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Some Problems FACING Foreign Architects Working in Chinese Architectural Practice Ai Weiwei // Translated by Lee Ambrozy From: Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 Blog Article Published: 2006.01.10

China has rapidly become the fastest developing and largest-scale economic entity in the world. This phenomenon has, in turn, transformed the Chinese architecture market into a force that the whole world attentively watches. The major reason for the Chinese architecture market’s becoming such a powerful force originates in the fact that this nation, which has 1/5 of the world’s population, has, after lying comatose in the domains of economics and politics for the past one hundred years, accumulated great hopes and demands in the course of its nearly 30-year conversion to capitalism. Thousands upon thousands of villages are becoming like cities. More than 100 million peasants are currently becoming urban dwellers and industrial producers. One hundred million households are moving. People thirst to become rich overnight. They are ready at any time to become new people living in a new home, a new neighborhood, a new city. The power of these desires has caused this ancient culture to rise from the dead to live again; this suggests, moreover, the revolutionary potential of a completely new attitude toward human existence.

In nearly 100 years of Chinese social practice, those varieties of social ethics and aesthetics that take traditional cultural forms as their foundation have been scarred and battered; nothing remains. What has replaced them is the Marxist conception of a socialist utopia, the cruel ideology of “class struggle,” and an inhuman societal reality. The “economic reforms” of nearly 30 years ago were the unavoidable choice for this calamity-ridden people to make at the end of history. After several decades this choice has already pushed this land of 1.4 billion people gradually to become a part of the global systems of economics and politics. China and the world discovered each other with great amazement. This has forced both parties to come to know themselves anew, as well as to recompose the spatial order and structural system of the globe.

This nation, whose architectural output has, in recent years, surpassed the sum total of all its architectural output in the course of its several thousand years of cultural history, is currently, in every domain, displaying all the elegance of a famished beast. China is consuming one half of the world’s concrete and one third of the world’s steel; and it is producing nearly half of the world’s textiles… These contemporary realities are causing the world to stare and to gasp, eyes wide open, mouth agape.

In the midst of this suffering, Chinese people are studying these loathsome realities, one after another. After the struggles of the past hundred years, they have returned to those inescapable foreign systems of thought—“democracy and science.” At the same time as China is prostituting its labor force, is painfully accumulating wealth, and is sharing in the fruits of human culture, it is discovering that it must also choke down these harsh realities.

Within the domains of contemporary urban development and architecture, be it with regard to ideas, to concepts, or to technological means, China still lags behind the rest of the world. This is causing China to be unable to face problems and to put forth effective solutions. In the course of the past 100 years, Chinese architectural practice has just barely managed to resolve the basic demands for shelter of one billion people; otherwise, it has not managed to leave behind any other spiritual meaning or cultural legacy. In facing the speed and scale of today’s development, the avant-garde culture and the mature technological resources gained from abroad represent the necessary path to fulfill the demands of China’s development.

This is a question of life and death. This is not a question of emotional preference. Although the situation is like this, clear reasoning is still, in different times and practices, suffering from crazed obstacles posed by the influence of outdated traditions, as well as by the special interest groups representing such beliefs. Such forces have persistently advanced under the mottoes “[for] the benefit of the nation” and “for the national spirit” to cover up the hypocrisy of such cultural standpoints and the incompetence of academia.

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“The rise of China” has attracted global interest. In the course of the past several years, a great number foreign architects and structural engineers have taken on projects large and small around China. These offices include both the “elite” of the pinnacle of global architectural culture and large-scale, functionally perfect, commercial enterprises. They include youthful practitioners and hordes of college students who, filled with idealism, attempt to discover and to realize in this new world. To this unknown land and unknown culture, they bring all of their past knowledge and experience.

These practitioners who possess this astounding courage must take the greatest risk that a risk-taker can take: They must face the infinite confusions created in these many situations in which they encounter different languages, different life conventions, different systems and structures of social power, different cultural views of values; and they must deal with projects of enormous scale, unimaginable speed, low fees, lack of clarity, illogical ordinances, simple tasks, complicated goals, absurd operational routines—these fickle, unclear, ambiguous project lack verifiable bases and laws to follow.

