Ai Weiwei is adamantine to pin down. For the aboriginal few account of our Zoom call, him bleary-eyed at his computer, I anticipate he’s talking to me from his new base in Portugal. My aberration – it’s Vienna, breadth he’s planning a appearance for abutting March. A year and a bisected ago, Ai was giving interviews about his new activity in Britain; afore that it was Germany, the country that offered him safe harbour aback he assuredly larboard China in 2015, afterwards years of coursing by the authorities and a spell in detention. So breadth does he absolutely live?
“Yeah, the catechism consistently comes up,” he says sheepishly. He abashed to Cambridge so his son, Ai Lao, could advance his English. His son is still there, but in the meantime, “I begin a allotment of acreage abreast Lisbon, so I’m affectionate of acclimatized there, but that’s alone for the accomplished year”.
A brilliant of the Chinese art arena from the mid-90s on, Ai became a domiciliary name in the west afterwards he helped accept the “bird’s nest” amphitheater in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, afore abnegation its use as “culture for the purpose of propaganda” and abnegation to appear the aperture ceremony. His abounding projects aback accept connected to aggravate the Chinese state, up to and including Coronation, his 2020 documentary about the coronavirus beginning in Wuhan.
You’d apprehend an artisan as globally acclaimed as him to do a lot of all-embracing travel, of course. But there’s article added to his un-rootedness. He explains, a little gnomically: “Once you don’t accept a abode to go, you can go anywhere.”
You mean, already you’ve larboard your homeland, you can accomplish a home wherever you like? The chat doesn’t sit able-bodied with him. “I’m still a Chinese citizen, a authorization holder. But I don’t feel that it is my homeland. I allege Chinese and I’m a archetypal Chinese – but I never had a home there. The year I was born, my ancestor was exiled. So my adventure started with no home, aloof actuality pushed abroad to a actual alien breadth as some affectionate of adversary of the state.”
It’s accurate that Ai’s aisle is absurd to accept afterwards alive about his backward father, Ai Qing. Regarded as one of China’s greatest poets, Ai Qing was a leftwing hero, accepting been confined in 1932 for his links to communism. Later, he was a acquaintance and an bookish battle accomplice of the Antipathetic affair baton Mao Zedong, afore badly falling from adroitness in a abolition of alleged “rightist” intellectuals. This adventure is told in assiduous but about admirable detail in Ai’s new autobiography, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. It’s added like a bifold biography, with Ai Qing’s adventure demography up the aboriginal 150 pages, a advantageous antidotal for westerners who apperceive little about him.
What all-overs out from those passages is the arduous animality of Mao’s arrangement of brainy enforcement, and the base altitude Ai accomplished as a child. The bleakest aeon was aback Ai Qing and his two sons lived in a dugout in “Little Siberia”, allotment of China’s far north-west. Their “bed” was a aloft clay belvedere covered with aureate stalks, with a aboveboard aperture in the roof to let in light. The paraffin lamp they acclimated central fabricated their adenoids atramentous with soot. Rats were a connected problem, as were lice. Ai Qing’s job for abundant of this time was charwoman out accepted toilets, which consisted of holes over a cesspit. In winter, this complex “breaking up the arctic faeces into acquiescent pieces and alive them out of the head one by one”. Eventually, his ancestor was rehabilitated, and the ancestors abashed to Beijing.
When I ask Ai about this aeon he picks up his buzz and turns it to face the camera. His homescreen is a black-and-white photograph of the dugout, a admonition of how difficult activity can be – or at atomic that’s what I assume. “Well, it was a adamantine time, but you accept a lot of joy, too.” How so? “You feel safe. You’re beneath there, you’re at a altered akin from added people. They’re all aloft you, but you feel safe.” He goes further: “I anticipate it is so positive, to be poor, and to accept an abandoned activity as a child. I anticipate you authorize an compassionate of how accessible our altruism can be.”
Ai is accustomed to adventurous statements like this that don’t necessarily assemblage up. The acquaintance of cutting abjection may be advantageous to attending aback on, but conceivably alone aback absorptive by wealth. I’m not abiding he consistently thinks through the implications of what he says, but I’m not abiding he cares all that abundant either. Conceivably this is the bequest of his childhood: aback you’ve already been alone in the best acute way, there’s little to abhorrence from people’s opinions of you. But it additionally seems to accept engendered a affectionate of nihilism.
I ask what motivates him. “Good question,” he answers. “You know, afterwards your interview, I wouldn’t apperceive what to do today. I accept so abounding shows, but I never accomplished a appearance and never contacted a babysitter in my lifetime.” If it wasn’t for bodies accepting in touch, he says, “I adeptness be abnormality on the beach, aggravating to acquisition some admirable shells.”
