He is both this and that, either this person or that person, someone who does this, although he also does that. Over the years, Ai Weiwei seems to have enveloped himself in a web of contradictions, polarities and different public faces. And yet, he is always one and the same. For instance, when he suddenly tears off his clothes to dance like a wild faun, naked, at home in his studio or outside in public, in front of the camera – so that the impact of his gesture is not lost – or when he states, in a clear and calm voice, “We have the chance to become everything and nothing at the same time … We can become part of a reality but we can be totally lost and not know what to do,”[1] or even, “I think just walking in the other direction is a smart choice.”[2] During interviews, he often sits at a simple, large, solid, wooden desk, sipping green tea, seemingly oblivious to the cameras and microphones, asking questions of himself and constantly using his mobile phone to photograph those who are questioning him, photographing him and bombarding him with various issues. The wooden desk stands in his home/studio, surrounded by a few objects and works of art that are almost always being inspected and sniffed at by cats. He is located on the ground floor, with doors that open up directly to the outside world, slightly ajar or tightly closed, depending on the situation and temperature, amidst his own architecture of brick blocks aligned to form zones and courtyards – a simple and sometimes even ascetic order. The bricks differ in hue, and sometimes in form – tilted, sunken, jutting bricks break the geometric pattern in an ornamental way that lends the minimalist facades a certain depth of structure and adds an informal hint of freedom to the geometric stringency.

His statements sound credible because they are spoken with such calm simplicity and clarity. And also because both the real and the virtual Ai Weiwei underscore his words and his architecture with a potent, tranquil and businesslike structure. He is a master showman who tolerates and even invites contradiction, setting things in motion by creating a structure and then allowing things (and people) to run their own course. By the same token, even his architecture becomes an “open, participatory work.” His first architectural project was the Fake Design architecture studio that he built on his return to Beijing instead of the artist’s studio that was a thorn in the side of the authorities. In Chinese, “Fake Design” is pronounced “Fuck Design.”[3] But what seems implausible, at least at first, is that the saying “we have the chance to become everything and nothing at the same time” is meant to apply inwardly and introspectively as well, even to the artist himself: an international name, a star, the most famous Chinese artist, feted in the West, both revered and criticized in China where he is under constant surveillance, and involved in many simultaneous gallery and museum exhibitions. At Fake Design, a kind of Weiwei Factory, there is a staff of some 30 or 40 people (even more during architectural projects). And there are almost as many visitors, journalists, gallerists, collectors, curators and photographers who make the pilgrimage to his studio on any given day. Such an artist can indeed be “everything and anything.”

Yet it is all too easy to forget, in this case, that Ai Weiwei only gradually emerged as an international figure in the course of the last seven years (his first museum exhibition was curated by Bernard Fibicher at Kunsthalle Bern in 2004). He had an inauspicious start in life in remotest northeast China, first in the wilderness of Manchuria and then in impoverished Xinjiang, to where his father Ai Qing, once a famous and highly respected poet, had been banished by Mao for his “revisionist thought.” Ai Qing’s exile, during which he was banned from writing, lasted 20 years, 13 of them spent cleaning toilets. Born in such a region, under such circumstances, and with such a family background, Ai Weiwei’s formative years were marked by his experience of systemic social paralysis. In 1981, after four brief years in Beijing, he left China for the USA, living in Philadelphia, Berkeley and, from 1983 to 1993, New York. It was a move that taught him a great deal. He was part of the Chinese diaspora in New York, where he became involved with the East Village art scene, studied the work of Duchamp and Warhol, and met with figures such as beat poet Allen Ginsberg. He dropped out of his painting studies (in the class of Sean Scully) at the Parsons School and led a somewhat unsettled and unstructured life, taking on occasional casual work and living from hand to mouth. Doing nothing as freedom, as a break with convention; the life of the artist as emancipation from social constraints led at first to a kind of subjective paralysis. It was, as he describes it, his “useless time”[4] in New York, with some of his first “useless objects” – objects that he stripped of their practical function, in just a few easy steps, thereby transforming them into thought-provoking artworks. Uselessness, “doing nothing,” thus becomes a form of resistance and escape, but also a sign of helplessness and a lack of definition or determination. Released from a world in which everything is prescribed, and in which individualism is not appreciated, only to land in a world where individualism is celebrated and the individual is left (almost entirely) to his own devices.