The same single entity that gave birth to the several thousand-year history of the mysterious cultures of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, also embraced the system for realizing the ideals of communism. This same entity possesses a cultural tradition of history’s most complete system of ethical thought, as well as a most materialist, desire-driven reality. It has a dogmatic theory of government, and also a society flooded with liberalism. These many types of confusions have caused this bit of land to be filled with energy and injury; with possibility and impossibility; with opportunity and danger, surprise, excitement, frustration, and despair.

People still come to China and still pay attention to China, because she is a part of humanity. Be it in terms of its significance for philosophy or in terms of its real life, China is becoming a real, irrefutable part of world culture. As the West faces China, it is also coming to recognize another face of the world, another condition of civilization and humanity. In doing so, perhaps it is also recognizing the limits and weaknesses of reason and order, and feeling the happiness that comes from doing so.

Citation: Ai, Weiwei. “Problems Facing Foreign Architects Working Within A Chinese Architectural Practice.”

Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009. Ed. Lee Ambrozy. Cambridge, MA: MIT,

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ARCHITECTURE AND SPACE Ai Weiwei // Translated by Lee Ambrozy From: Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 Blog Article Published: 2006.01.13

The most important factor in architecture is space: the relationship between space and subject; the relationship between space and space; the beginning, continuation, transformation, and disappearance of space…

Rays of light define objects and give special characteristics to space. The strength or weakness, direction, and changing nature of light and shadows, alternately incite and repulse people’s emotions. Tthe experience of space is determined by the strength of light and the proportions, structure, and materials of its volumes. Space can also be psychological. It can arouse the imagination. One’s sense of space hints at a person’s emotions and affects a person’s spiritual existence. When a person attempts to determine his relationship with space, he attempts to understand that which is outside of his own body; he attempts to understand existence outside of the material.

Our understanding and description of a given space originate in our understanding of things that will one day occur in that space, including reasons why the event occurred and reactions provoked after the event. Understanding of space is human.

To understand the potentials of space and of related things, you could watch the process of a cat stretching itself out as it jumps.

A builder’s grasp of space and of the possibility of forming space reveals his understanding and interpretation of himself and of what is outside himself. It is a recognition of limits, a feeling of restraint.

When people attempt to understand existence outside of humankind (as in the moments before and after such an attempt) puzzlement ensues. Puzzlement and the attempt to interpret are dreams from which people have no means to disentangle themselves. The reality of existence is the reality of puzzlement. Puzzlement exists everywhere. People’s eternal pursuit of truth originates in their perpetual dependence on puzzlement. People are obstacles to themselves. It is impossible to transcend the tragedy of fate. No person can reach the other shore.

Construction is unnatural. It is something that people do for themselves. Utilitarian function means who uses something, and how they use it. It also tells you what you are, and what that means. Ways of building puzzle people. To state thoughts and emotions, to conquer material obstacles, to penetrate or prolong sentiment all can cause material things to become carriers of spirit. They all can cause material things to possess the ability to transcend themselves.

The material thing is the thing itself. But the material thing that we see is never the thing itself. What we see is merely what we see. When building, is it possible to attempt to be clear, to be simple, to be direct, to be correct? Besides “it is” and “it is not,” “whether,” “or,” “other,” and “also” also exist. Chopsticks and the way in which they are used constitute an effective device. In many situations the problem that construction faces is how to provide effective devices.

Power is manifested as destruction of people’s spiritual order. Incertitude is perpetual puzzlement. This cannot be conveyed in words. If a built object is not imbued with its builder’s reverential spirit toward that which is unknown, and if it does not make an appeal toward the spirit, then it is merely a dumping ground for materials.

The difficulties of construction originate in the following. The experienced and the inexperienced will have the same kind of difficulties; for the inexperienced strive to gain experience, and the experienced strive to abandon experience. This sort of striving is futile. It is just as though we await a wind that will fill people with good humor, yet this wind never arrives.

This is like playing a game that seems very simple, but there exists no means of finding an obvious response. Thus, we

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cannot help but overthrow all of our past efforts and begin again. The problems of construction are in fact philosophical problems. It is a game in which one must never cease to return to the beginning. Every attempt to build marks an attempt to question. But the answer always slips away from us. This is a black cat attacking its own shadow. It is fruitless. When we begin again, what remains is only a thirst for real things and mentalities, an attempt to get closer. It is a game that should never begin, but once begun, it never ends.

