ai weiwei

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Ai Weiwei Acting Is Believing

Meiling Cheng

First, a Follow-up 1 July 2011 On 22 June 2011, after 81 days of incarceration in an undisclosed location, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was released on bail, having allegedly confessed his crime of tax evasion. Ai’s release followed a huge international campaign to free him and came just a day before the Chinese premiere Wen Jiaboa left for state visits to the UK, Germany, and Hungary. Ai’s emergence from his arrest to reunite with his family opened the second act of a global performance that has been raging since his initial “disappearance” on 3 April 2011. Doubtlessly, the key players in this global performance, including the Western media, art communities, and governments, the Chinese CCP leadership, and Ai Weiwei himself, will continue to write the second act from their ongoing real-life actions with new points of public interest, but at this transitional moment, no interpretation regarding these key players’ motivations, calculations, and strategies provides conclusive evidence as to how the second act will unfold.

In response to Ai’s sudden detention in April, I wrote the following TDR Comment, but primarily as a character study of the Chinese artist. Ai had evolved from using his versatile talents as a mediator between the Western art establishment and Beijing’s emergent experimental art world in the 1990s into an outspoken crusader who, through his new-media political art, champions the causes of his less well-off compatriots and promotes typical democratic values. Although Ai is now free from the prison cell, his bail condition restricts him from accessing some of his most efficacious art tools: Twitter feeds; interviews; international travel.

Ironically, when Ai was shielded from public view, tireless media attention and the dedication of the Western art world insured that his vocal political art continued to be heard; now that he has regained relative freedom of movement, Ai faces the compound challenges of intensified global expectations, unrelenting surveillance by his Chinese government prosecutors, and his very recent personal/family experiences of the legal/political consequences to his dissident art.

I would not be exaggerating to state that Ai has emerged from a crisis that validated the power of his prior political art only to find himself in another, and perhaps greater, crisis, forcing him to reevaluate how he wishes to conduct his art/life from now on.

These uncertainties made me decide to keep the following comment as a temporary (historical) document, whose multiple versions of updates exist on the internet, but whose more substantial progress in “plot” development will likely be unrealized even after my document is published in print.

22 April 2011 I write with extreme concern for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, with whom I have had several phone and face-to-face interviews since 2004.1 The international press has covered extensively the circumstances surrounding Ai’s latest arrest.2 In summary: on 3 April 2011, as Ai waited to board

1. I began working with Ai Weiwei for a TDR article that covered the Fuck Off exhibition (2000), cocurated by Ai and Feng Boyi (Cheng 2005).

TDR: The Drama Review 55:4 (T212) Winter 2011. ©2011 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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2. I consulted many news articles in the Western media available online. I will cite my source only when there is a direct quotation.

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a plane to Hong Kong and then to Taiwan, two uniformed security agents intercepted him and took him from the Beijing Capital Airport; later that day, police raided Ai’s Caochangdi home/studio and seized his laptops and office computer hard drives. The police also questioned his wife, Lu Qing, and the staff and volunteers from Ai’s company, FAKE Design; some of them have since gone missing.

On 5 April, after Ai had disappeared for 50 hours, his mother Gao Ying and sister Gao Ge Ai Weiwei in his office, located inside his home/studio complex in Caochangdi. posted on their neighborhood In the background is a photograph of Ai’s installation artwork, Remembering street a handwritten “Missing (2009), which covered the façade of Haus der Kunst in Munich. The installation Person” notice, whose photowas made of 9,000 backpacks in five different colors, making up a Chinese graphed version soon went viral. sentence: “For seven years she lived happily on this earth.” (Photo by Jeff Kelley) On 7 April, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, replied to queries at a regularly scheduled news conference that Ai was under investigation for “economic crimes” and this incident “has nothing to do with human rights or freedom of expression” (Branigan 2011).