This world and that world, this human image and that human image, identity and alterity. There is a deeply rooted duality in both the oeuvre and the individual that is at once a great opportunity and a dichotomy. Ai Weiwei carries both within him – the break with the past and faith in the continuity of culture. He is both a modernist and a traditionalist, local and global, American and Chinese, thinker and collector. Ueli Sigg, prominent Swiss collector of Chinese art, summed it up in an article in the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung when he said, “the oeuvre fuses two contrary paradigms of artistic creation: on the one hand the Western paradigm of ‘avant-garde art’ that seeks to create space for new ways of thinking by making a radical break with the past and its traditions, and on the other hand the classical Chinese paradigm that holds tradition in great respect and therefore sees artistic creation in terms of a constantly evolving continuum that draws upon the richness of Chinese culture.”[5] The sculptures that Ai Weiwei creates from Qing dynasty furniture embody this fusion. His approach is clear, direct and harsh: the table is sawed in two. Then the pieces are reassembled. The cut is precise, radical, surgical – but not destructive, as it is with, say, Gordon Matta-Clark; the raw and violent are not an issue here. The (distorted) reassembly is carried out with the utmost respect for what has been destroyed and de-functionalized, as well as for the material itself. These furniture sculptures illustrate the affinity between break and continuity, between being “this” and being “that.” As Ai Weiwei puts it, “after Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product. … A way of looking at things.”[6] Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, but one with an acute awareness of the material and enormous respect for the production methods and the product.

Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing in 1993 due to his father’s illness and, on moving from New York’s East Village, soon became an important part of the emerging art scene in the East Village of Beijing. He built his own studio and, in 2000, curated the “Fuck Off” exhibition in Shanghai, which showcased contemporary Chinese art. He was soon to discover the increasingly radical transformation of the city. From 2002 to 2008, he documented this tabula rasa that characterized not only Beijing but other Chinese cities as well. Everything in the country has been in government hands since 1949. That means that the state does not need to enter into any complex negotiations in order to demolish huge swathes of buildings – especially the traditional one-story hutong houses constructed along narrow lanes – and create huge empty sites on which to construct new architecture. Ai Weiwei has documented this architectural tabula rasa. He has photographed the “provisional landscapes” that temporarily result from this policy, documenting a form of state-run megalomania that shows little respect for the history and culture of the country: razing to the ground and building anew, including such prestige projects as T3 (Beijing Airport’s Terminal 3) and the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium by Herzog & de Meuron, in which Ai Weiwei was initially involved as artistic consultant for design. In this way, continuity, destruction and construction are intensely fused into a new core. Documenting and preserving these facts, as Ai Weiwei also did in his search for the names of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake – victims of the collapse of their shoddily constructed school buildings – is a means of seeking the truth and restoring the dignity of the individual through the possibility of remembrance. Documentation as a form of naming, as a chronicle, as an archive of the present and as a sign of respect for life lived.

“Passive” documentation merges with active provocation. In a photograph titled June 1994, the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Lu Qing, Ai Weiwei’s former assistant and partner, who is now his wife, cheekily lifts her skirt to show her underwear. Ai Weiwei clenches his fist and raises his middle finger (“flipping the bird”) towards the Gate of Heavenly Peace. These are gestures of protest, resistance and insolence. A series of photographs followed in which Ai Weiwei again gives “the finger”: to the Eiffel Tower, the White House, the Gobi Desert, and even his own studio. With dry wit, he has called this provocative series “Study of Perspective,” in reference to the way distances are gauged by stretching out an arm, fist clenched and thumb extended, and alternately closing one eye, then the other. The thumb “jumps” horizontally, and the discrepancy, multiplied by ten, provides an approximation of the distance to the object in question. In this way, the offensive gesture is transformed into a statement of position and location: here I am, this is where I want to go, and this is how far away it is. These images, simple and stereotypical as they may appear at first glance, thus become metaphors of the relationship between social power and individual freedom – in which possibilities are gauged, boundaries are tested and new perspectives emerge (following the collapse of Eastern European communism). It is a subject with which he continues to engage. The individual and the mass are embodied by the single hand-painted ceramic sunflower seed and the field of millions of sunflower seeds: Ai’s famous installation at Tate Modern addresses this issue, which is of such central importance to China in particular, in a work of minimalist form and appearance.

