“I took confrontational photos of undercover police taking people away, and the moment was very dramatic,” he recalled of the riots when I reached him by Skype a few nights before the Rikers shoot. “People would ask, ‘What is going on? What is behind the charge?’ and ‘What is the result?’ It is a moment that raises a lot of questions.” That early experience, he said, “gave me an opportunity to become aware of a brutal condition: that authorities abuse their powers. If we see life as a one-hour-long film, my experience in New York was the first half hour. It shapes what happens later.”
The personal has long been the political in both his life and work. The son of Ai Qing, one of modern China’s most renowned poets, Weiwei grew up in the hinterlands, in a forced exile with his family that lasted until the end of the Cultural Revolution. By 2008 Weiwei had become one of China’s cultural ambassadors, known around the world for his collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron on Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics. In his diverse roles as artist, urbanist, designer, and architect, Ai often calls attention to issues sparked by the collision of traditional values and the unbridled rush toward the new. In a seminal photo series created in 1995, for instance, he smashed an irreplaceable Han-dynasty urn to pieces; in another work, he emblazoned an ancient urn with a Coke logo.
Increasingly for Ai, technology and social media have become as much a medium as a tool, a kind of performance art in which we are all participants. He has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter—and that number is growing, despite his recent silence. “I think restrictions are an essential condition in the fight for freedom of expression,” he told me in an e-mail. “It’s also a source for any sort of creativity. Technology liberates us as individuals. It makes me happy to think that it has become a part of me.”
In the wake of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province that killed thousands of children (reportedly, their schools were built using substandard materials because of local corruption), Ai used his blog to mobilize activists to collect the names of the dead after the government refused to supply them. The resulting installation, Remembering, covered the facade of Munich’s Haus der Kunst with close to 9,000 children’s backpacks that spelled out she lived happily in this world for seven years—a quote from a mother of one of the children. When I asked him what role he plays as an artist in helping others understand change, he replied, “I spend most of my effort liberating myself from being an artist to becoming a real human being.”
It was nearing midnight in New York when we called Ai to tell him we had shifted locations and were now on the street. “Are we in the Bowery?” he asked, scanning the riot of storefronts and signs through our laptop. “We’re in Chinatown, in Flushing, Queens,” I told him. As onlookers gathered, drawn by Vadukul’s flashing camera and a model dressed head to toe in Alexander Wang, we hastily wrapped the laptop in a hood to keep Ai from being recognized. Vadukul took some test shots of the scene, which, according to Ai, could depict “an anonymous person in London, Beijing, an Arab nation, or elsewhere in the world” being arrested and detained by authorities. “The individual can be charged, or not charged—with no clear explanation.”