As a world-renowned Chinese artist and outspoken social critic, Ai’s detention elicited tremendous overseas response, from high-level US, EU, German, French, Australian, and British government expressions of shock to public demonstrations and performance protests by artists, including those in Hong Kong.3 Online petitions emulated Ai’s prolific “social sculpture” output by spreading the word via electronic social media (Guggenheim 2011).4 London’s Tate Modern, which has been showing Ai’s Sunflower Seeds (2010) — an installation made up of 100 million individually hand-crafted porcelain sculptures of life-sized sunflower seeds — prominently displays its support for the artist with a rooftop sign that reads: “RELEASE AI WEIWEI” (Tate Modern 2011). Despite this global pressure, the Chinese government confirms that it is holding Ai on various alleged crimes (tax evasion, bigamy, internet pornography, plagiarism, etc.), while warning other countries not to interfere in China’s domestic affairs.

Given Ai’s status as an artist of multiple genres — including performance art, conceptual sculpture, interactive installation, photography, architecture, video documentary, and politically engaged new media art — his arrest epitomizes the state’s infringement on artistic freedom. We might share the general abhorrence of any censorship of art and mourn the unjust treatment of a fellow artist. This reading, at its purest, assumes that unhampered individual

3. The EU acted as an entity, while certain European countries (Britain, Germany, France) acted individually to join international outcry over the detention of Ai.

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4. “Social sculpture” is a concept first developed by Joseph Beuys, who, I believe, has inspired Ai’s naming of his electronic activism as “social sculpture.”

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Meiling Cheng is Associate Professor of Theatre and Director of Critical Studies at the School of Theatre, University of Southern California. She is the author of In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (2002). Currently she is developing a multicentric perspective to practice and theorize contemporary Chinese time-based art in her book manuscript, Beijing Xingwei.

freedom of expression is a universal virtue and that public censorship — in whatever form — a condemnable evil.

While my own sentiment leans toward this assumption, I am also aware that my emotional response to Ai’s plight is itself an ideological construction, resulting from my acculturation to the values of the democratic West and my immersion in the Western news media’s reaffirmation of these values through its coverage of the Ai incident. I proclaimed my politics by signing an online petition calling for Ai’s release (circulated by Change.org). Nevertheless, the performance scholar in me understands my act as the temporary erasure of any critical distance between what I believe and what I might, given time to reflect, find otherwise. The stakes in Ai’s case are high; his lawyer and family still don’t know his whereabouts and physical condition. When a person’s life is in danger, it seems heartless to study his detainment as an episode of sociopolitical performance. But Ai Weiwei himself made such a reading not only possible, but also desirable. Numerous commentators have observed that Ai’s arrest may be a shock, but not a surprise. The artist has long foreseen, even incited, his detention (e.g., Coonan 2011). By blurring the line between art and life, art and politics, Ai has knowingly, if not willingly, taken the risk that he would be arrested—and it is likely that he might retrospectively frame this arrest as a political performance. He has performed something similar before: when his expensive Shanghai studio was bulldozed by the city government on 11 January 2011 he recuperated the city’s destructive act by calling it his performance art piece. As represented by the Western media, the Chinese government’s persecution of Ai has established the artist in the liberal imaginary as a heroic freedom fighter. But Ai deserves a more complex reading.

Ai is a multifaceted character, more ambivalent than a straightforward dissident. A case in point is the name he chose for his design company, FAKE — meaning in English that which dissembles and sounding in Chinese pinyin close to “fuck.” This bilingual semantic-sonic punning typifies Ai’s impudent series of performative artworks, from smashing a valuable Han Dynasty urn, coating vases from the Neolithic age with bright industrial paint, giving the finger to inter/national cultural and political monuments in his performative photographs, fabricating witty conceptual sculptures — like ostentatiously counterfeit objects out of redeemed traditional Chinese furniture parts — to jumping in midair, naked except that his privates are covered by a stuffed toy horse, nicknamed “Grass Mud Horse,” whose pinyin (cao ni ma) is homonymic with an obscene three-word curse (literally, fuck your mother) in Chinese (see Ai 2003; China Digital Times 2011). “FAKE” also reflects Ai’s equivocating mix of irreverence, brashness, and posturing, characteristic of his evolving public identities through a series of roles he inhabits.

