He does it his Weiwei
Daniel Nelson
He’s an inveterate, irrepressible, imaginative, taunting provocateur. And whatever the authorities throw at him – including the destruction of his studio, physical assault, and 81 days detention, for every second of which a warder was never more than a metre away – he uses the strength and method of the assault jujitsu-like against his attackers.
Before his studio was razed to the ground, for example, he invited hundreds of people to a party at which crab would be served. After the destruction he produced 3,000 porcelain crabs in a work called Hie Xie – a homonym for ‘harmonious’ much used in government propaganda but which more recently has become Internet slang for ‘censorship’.
In addition, he obtained some of the rubble and turned into an artwork.
Even without Ai’s table-turning, the state’s act of vandalism revealed its own confusion over how to deal with him: a local administration had invited him to build the studio at its own cost – presumably hoping to cash in on his success – but subsequently changed its mind and ordered its demolition on the grounds that it had not received planning permission.
Similarly, when released from detention and forbidden to speak about it, he created six meticulous model reconstructions of his imprisonment. They are in the Academy show and you can peer at them through a small hole or a window. Not particularly interesting artistically, but a nice riposte.
And when 30,000 people sent him money after he was charged with tax evasion and ordered to pay $i.5 million in 15 days he made I.O.U., a work in which his promissory notes to each donor were scanned and turned into wallpaper.
He’s probably best known for his protest work after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in which 5,000 pupils died in 20 schools, partly as a result of cheapskate “tofu dreg” construction. He clandestinely bought 200 tons of twisted steel from the wreckage and had it straightened by hand and hammer. The rods are laid out in a wave-like form, and are overlooked by the names of every dead child, like a war memorial.
It’s a big exhibition, with room for other aspects of his work, like the bicycle chandelier, the one metre crystal cube, a sex toy, a Picasso-like Hanging Man fashioned from a coathanger, the skilful version of a traditional Chinese puzzle box with a series of hidden parts.
A modern version of those secret compartments can be found elsewhere – in a work titled Bed, where it is not obvious that one side is in the shape of China’s border, and another where the visitor has to take it on trust that seen from above it’s another map of China.
His protest art, experimentation and genre mixing make him easily understood in the West (he lived in the US for more than 10 years) but he incorporates traditional Chinese elements in many of his works, which probably adds to his popularity here. He turns Neolithic vases and Qing dynasty artefacts into impossible furniture, or films himself dropping them, which he now admits was a raher silly gesture – a reminder of the destruction of historical objects in the Cultural Revolution (and in the contemporary dash for modernisation) in which his famous poet father ended up cleaning latrines in a military re-education camp. One of the most moving works in the show consists of porcelain replicas of the bones said to be of another intellectual who died in a similar camp: “The work commemorates the suffering of the father and thousands of others during the brutal regime of Chairman Mao.”
The show is an eye-opener: many people in Britain know his name as a sort of art celebrity but relatively few have had a chance to see what he has been up to since his return to China in 1993. Here at last is a chance to look at the detail and range of his extensive output.
In China, he gets away – for most of the time – with his sometimes subtle, sometimes devastating critiques by insisting that what he does is art, not politics. In truth, his courageous, quick-minded politics are more effective than his art.
Ai Weiwei is at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1, from 19 September until 13 December. £17.60 (without donation £16); under-16s free. Info: 7300 8000/ www.royalacademy.org.uk
+ 21 September, An introduction to Ai Weiwei, Adrian Locke, 1-2pm
+ 10 October, Ai Weiwei, social media and online activism, Ros Homes, 3-4pm,