Ai Weiwei follows the enlightened conceptualist line of thinking that holds the work to be less important than the idea behind it, the path that led to it, and the possibilities it may generate: “An interesting idea is that most original thinking is done by individuals, whereas the most powerful object is always created by collective wisdom … An artist functions as a mediator in society: an initiator who sets up a program rather than handling every detail on his own. So you have an open structure and invite people to join … by doing that, you write new rules to the game … You also physically implicate society. I believe that only if you think that way can blogs and social awareness be applied to a higher end.”[7] Ai Weiwei has increasingly maneuvered himself and his art into a situation in which communicating becomes a performative artistic act in its own right. We live in a world in which there is an endless accumulation of information, but that information is not necessarily processed or memorized for easy recall. His daily interviews, his blogging from 2005 to 2009, his use of Twitter – according to Daniela Janser’s essay, he often sends over a hundred tweets a day – generate a flow of communication, messages and responses, statements and contradictions. Ai Weiwei has come to be seen by the Chinese public as something of a life mentor, as a kind of father figure to be consulted on anything by anyone, as someone who will invariably be able to give advice. It is a dangerous position for the artist to be in, and he reflects on this just as he reflects on his changing position within the global economy of today. As Karen Smith puts it with regard to Ai Weiwei’s situation, art serves as rebellion and as communication.[8] Or, in his own words: “Art ought to be a tool, a carriage for conveying information.”[9]

The installation Fragments, the communicating bicycles (Forever), the bowl of pearls (Bowl of Pearls), the chandeliers, the bed of sunflower seeds: in addition to their own inherent value and intent, all of these works embody something that is a key theme for Ai Weiwei – that of the connecting, interlacing and dovetailing of physical and digital networking. They are sculptural, room-filling visualizations of a transparent world in which everything and everyone is and can be connected if we want. Ai Weiwei proves himself a socially aware structuralist. Conversation, dialogue and communication are, for him, forms of open and living sculpture. Ai Weiwei’s approach has sometimes been compared with Beuys’s concept of social sculpture. Although Ai Weiwei acknowledges this comparison, his roots as an artist are to be found in Duchamp, Warhol and – through a paradox of own his own life and background – increasingly, in China. His huge outdoor work, Template, created for the documenta 12 in Kassel, consisting of the remnants of abandoned and ruined temples, is emblematic of a central tenet: that of history as the lens through which we view the present and look towards the future. Nature is a parallel force to history, and one more powerful still, as illustrated by the very fact that a storm tore down the model or lens that Template represented and broke it into pieces. Now the work itself has become a symbol of the interaction between nature and culture.

Given the notion of the artist as mentor,[10] as medium, and as a nerve-center of communication, photography is eminently suitable as an important instrument of note-taking, documentation and communication. In a conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ai Weiwei compares photography to drawing and making notes. In today’s world, he explains, “Taking photos … [is] like breathing, it becomes part of you.”[11] His enthusiasm for the medium is not entirely unadulterated. He has at times spoken of it critically in his blogs: “Photography is a deceitful and dangerous medium; and medium is method, it is significance, a ubiquitous feast of hope, or a hopelessly impassable ditch. In the end, photography is unable to either record or express reality, it rejects the authenticity of the reality that it presents, making reality even more remote and distant from us …” Yet, for him, photography is also a central and indispensable aid or tool in addition to the verbal communication and writing that he says he loves best.[12]

