had just come through a tough period. There were no human rights. It was just a dark age. Then suddenly, people were talking about the “Four Modernizations,” but no one was questioning how things were done in the past. So I was disappointed.”
During that time, Ai says he joined the “Stars,” a collection of self-taught artists who were questioning authority and challenging traditional notions of art. The group, led by the sculptor Wang Keping, held an exhibition on the steps of the National Gallery in Beijing in 1979. And soon after, they were a national and international sensation.
 People called it a dramatic break from Communist Party art. The art movement blossomed alongside Beijing’s “Democracy Wall,” where young people began expressing themselves and posting their idealistic thoughts.
But when the authorities did away with “Democracy Wall,” and history swung back toward tightening the reins of free expression, Ai says his girlfriend’s family to help him secure a visa to study in the United States.
He left for Berkeley, California in 1981. And before long passed his English language test and moved to New York City, where he enrolled at Parson’s School of Design and the Art Students League.
While in New York, he says he studied Dadaism, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. And he dropped out of school again. He spent most of his 12 years in New York wandering the streets, visiting art exhibitions, going to bookstores and working part-time as a baby sitter, construction worker and printer. He also experimented with art and the idea of creating a community of intellectuals.
“Almost no one of my generation wasted their time,” he says now. “Either they want a degree or follow the mainstream. They want to become useful. That never crossed my mind.”
 In New York, he also befriended a lonely New York poet named Allen Ginsberg, an icon of the 60s anti-war movement who often read his poetry aloud at St. Mark’s Church in the Village. And Ai Wei Wei’s apartment, near Tompkins Square Park, became a kind of rooming house for a group of young Chinese artists and intellectuals, like Tan Dun, Xu Bing and Chen Kaige.
“My place was like a base in the east,” he laughs. “My answering machine said, ‘the East is Right.’ ”
According to Ai Weiwei, he was doing almost nothing in New York. He showed his art works to Allen Ginsberg, who said he doubted any gallery would show them. At parties people would turn away when he announced himself as an artist. And after he dropped out of school he became an illegal alien.
He did participate in 1985 at an exhibition at the Ethan Cohen gallery. In one of his pieces, he placed a large raincoat on a hanger with a condom tied to the coat’s pocket.
But back then, he says, German Expressionism and Basquait were all the rage. His career hardly took off.
After the student occupation of s Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was broken up in June 1989, he was outraged. He went on an eight-day hunger strike in New York to protest the crackdown. He also joined a group called “Solidarity for China.” Strangely, he says, because of those tragic events, he managed to get rid of his status as an illegal alien and get a green card, which allowed him to stay in the United States.
 But he says he returned home in 1993, after relatives told him his father was ill. He says he was reluctant to return home – and felt something of a failure.
"In ’93, when I came back my mother was to shy to ask me. I didn’t have a degree, almost no money, no property, not married. I don’t have a degree, not even a bachelor’s degree. But I came back because my father was ill. In 12 years I hadn’t come back once. And I hadn’t even written a letter.”
His father died three years later, at the age of 86, in 1996.
IV. “Picasso” Comes Home.
 ut back home Ai Weiwei returned to the art scene. He created a community of artists in Beijing’s so-called East Village, named after New York’s East Village. And he began working with artists and publishing underground books about their works, with titles like “Black Paper,” “White Paper,” or “Gray Paper.”
In photographs, he gave the finger (meaning sticking up his middle finger in a vulgar gesture) to a series of national monuments: the White House in Washington, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
When Ai Weiwei started documenting the works of some of his favorite artists, like Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan, he began throwing in his own art pieces, daring photographs, surrealistic sculptures and large installations, like his clever and intricate arrangement of Forever bicycles.
 From that early period, there is also a well-known photograph he took, of his wife, Lu Qing, acting as a female exhibitionist, flipping her skirt up in front of Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square, in June 1994. A disabled man in a motorcar watches.
He also created seemingly simple photographic series, such as “Seven Frames,” a series of 7 photographs of a Beijing military guard, each representing a portion of the body – from head to foot. The rather stiff, military official has all the indications of authority from the stern look to the neat body – only to reveal in the final frame, as the curator Wu Hung points out, that his right shoelace is untied.
This photograph, like much of Ai Weiwei’s works, are intended to poke fun at authority, to undress and expose officialdom, to deconstruct authority and tradition – as with breaking ancient vases, decorating a Han Dynasty Urn over with Coca-Cola logo or livening up Stone Age clay pots by painting them with bright “Warhol colors.”
Curiously, before 2000, Ai Weiwei was not well known as an artist. He was mostly producing books and promoting art, doing gallery work, and even selling antique furniture.
 But Ai Weiwei stirred things up in 2000 during the Shanghai Biennale, when he and Feng Boyi co-curated a show called "Fuck Off," as a kind of alternative to the Biennale. The show was packed with provocative works, including one installation that included the bodies of two dead babies.
Almost as soon as the show opened it was closed down. But news of the closure swept through Shanghai and within days foreigners and the foreign media were talking about the "Fuck Off" show and interviewing Ai Weiwei.
Some called his show a publicity stunt, meant to shock and draw attention to him. And it worked; before long, Ai Wei Wei was not just gaining attention as a curator, he was showing off his own art works.
Now. two of the biggest collectors of Chinese contemporary art – Guan Yi and Uli Sigg – consider Ai Weiwei among the country’s best artists.
Ai Weiwei says that after 1999, China has loosened up tremendously, and one indication is how Chinese contemporary art is flourishing in Beijing and Shanghai. Only the most overtly political – like works depicting the Tiananmen Square “massacre” or the leadership – are banned or taken down.
Still, Ai Weiwei has never had a solo exhibition inside China. Most of his work has been shown in the U.S. and Europe. He says there is a great deal that needs to be changed and re-examined. China, he says, is not a free society.
 "Even today, many important political truths are hidden,” he says. “To me, it’s unbelievable. And I think society will pay a lot.”
The poster on his wall, he points out, was adapted from a government poster warning of the dangers of firecrackers in the early 90s, when firecrackers were banned in Beijing.
He turned the injured bandaged finger into a middle finger, in a vulgar western gesture.
Now, Ai Weiwei says, he’s busily working on architectural projects, though he never studied architecture. He simply picked it up, he says, and it wasn’t so hard.
For Urs Meile, his European art dealer and the founder of the Urs Meile Gallery, he’s now designing a walled compound, a live and work space gallery on a 21,000 square foot lot near his own studio.
He is meeting artists, creating new works, and doing what he’s always done – inventing provocative art works – and stirring up trouble, like some other great artists.
It was all an accident, he suggests. But then he says that he really intended to be a path breaker in the world of art.
“When I left China [for the United States], I told my mother, ‘I’m going home,’” he says. “She thought – 'Stupid boy.' I said, ‘Ten years later, you’ll see another Picasso.’ I was wrong. It was 20 years later,” he says with a grin.
Related Links:
·Artist Profile: Ai Weiwei
·Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993
·An Interview with Ai Weiwei
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Chandelier, 2002 |
Study of Perspective: Eiffel Tower, 1995-2003 |
Installation view of Whitewash and Still Life, 1993-2000 |
Breaking of Two Blue-and-White, 1996 |
One-man Shoe, 1987 |
Table with Three Legs, 1998 |
Caol Hives, 2000 |
Feet, 2003 |
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