Ai Weiwei: Acting Is Believing

First, a Follow-up

1 July 2011

On 22 June 2011, after 81 days of incarceration in an undisclosed location, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was released on bail, having allegedly confessed his crime of tax evasion. Ai's release followed a huge international campaign to free him and came just a day before the Chinese premiere Wen Jiaboa left for state visits to the UK, Germany, and Hungary. Ai's emergence from his arrest to reunite with his family opened the second act of a global performance that has been raging since his initial "disappearance" on 3 April 2011. Doubtlessly, the key players in this global performance, including the Western media, art communities, and governments, the Chinese CCP leadership, and Ai Weiwei himself, will continue to write the second act from their ongoing real-life actions with new points of public interest, but at this transitional moment, no interpretation regarding these key players' motivations, calculations, and strategies provides conclusive evidence as to how the second act will unfold.

In response to Ai's sudden detention in April, I wrote the following TDR Comment, but primarily as a character study of the Chinese artist. Ai had evolved from using his versatile talents as a mediator between the Western art establishment and Beijing's emergent experimental art world in the 1990s into an outspoken crusader who, through his new-media political art, champions the causes of his less well-off compatriots and promotes typical democratic values. Although Ai is now free from the prison cell, his bail condition restricts him from accessing some of his most efficacious art tools: Twitter feeds; interviews; international travel. Ironically, when Ai was shielded from public view, tireless media attention and the dedication of the Western art world insured that his vocal political art continued to be heard; now that he has regained relative freedom of movement, Ai faces the compound challenges of intensified global expectations, unrelenting surveillance by his Chinese government prosecutors, and his very recent personal/family experiences of the legal/political consequences to his dissident art. I would not be exaggerating to state that Ai has emerged from a crisis that validated the power of his prior political art only to find himself in another, and perhaps greater, crisis, forcing him to reevaluate how he wishes to conduct his art/life from now on.

These uncertainties made me decide to keep the following comment as a temporary (historical) document, whose multiple versions of updates exist on the internet, but whose more substantial progress in "plot" development will likely be unrealized even after my document is published in print.

22 April 2011

I write with extreme concern for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, with whom I have had several phone and face-to-face interviews since 2004.¹ The international press has covered extensively the circumstances surrounding Ai's latest arrest.² In summary: on 3 April 2011, as Ai waited to board a plane to Hong Kong and then to Taiwan, two uniformed security agents intercepted him and took him from the Beijing Capital Airport; later that day, police raided Ai's Caochangdi home/studio and seized his laptops and office computer hard drives. The police also questioned his wife, Lu Qing, and the staff and volunteers from Ai's company, FAKE Design; some of them have since gone missing. On 5 April, after Ai had disappeared for 50 hours, his mother Gao Ying and sister Gao Ge posted on their neighborhood street a handwritten "Missing Person" notice, whose photographed version soon went viral. On 7 April, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, replied to queries at a regularly scheduled news conference that Ai was under investigation for "economic crimes" and this incident "has nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression" (Branigan 2011).

Ai Weiwei in his office, located inside his home/studio complex in Caochangdi. In the background is a photograph of Ai's installation artwork, Remembering (2009), which covered the façade of Haus der Kunst in Munich. The installation was made of 9,000 backpacks in five different colors, making...