I first contacted Ai when he was the cocurator of Fuck Off via a phone interview (see Ai 2004). At once brusque and laconic, Ai’s phone persona prepared me for my difficult first faceto-face with him in his home/studio in July 2005 (Ai 2005).5 With the benefit of hindsight, I recall that (almost farcical) encounter. Ai’s performance of façade, supported by his imposing “personality architecture,” buttressed by countless interruptions — by his assistants, younger artist-visitors, and international cell phone calls — punctuated and truncated our one-hour interview. Was Ai showing me that his time was too valuable to focus on one interview by a Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese American female scholar? Was he insinuating his disapproval of my analysis in the TDR article (Cheng 2005) concerning his “internal censorship” of the photographic documents of Zhu Yu’s performance piece, Eating People (2000), which he excised from Fuck Off? Or, was Ai demonstrating that his multiple responsibilities to the Chinese art world trumped all other matters?

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5. I interviewed Ai primarily to inquire about Zhang Shengquan, an artist who corresponded with Ai before he committed suicide on 1 January 2000. We also discussed Ai’s general views about performance art in China and the specific “self-inspection” procedure through which Ai, with Zhu Yu’s agreement, removed the five photographic documents of Eating People from the wall of Fuck Off.

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I requested a second interview with Ai in March 2009 while I was writing about his largescale performance piece, Fairytale (2007). In this work, he recruited 1,001 ordinary Chinese citizens and brought them, in five rotating groups, as living artworks to the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Although Ai remained somewhat reserved in this second meeting, referring me again and again to his sina.com blog archive for answers to my questions and reading a newspaper throughout our one-hour interview, this time there were no cell phone interruptions or youngsters groveling for favors. Ai also allowed me to watch — in his studio, on his assistant’s laptop — his newly edited, not-yet-released two-and-a-half-hour digital video documentary about the making of Fairytale. Moreover, Ai volunteered information regarding his ongoing “citizens’ investigation” of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake victims, asserting that he would keep posting the names of the deceased students one by one on his blog, even though the government censors would erase those postings almost instantly.

Two months after my second meeting with Ai, his blogsite was no longer accessible, having been shut down by the Chinese government. The state’s censorship forced/inspired Ai to begin using Twitter as art activism, dexterously bypassing the official ban on Twitter. In August 2009, I received a group email from Ai’s assistant, stating that Ai and his volunteers had been attacked by the police, just when they were getting ready to leave their hotel room to testify in court for the Sichuan earthquake human rights lawyer Tan Zuoren. One hit Ai on the head.6 The brutal incident necessitated emergency cranial surgery about a month later in Germany (Ramzy 2009).

Based on my understanding of Ai’s artistic corpus, supplemented by the two interviews, I suggest that Ai is a consummate performance artist, whose most fascinating trait is his play with the gray areas between seeming and being, simulation and earnestness. In the decade after his 1993 return to China from the US, where he had lived since 1981, with his pedigree as the son of Ai Qing, the esteemed, if once disgraced, poet who was reinstated after the Cultural Revolution, and his English-speaking worldly sophistication, Ai assumed the role of a mediator linking government authorities, the Western media, collectors, curators, critics, and Chinese practitioners of contemporary experimental art. This role in turn engendered two simultaneous and mutually reinforcing professional goals: to advance his own artistic career and to foster the growth of Chinese experimental art. His three pioneering self-published anthologies on Chinese performance art — untitled but known as Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995), and Gray Cover Book (1997) — and the Fuck Off exhibition he coorganized were significant steps toward achieving this goal.7 With the design and construction of his austere and elegant home/studio complex in Caochangdi in 1999, Ai moved into architecture, which brought him the opportunity to serve as a consultant to Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss firm that designed Beijing National Stadium, the famous Bird’s Nest, for the 2008 Olympic Games. Hosting the Olympics was a momentous “nationalistic” occasion for the country’s capital (both geopolitical and economic), a chance to present China’s brand new state image of cosmopolitan creativity. Beijing embarked on a massive official program — from the draconian urban cleanup to the extravagant performance ceremonies planned for the Olympic Games — to create an icon of a postmodern China. Compelled by what he discovered from his privileged vantage point to shift his performance strategy, Ai very publicly transitioned (in August 2007) from his status as an official insider to a socially conscientious outsider. Ai vocally denounced Beijing’s propagandistic promotion of the 2008 Olympic shows as a “fake smile” (CBC Arts 2007).8 Given that Ai is himself a supreme manip-