Instead of focusing on such iconic individual works as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn or June 1994, this book takes a look at the aesthetic impact of his more casual, yet nevertheless precisely and functionally targeted photography. The book begins and ends with two major blocks of work, like brackets: on the one hand, his diary-like photographs of New York and, on the other hand, his blog and cellphone photographs from recent years. Both blocks of work function as a form of social networking through diary-like photography. Unlike the blog photographs, however, the New York photographs were not developed until years after Ai Weiwei had returned to Beijing. In other words, these photographs are not a form of direct communication, but are instead an archive of a certain time, a certain life, and of a community in which Ai Weiwei moved as a young artist in exile. Like many of his first blog photographs, the New York photographs are black and white, but they differ in that they are analog rather than digital, and are taken with a sense of unhurried calm and a keen awareness of photographic composition. The blog photographs, on the other hand, are mostly digital, piled online in quantity and easily accessible. Uploaded sometimes at the click of a cellphone, Ai Weiwei has used them to transform photography into a new photo-cinematographic flow of color images meandering through the worldwide web. Often, he shoots not just one photo of a scene, but twenty or thirty or forty or even sixty, allowing us to follow, step by detailed step, such everyday events as Ai Weiwei “artistically” cutting someone’s hair: life in Beijing’s new art district, Caochangdi, as a performance piece. By the time it was closed down, Ai’s blog had 17 million readers. His life in Beijing had become a work of performance art followed by people all over China and, indeed, the world. As he puts it, “I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.”[13]

“I came to art because I wanted to escape the other regulations of the society. The whole society is so political,” Ai Weiwei says. “But the irony is that my art becomes more and more political.”[14] Ai became an artist by pure chance, and today he is an impassioned architect, artist, blogger, twitterer, “photo-taker,” sociopolitical artist and cultural critic. For him, art is an intellectual tool that allows him not only to change himself, but also to change situations, to peel away the crust and open up new fields of potential. He sees art as an active part of the enlightening, clarifying elements in the world – at least in those parts of the Eastern world where people are faced with secretive and totalitarian forms of government (and much less with the emptiness of Western capitalism and consumerism, yet): Art as a form of change. That involves, among other things, living with dichotomy and ambiguity, enduring contrast and contradiction, and relating them to one another in a way that makes sense. Interlacing, connecting, rebelling, communicating and enabling as a way of life and a form of art. Because, “after all, it’s a mind game.”[15]

[1] Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Ai Weiwei. In: Ai Weiwei, ed. by Karen Smith, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Bernard Fibicher. London: Phaidon, 2009, p. 19.
[2] Mathieu Weiner in conversation with Ai Weiwei, see fn. 1, p. 20.
[3] Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Ai Weiwei, see fn. 2, p. 31.
[4] Karen Smith, “Giant Provocateur.” In: Ai Weiwei, ed. by Karen Smith, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Bernard Fibicher. London: Phaidon, 2009, p. 82.
[5] Ueli Sigg, ”Konfusionismus. Der Sammler Ueli Sigg über den Künstler Ai Weiwei – ein Porträt.” In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 21.11.2009.
[6] Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Ai Weiwei, see fn. 2, p. 20.
[7] Mathieu Weiner in conversation with Ai Weiwei, see fn. 1, p. 22.
[8] Karen Smith, see fn. 5, p. 110.
[9] Karen Smith, see fn. 5, p. 107.
[10] Ai Weiwei cit. in Birgit Sonnad and Ralf Schlüter’s interview: “Ai Weiwei, braucht die chinesische Gesellschaft Künstler als Sprachrohr für die Wahrheit?” In: Art, 1.12. 2009, pp. 20–26.
[11] Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Ai Weiwei, see fn. 2, p. 16.
[12] Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Ai Weiwei, see fn. 2, p. 19.
[13] Ai Weiwei, cit. in Evan Osnos, “It’s not beautiful. An artist takes on the system.” In: The New Yorker, 24.5.2010, p. 56.
[14] Michael Wines, “Still making art, and trouble, in China.” In: International Herald Tribune, 28.11.2009.
[15] As Ai Weiwei himself put it; see fn. 1.