It’s an amazing animadversion for addition as abounding as Ai. Each year he produces several above abandoned exhibitions (in 2016 he had 17, from California to New York to Turin to Athens). His assignment takes in photography, sculpture, blur and amusing abstracts such as Fairytale, in which he abiding for 1,001 Chinese travellers to appointment the German boondocks of Kassel. At added credibility he has absent into article akin journalism, attempting to certificate the names of accouchement dead in the Sichuan convulsion aback the authorities bootless to almanac them. He is assisted by a baby army of helpers: he says their cardinal varies, but “if we do ample projects it would be hundreds, sometimes thousands”.
As a child, he says, he had no dreams for his future, because such things ran adverse to antipathetic ideology. Ambition was a bedraggled word: “If the doors and windows are shut, you don’t accept a view.” But alike afterwards he able to New York in his aboriginal 20s, he drifted, enrolling at Parsons School of Design but flunking his final exams by artlessly autograph his name at the top and annihilation else. He busy an accommodation on the Lower East Side, formed night accouterment at a book shop, and lived the activity of a flâneur. At St Mark’s Church one evening, he listened to Allen Ginsberg recite a composition about China; it independent a band about “revolutionary poets [sent] to advertise bits in Xinjiang”. Ai approached him, explained the connection, and the two became friends. He remembers him as “a admirable man, actual kind, but with the affection of a rebel”.
His wanderings additionally took him to the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, breadth one day he best up The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, a book of the artist’s deadpan observations on fame, adulation and work. It bedeviled him. He singles out Warhol as one of the key influences on his life, alongside the conceptual artisan Marcel Duchamp, his ancestor and, added surprisingly, the philosopher Wittgenstein.
“I was so absorbed by this alone who seemed so empty, but at the aforementioned time was a accurate absorption of our American culture,” he says of Warhol. He is aghast that they never met, admitting he abounding a brace of arcade openings in the abundant man’s presence. “Warhol accepted irony so well, but additionally tells the truth. Actual acrid accuracy in his writing. He was 50 years avant-garde of his time. He accepted chargeless expression, media and communication, he was demography selfies all the time, recording bodies all the time.” Does he feel they accept a lot in accepted as artists? “We are both aboveboard and insincere at the aforementioned time. And we adulation life, but afterwards goals, afterwards purpose.”
I point out that Ginsberg and Warhol – and Wittgenstein for that amount – were gay. “Gay bodies in association accept a complicated accompaniment of apperception … they are about added acute and smarter,” Ai says. This is addition one of those disarmingly baldheaded statements that addition added afraid about how their words are accustomed would avoid. I acquisition myself aggravating to adapt it for him: is it that they accept a added complicated accord with society? “They are complicated, and that aggravation gives them insecurity, because they’re different. And that crisis makes them, you know, added acute – they are artists, poets, musicians.” I acquisition this an amusingly pat description of the gay condition, but I’ll booty it.
Back to Warhol: what would he accept fabricated of the internet? Would he accept enjoyed memes and amusing media? Ai thinks no, he apparently wouldn’t – what he admired about selfies and alive streams (as you could credibly alarm some of his eight-hour movies) was that he was the alone one accomplishing it. Ai, on the added hand, is acclaimed for his adulation of Twitter, seeing it as a apparatus for chargeless announcement and connection. And while you brainstorm Warhol would accept revelled in our accepted accompaniment of avant-garde capitalism, for Ai there is no bigger blackmail to humanity.
“I acclimated to anticipate the crisis was from authoritarianism. But now, I absolutely faculty that accumulated commercialism is a bigger crisis to the accomplished animal environment. It’s activity to absolutely abort animal association by auspicious the admiration aloof to accept more, aloof to get profit.” Does that beggarly he’s appear abounding amphitheater to communism? “I don’t anticipate so. I abhorrence the antipathetic viewpoint. I anticipate that alone belongs to the past.” So what is his solution? “We accept to go aback to humanism.” What does that mean, though? “Respect for individuals’ lives, acreage and development,” he says, throwing me hardly by advertence property, which suggests at atomic some accord with capitalism. Humanism centres “individuals rights to be themselves and allege out about what they’re thinking”.
If added aspects of his political cerebration are confused, there’s no mistaking Ai’s charge to chargeless speech. Donald Trump may absolutely affectation a crisis to democracy, he says, but the “much bigger danger” are amusing media platforms that “manipulate our thinking” by banning him. The abandon to say it as he sees it is conceivably the alone absolute allegorical assumption of Ai’s all-embracing career, and provides addition articulation aback to his father, who wrote Mao a continued letter about the charge to bottle artists’ adeptness to allege the truth, whatever the circumstances.
Ai tells me he has “no plan, no goal, no purpose of my life”. But that’s not absolutely right. His plan is to be himself, unfiltered. It’s a adventure that explains his activity and boundless productivity, which, alike during the pandemic, gave acceleration to added shows, added accessible art, 10,000 printed face masks, the Wuhan blur and, of course, the book. I ask him what he thinks the job of an artisan is. “The job of an artisan is to accept no job,” he laughs. What affairs is to “stay alert” and “speak out with truth”. Ai Qing would no agnosticism agree.
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei, translated by Allan H Barr, is appear on 2 November by The Bodley Head.
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