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6. Because of a university computer server problem, I no longer have the email text in my archive, but, according to my calendar, the date I received the email was 13 August 2009.

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7. These three untitled volumes, coedited by Ai and self-published by participating artists, are called by the colors of their covers (see Zeng, Ai, and Xu 1994; Zeng and Ai 1995; Zeng and Ai 1997).

8. The Chinese phrase, jia xiao (假笑), may be translated as a “pretend smile,” as cited in the report by CBC Arts, or as a “fake smile,” as translated here. The CBC article also cites Ai as saying, “I would feel ashamed if I just designed something for glamour or to show some kind of fake image.”

ulator of seeming and being “fake,” this denouncement both inaugurated Ai’s performance as a dissenting rebel against the authoritarian hypocrisy — a role favored by the democratic West — and marked a drastic narrowing of his representational spectrum.

The more Ai performed dissent, the more he found reasons for his dissent; the more he found a solid basis for his critique, the more he reduced the distance between his “faking,” by ambiguously embracing contradictory positions, and “acting,” by committing to a unitary position. For Ai, to fake was now more and more to act according to his newfound convictions, which revolved around the individual’s right to voice opposition and expose corruption. Ai’s tactics in acting out his convictions included pushing existing sociopolitical boundaries within China and fraternizing with the Western media and contemporary art establishment: he used the former to cultivate his international fame and sought the latter to endorse his political art.

Ai applied both tactics in his Sichuan Earthquake Names Project (2008–2009), the summative title he used for his art activism that involved “more than 50 researchers and volunteers” in towns across Sichuan province to collect the names of the students crushed to death by shoddily constructed school buildings during the 2008 earthquake.9 Ai initiated this citizens’ investigation for the victimized schoolchildren and their parents; he did it for himself as an artist; he did it for what he hoped would result in a better China. If Ai’s previous professional aim was to globally spread good tidings by promoting contemporary Chinese experimental art and his unique position in it, his more recent objective was to alert his global audience by publicizing China’s political ills. Despite this shift in modality, however, Ai’s creative mission has been consistent throughout his career.

Thus we may discern Ai’s performance logic: faking is acting; acting is believing.10 If Ai’s faking was positioned to design a range of roles that heightened his personality, then his acting was adopted to consciously refine, fit into, and further develop these selected roles: as an experimental artist, a mentor for newcomers, a mediator, a publisher, an architect, a curator. When Ai acted in a particular role (as an activist/a political artist) that he found best addressed his intended goal (e.g., unveiling hidden sociopolitical problems), he prolonged the enactment of this role, whose performative reiterations were extended to such a degree that the actor believed in the role’s value for realizing his most socially relevant potential. Belief requires faith; faith preempts ambivalence. Ai’s belief in his role’s concordance with his best self (as an artist who advocates for the downtrodden, for artistic freedom, and for individual human rights) demanded that he overcome whatever difficulties he encountered in continuously enacting this role. The longer he inhabited this particular role, the less able and willing he was to access his inventory of other roles.

