On his laptop, Vadukul opened the images he’d just shot, then walked over and positioned it, screen to screen, with the one that showed Ai sitting at his desk in his Beijing studio. In this way Ai could see—despite the fact that it was now dark—and give instant feedback. Soon we sent him a file and then watched Ai scroll through the shots we’d just taken—images with, presumably, a powerful resonance. He told us which pictures he liked, and we went back to work. “It was helpful to have his voice in my head,” Vadukul recalled the day after the shoot. “The flow of his innermost experiences began to transfer to my photography; it was all moving very fast.”
Artists have long collaborated with assistants, and Ai often realizes his projects with a team of specialists that works in a factorylike manner. “I am putting less effort into personally producing the work,” he recently told Chris Dercon, who oversaw Ai’s Haus der Kunst show and is now the director of Tate Modern. “Others executing the work always means there is a kind of surprise, as well as a form of collective wisdom.” Still, it would be safe to say that no artist has ever worked as closely with his team from such great a distance as Ai did in the making of this project. “The feeling and emotions were close, but the camera was so far away,” he later told me. “The process became a part of the work. Art is always about overcoming obstacles between the inner condition and the skill for expression.”
It was nearly 5 a.m. in New York when we wrapped up. The surreal mash-up of art, technology, fashion, culture, and, not least, Ai’s presence, had kept the entire crew exhilarated throughout the night. I called Ai to tell him we were done. “That was a unique experience, no?” he said with a laugh. Two weeks later he was still digesting and savoring it. “I think this would have made both Leonardo da Vinci and Andy Warhol jealous,” he told me. “I laugh when I think about that. It reminds me of a poem that my father wrote before the Berlin Wall collapsed. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter how tall, how long, how thick this wall is, it can never stop the wind, the air, and people’s desire for freedom.’ Our desire for freedom is stronger than the wind.”
