The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未) began his second month of detention last week, and still the Chinese government has given an increasingly outraged and anxious world no satisfactory answers to questions about his whereabouts, his condition or the charges against him.
But business as usual can sometimes be its own quiet form of defiance. Despite Ai’s absence, his plans for exhibiting his art in the West have been proceeding on schedule. Two weekends ago, an exhibition of new work opened at the Neugerriemschneider Gallery in Berlin, which displayed an immense white banner printed in black with the words “Where is Ai Weiwei” on the front of its building. (It was designed by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.) A larger exhibition will opens at the Lisson Gallery in London. And in Manhattan Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, which is being termed Ai’s first public sculpture, was proclaimed open on the morning of May 4 in a drizzle at the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel.
The ceremony was overseen by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and attended by dozens of members of the press and the New York art world, including 12 artists and arts officials who represented the absent Ai by reading short pertinent sentences from his interviews and blog posts. Citing New York as a city that “fiercely defends the right of all people to express themselves,” Bloomberg called Ai “one of the most talented, respected and masterful artists of our time.”
Photo: Bloomberg
Circle of Animals is a series of 12 heads of the creatures of the Chinese Zodiac, for which years are also named: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig. Each head is cast bronze, roughly 1.2m high and set on a slender 1.8m bronze base that suggests an abstracted lotus stem and leaves. Among the most sculpturally distinctive parts of the project, the bases also resemble stakes, which adds a slight touch of gallows humor. (The work will be on view through July 15 and will later travel to Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh and Washington; another edition will go on view next week outside Somerset House in London.)
Contrary to the title the heads at the Plaza are not placed in a circle, as they were when they were displayed at the Sao Paulo Biennale last year. Sited on two tiers of the fountain and all facing the north, they suggest more a kind of reviewing stand. Taken at face value they are universally familiar animal heads, like the characters in Aesop’s fables. They are also slightly generic. They could have been made by any number of artists of different nationalities over the past several decades. Yet a few of them — notably the rooster, dragon and tiger — are distinctively ferocious looking and bristle with ornate detail and texture. Others are more docile and plain; the horse could almost be an oversize My Little Pony toy.
THE BACKSTORY
photos: AFP
Zodiac Heads is a conceptual work bodied forth as bronze sculpture that my colleague Holland Cotter rightly predicted would look “winsome” if you didn’t know the back story, but that becomes more subversive if you do. The heads are enlarged versions of those that were designed in the 18th century by European Jesuits for the Manchu emperor Qianlong as part of a famous fountain clock in the European-style gardens of the Summer Palace near Beijing. (Each of the originals spouted water for two hours a day, which may explain why the mouths of Ai’s copies are open, as if they are noisily expressing themselves.)
The heads were looted when this vast complex of buildings and gardens was ransacked and burned by British and French troops during the Second Opium War in 1860, an event that remains a signal symbol of national humiliation. They began to resurface in 2000, and at this point the Chinese government has retrieved five of them (ox, tiger, horse, monkey and pig).
Another two (rat and rabbit) were part of the Paris sale of the collection of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Berge, in 2009. The Chinese government sued unsuccessfully for their return; they were successfully bid on by a Chinese collector who then refused to pay for them as an act of patriotic protest, and they are now back in Berge’s hands. The remaining five may be lost forever.
photos: AFP
Knowing all this gives Ai’s piece a certain frisson, beginning with its mongrel origins (Manchurian, Chinese and European) and extending to his enlargement of the original work’s scale and reimagining of the missing heads. It is a seemingly benign work plundered by the West, now being shown to the West, triumphantly enlarged and reconstituted. But in interviews conducted before his incarceration Ai neatly sidestepped the importance of this knowledge, saying that it was not crucial for the public’s enjoyment of the work.
“They should just look at the objects and see the connection through their own experience,” he said.
The heads are also evidence that Ai’s achievement as an artist, activist, designer, writer and increasingly famous and fretted-about dissident forms a whole that may be greater than the sum of its parts. But certainly the longer he remains incommunicado, the more his courage in the face of China’s brutal power comes to the fore as the greatest part. It remains to be seen what price he will pay for his bravery.
photos: AFP
At the ceremony Ai had the final word, and the last quotation, read by Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, was especially apt: “Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.”
While Ai Weiwei remains interned by the Chinese authorities, the Lisson Gallery in London will be putting on an exhibition of his work. Here its director, Nicholas Logsdail, talks about Ai’s growing influence on the global stage and his sadness at the artist’s arrest
By Nicholas Logsdail / The Guardian, LONDON
In my opinion, Ai Weiwei is one of the major artists of the early 21st century. My gallery avoided the gold rush for Chinese art in the boom years because, in my experience, it’s almost always a false premise to group artists together by generation or nationality. What’s important is the quality of the individual artist, and it was clear to us that Ai stood apart. He’s not just the most important Chinese artist of his generation but a truly international figure.
His work is a very interesting blend of traditionalism and liberalism, with a revolutionary bent. He has an outspoken nature, which is what has got him into trouble, but my reading is that his primary impulse is less to overturn society than to improve it. He is unwilling to keep quiet in the face of ignorance and prejudice and he speaks out against injustice wherever he finds it.
I’ve met him on a number of occasions over the last couple of years. When we were preparing for the show, I found him to be highly practical and thoroughly professional. He is a serious man of few words but he has an ironic sense of humor. He’s also a big guy, physically, with a barrel chest and a commanding presence. We had some very interesting conversations about the time he spent living in New York in considerable hardship. He was an exile, partly by choice, partly out of necessity because of his family’s political problems in China. It was a gestation period, a time of growth. He was taking stock of the bigger world and putting his house in order, as an artist and an intellectual.
He may not think of himself as an intellectual, but I would certainly describe him as one. Although he can be irrational himself, he despises irrationality and tries to give a clear and logical approach to the issues that are important to him. He’s committed and idealistic, and unaccepting of injustice to the point of self-denial — allowing himself to get into this position is surely a form of self-denial.
All the arrangements for the show had been made before his arrest, but it feels rotten putting it on in his absence. We’ve been praying, metaphorically speaking, that some news of his whereabouts would break, but nothing has: it’s been total silence since his detention.
I think he is a great global cultural ambassador for the new China, but this arrest is making China’s new cultural revolution look rather unrevolutionary.
In light of Ai’s detention we have organized a very different series of events from the ones we had originally planned. Alongside the show, we will have a press conference and then a big open party to celebrate Ai’s work. We will also have a moment of silence to remember his situation.
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