Without distance between seeming and being, performing and living, Ai cut his safety net, which was strung between the versatility of shifting roles. But even Ai’s refusal to balance roles against each other would not have opened him to danger had there not been a confluence of several sociopolitical events that triggered China’s latest large-scale crackdown.11 Although analysts maintain that it’s highly unlikely for something similar to the 2011 “Arab Spring” to roil China anytime soon, the nation’s tightened security control reveals the nervousness of its leaders (Euronews 2011; Zhang 2011). Minxin Pei hypothesizes three reasons for Beijing’s current campaign against dissent: (1) preemptive strikes against a potential “Jasmine

9. The information collected by the Sichuan Names Project inspired Ai’s subsequent series of projects, using student backpacks to create installations in various exhibitions overseas (see Grube 2009).

11. “Global values” is used as a code phrase to connote democratic values such as “the sanctity of individual” and “freedom of expression within a civil society” (see Jensen 2011; and Richburg 2011).

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10. My proposed analysis was inspired by Lope de Vega’s play, Acting Is Believing (c. 1607–08), in which a playwright/actor, Genesius, who plays a Christian, is converted during/by his acting and is sentenced to death, hence martyrdom, by the Roman Emperor Diocletian. St. Genesius is the patron saint of actors (1986:101). By analogy, democracy is the belief system to which Ai is converted.

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Revolution”; (2) power jockeying in preparation of the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership transition, scheduled for 2012; and (3) a punitive response to the “offense” China perceived regarding the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo (Pei 2011). Add one more: the CCP leadership is bracing for an economic downturn set off by Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami-related recession. Since the CCP bases its internal political legitimacy largely on delivering a continuous economic boom, it cannot risk social instability scaring investors and curtailing economic growth.

For whatever reason, Ai, along with many other activists lesser known overseas, are casualties of the attack on political nonconformists. Intriguingly, the Chinese government’s capture and confinement of Ai reverses the artist’s performance logic: from faking to acting to believing. Conversely, for the Chinese government, believing is acting; acting is faking. Although in the past, Ai’s reputation offered China both an international cachet for its burgeoning contemporary art scene and an image of tolerance for dissent, the Chinese leadership now believes that Ai’s agitation is no longer an asset; the government acts accordingly and must now produce enough evidence to charge Ai (to “fake,” as in exaggerating evidence or enforcing confession).

Ai Weiwei’s case has garnered such an audience in the West because he serves as the perfect poster child for the “virtues” of Western democracy. If Western opinion is that China’s economic prosperity threatens the West’s competitive edge, secured for more than a century by intertwining democracy and capitalism, Ai’s arrest proves there is something essentially “faulty” in China’s combination of authoritarianism and de facto capitalism. The Western media’s representation of the Ai case betrays much self-righteousness. Instead, consider this possibility: compare China’s hybrid socialism-capitalism system to a beehive. A bee colony is, as Jürgen Tautz puts it, “nature’s most wonderful way of organizing matter and energy in space and time” (2008). The common mission of all bees — workers, drones, queen — is to ensure that the colony will not only survive but thrive as “a single integrated living organism” (2008). The fate of any individual bee is inconsequential vis-à-vis the sustainability of the entire colony. Is the Chinese leadership’s current purge of dissidents following a similar logic?

Still, people are not bees. Arresting Ai is China’s show of force to the world and, internally, a strategy to instill fear among critics, including overseas Chinese. When I first heard about Ai’s disappearance, my immediate reaction was fear. I have written about Ai, along with other political artists, in my current book manuscript on Chinese time-based art. Once my book is published, will I be disappeared when I next visit China? I live where dissension is a basic principle.

But that carries the ironic result that political artists may not be heard — the risk to their art is inefficacy. Contrastingly, in China, an artist like Ai, who assumes the role of a virtual oneman opposition party, is heard loud and clear. He hazards the possibility of playing the martyr’s role. And only a “martyr” as internationally celebrated as Ai will have his silencing heard as a global controversy.

References Ai Weiwei. 2003. Ai Weiwei: Works: Beijing 1993–2003, ed. Charles Merewether. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd. Ai Weiwei. 2004. Phone interview with author, 1 September.

Ai Weiwei. 2005. Interview with author, 5 July. Beijing, Ai’s Caochangdi Home/Studio.

