Ai Weiwei

Since 2011, the authorities have demolished Ai’s Shanghai studio, jailed him in solitary confinement and under psychologically torturous conditions for 81 days, forbidden him to travel since his release, accused him of tax fraud, forced him to pay a fine of 15 million yuan (USD 2.4 million) and have issued an official notice that his Caochangdi studio would also be demolished . . . some day. Stamped with the red seal of the party, the notice stated, “The date for demolition is uncertain.”

Creating uncertainty and arbitrary fear are some of the most effective tools an authoritarian regime has at its disposal. Ai is forced to work under these nebulous conditions. At any moment, his work could be destroyed, and he or his colleagues could be disappeared. Living like this would break the spirit of most men, but it only serves to fuel Ai’s art and resistance.

After a pause, as Ai and some assistants shuffle through a mound of papers depicting upcoming art projects, the artist walks over to a curio cabinet. From one of the shelves he picks up a ten renminbi (RMB) note folded into a paper airplane, with Mao’s head deconstructed in the creases. Ai explains how people had thrown money over his front gate. Since last year, he has received nine million RMB in donations from more than 30,000 private Chinese citizens to help him pay the heavy tax bill levied by the government on his company, Fake Ltd. For each donation, no matter how large or small, Ai’s studio is creating handwritten calligraphy art pieces he calls “loan receipts,” a kind of thank-you-cum-IOU note. He confides that this is taking more time than any of his other projects.

These last weeks, Ai and Zuzhou have spent much of their time on a special project: they are putting the finishing touches on a heavy-metal album and accompanying music video, directed by Christopher Doyle in a highly secretive location and soon to be released on MTV. One day, Ai returns home from shooting his music video a changed man. During the video his four-year-old son, Ai Lao, helped him shave his head and beard. Ai anticipates he’ll be able to roam the streets of Beijing without being recognized. 

On a recent smoggy morning, he jumps into his car, passing the snoozing policemen, and is driven an hour to his large production studio on the outskirts of Beijing. He wants to inspect various works in progress. For security reasons, he chooses to keep this address out of the public domain. In his typical love of wordplay, he simply refers to it, nonsensically, as the Left/Right (Zuoyou) studio.

Like the 40 cats who live there, Ai roams the terrain. Strewn around the factory spaces are old experiments that either never came to fruition, or are remnants of successful projects to be used in new variations. There’s a fallen sculpture of an officer of the People’s Liberation Army. The broken-necked soldier, his decapitated head lying forlorn amid the rubble, is reminiscent of the torn-down statues of toppled dictators throughout history. 

Like many of their generation, Ai and his family suffered throughout the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), as the Red Guards were bent on destroying the “four olds”: old ideas, culture, customs and habits. Ai’s work, in contrast, embraces the old, the commonplace and the traditional. He preserves the past by reshaping history into conceptual art, highlighting the absurdity of a society trying to erase its past to serve its present needs. He transforms Qing dynasty stools and connects them (in classic mortise and tenon technique) into free-rambling grape vines in his work Bang (2013); map templates of China from his “Map of China” series (2004), for which he used ancient wood from demolished temples, hang on a Left/Right wall like an isolated continent adrift.

On the walls of yet another room of Left/Right is the latest incarnation of Ai’s bicycle installation Forever. Exactly one hundred years after Duchamp created his original Bicycle Wheel readymade, in 1913, Ai has reinvented his own artistic wheel. Utilizing an old Chinese bicycle (the Forever brand), he transforms a common, mass-produced street vehicle into an existential symbol of eternal recurrence. Taking the concept of eternity a step further, in 2013 Ai cast the bikes into stainless steel—the modern material that is supposed to last forever.

Ai heads back from Left/Right to 258 Fake, where he spends much of his time pecking away online in his personal space in an adjoining building on the left side of the courtyard. Through Twitter accounts, Ai reaches beyond the studio walls, the Chinese firewall and the national border he’s now forbidden to cross. One of the internet’s great communicators, his stature has grown in the netizen community because of his open criticism of the leaders’ phony exterior. Because the censors cannot stay ahead of internet capabilities, his tweets help to break the totalitarian grip on information flow, paving the way for new perceptions of reality.

There is a huge price to pay for opening the door. Imminent danger is inseparable from Ai’s activities. 
On April 4, he learns that Xu Wei, Doyle’s cameraman who shot the MTV video, has turned up missing. Ai calls the police to see if Xu is 
in their custody. Though the police deny it, Ai begins instant messaging, and his posts over the next couple of days confirm the arrest, and tell of Xu’s transfer, bruised and battered, to the Civil Aviation General Hospital—his first words to his girlfriend at the police station were that it is “related to Ai.” This stream of tweets pays off: Xu is released on April 14.

This dangerous cat-and-mouse game will only end when the authorities finally realize that the inhabitant of 258 Fake is real—a real national treasure, not to be feared, but to be appreciated for his revolutionary long march.