Ai Weiwei. 2009. Interview with author, 23 March. Beijing, Ai’s Caochangdi Home/Studio.

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Branigan, Tania. 2011. “China Says Ai Weiwei Detention ‘Nothing to Do with Human Rights.” Guardian .co.uk, 7 April. www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/07/china-suspect-ai-weiwei-financial-crimes (12 April).

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CBC Arts. 2007. “Artist Behind Beijing’s ‘Bird Nest’ Stadium Boycotts Olympics.” CBC News, 11 August. www.cbc.ca/news/arts/artdesign/story/2007/08/11/beijing-artist-stadium.html (15 April 2011).

Cheng, Meiling. 2005. “Violent Capital: Zhu Yu on File.” TDR 49, 3 (T187):58–77.

China Digital Times. 2011. “China News Tagged with: Grass-Mud Horse (34).” China Digital Times.net. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/grass-mud-horse/ (12 April 2011).

Coonan, Clifford. 2011. “Ai Weiwei: Seeds of an Iconoclast.” The Independent, 9 April. www.independent .co.uk/news/people/profiles/ai-weiwei-seeds-of-an-iconoclast-2265474.html (12 April).

Euronews. 2011. “Jasmine Revolution ‘Impossible’ in China: Analyst.” Euronews, 30 March. www.euronews .net/2011/03/30/jasmine-revolution-impossible-in-china-analyst/ (16 April).

Grube, Katherine. 2009. “Ai Weiwei Challenges China’s Government Over Earthquake.” ArtAsiaPacific 24 ( July/August): http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/64/AiWeiweiChallengesChinasGovernment OverEarthquake (16 April 2011).

Guggenheim Foundation. 2011. “Call for the Release of Ai Weiwei.” Change.org. www.change.org/petitions /call-for-the-release-of-ai-weiwei (12 April).

Jensen, Lionel M. 2011. “Ai Weiwei and the ‘World of Madness’.” Asia Sentinel, 14 April. www.asiasentinel .com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3129&Itemid=258 (18 April).

Pei, Minxin. 2011. “Three Reasons for Beijing’s Current Campaign Against Dissent.” CNN World, 11 April. http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/11/3-reasons-for-beijings-current-campaign-against -dissent/ (11 April).

Ramzy, Austin. 2009. “Surgery for Ai Weiwei in Germany.” The China Blog, Time/CNN. http://china .blogs.time.com/2009/09/15/surgery-for-ai-weiwei-in-germany/ (28 March 2010).

Richburg, Keith B. 2011.“Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Arrested in Latest Government Crackdown.” The Washington Post, 3 April. www.yhumanrightsblog.com/blog/2011/04/03/chinese-artist-ai-weiwei -arrested-in-latest-government-crackdown/ (12 April).

Tate Modern. 2011. The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei. 12 October to 2 May 2010. www.tate.org.uk/modern /exhibitions/unileverseries2010/default.shtm (12 April).

Tautz, Jürgen. 2008. “Honeybee Biology — Life of a Superorganism: The Bee Colony — Like a Mammal in Several Bodies.” Knol, 30 July. http://knol.google.com/k/juergen-tautz/honeybee-biology-life-of-a -superorganism/73qdwhtd66v3/2 (18 April 2011). de Vega, Lope. [c. 1607–1608] 1986. Acting Is Believing: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts. Trans. Michael D. McGaha. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press.

Zeng Xiaojun, Ai Weiwei, and Xu Bing, eds. 1994. An untitled book with a black cover, known as Black Cover Book (self-published).

Zeng Xiaojun, and Ai Weiwei, eds. 1995. An untitled book with a white cover, known as White Cover Book (self-published).

Zeng Xiaojun, and Ai Weiwei, eds. 1997. An untitled book with a gray cover, known as Gray Cover Book (self-published).

Zhang, Yiqian. 2011. “Jasmine Revolution Failing to Blossom in China?” Newsy, 23 February. www.newsy .com/videos/jasmine-revolution-failing-to-blossom-in-china/ (18 April).

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