Artists are not beauticians. They do not have the obligation to provide services to anyone. They do not need to give people a feeling of beauty. Art is a type of game. You can play it. You can not play it. It’s up to you. The relationship between art and the people is a normal relationship in which neither side serves the other. The only difference between public art and regular art resides in the fact that public art is placed in a non-private space. This causes you to be unable to do certain private things when next to the work—for example, to walk around the work naked. But at night, when no one is around, you still can urinate on the side of the work.

The “public” in public art actually refers to a personal space. It does not contain an artistic value judgment. It does not serve the public. It was not created for the public. It could be created to target the public, or it could completely ignore the public’s existence. Here, art has merely effectively made use of a public spatial environment. It does not have an obligation to beautify or to adorn. If you want to believe public taste, you must have sufficient belief in the people. If the public can become infatuated with a piece of fabric dyed red with chemical dye, then it definitely can love, or at least understand, a concrete barrel. The public’s normal attitude is one of numbness. If you stimulate the public, it will gain a sense of happiness. After constructing a 100-storey building, everyone will come to take a photo in front of the building. After this building is destroyed, everyone will be happy; it will be as though they are collectively celebrating their birthday.

Art is an artist’s business. The ultimate relationship between artwork and spectator is difficult to judge. It is sometimes entirely separate from the artist’s original desire. Understanding art is like taking drugs. You either do not know the meaning of “high” or have already gotten “high” and never again need someone else to tell you what it means to be “high.” If you pretend to be “high,” you know. I don’t understand what it means to “beautify the environment.” Why does the environment need beautification? Who will beautify it and how will they do it? The usual result is the opposite of what one intends.

Much public art is the ornamentalization of popular, mediocre sentiments. It is an approval of a safe, stable state of mind.

It is an abuse of rulers’ practical sense of value and aesthetics. Mainstream, orthodox consciousness; the feeling of safety and the aestheticization of it; the series of related emotions produced by this phenomenon; and the many efforts expended on behalf of this goal have formed the core of the ideals of middle-class society. This type of societal ideal and the laws, education, propaganda, and the many costs produced by it are the bases of mediocre governmental ideals and social aesthetics. Interesting artworks are effective disturbances of tradition, popular and vulgar aesthetics, and social ideology.

Attacks on and subversions of mediocre aesthetics, ideals, and beliefs have led to the formation of the conflictive relationship between modernism and real life. They also have openly revealed modernism’s true identity. A work that is unable to make people feel uncomfortable or to feel different is a work not worth creating. This is the difference between the artist and the fool.

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With Regard to Architecture Ai Weiwei // Translated by Philip Tinari From: Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 Blog Article Published: 2006.01.22

Architecture has always been and will always be one of man’s basic activities. This basic activity has and will always move in step with the basic human need for survival. The essence of architecture lies in the search to satisfy the demands of human survival and in the desire to transform people’s conditions of existence. As different architectural forms attempt to regulate people’s different manners of activity, these forms simultaneously tell people who they are. They tell people that they are different from other people. They tell them what their place is.

Architecture can also be silent. It can stay aloof of the popular words of this world, like a stone statue buried in a riverbed.

The many efforts that people make when creating architecture represent an understanding of their own place within the natural world, of order, and of potential. The essence of this understanding is a reflection of people’s worldview. It is a reflection of the philosophy of the age, of political ideals, of aesthetics. But all of this is displayed in a material form. This gives architecture functions of display and of cognition at the same that it possesses dimensions, materials, functions, and form.

No matter what type of architecture from what time or place one considers, they all reveal who the builder was; they reveal the meaning of this architectural action, what kind of building it is, how the builder interpreted and depicted the conditions of things, how he saw possibilities, how he made necessary choices, how he regulated our manners of behavior and our ideals, how he got rid of outdated clichés, how he told people, “things can also be this way, this is better for everyone; it is more interesting, it is more convenient, and it causes us to be even more different from the past.”

People live. People act. At the same time that they live and act, they also interpret the possibilities of life and the possibilities of action. Living and acting are people’s basic activities. Living and acting have always been and will always be accompanied by suspicion, hesitation, and incertitude. Striving to bring himself closer to that which is essential, observing the meaning of his personal fate, describing of the logic of his actions can all cause a builder to become like a murdered person. In the darkness he must shut his eyes. Perhaps only in such a manner can he finally see something. A building resembles more a necessary action. Only then can it attain that which it indicates; only then can it have some sort of meaning. We can observe a child’s happiness in playing on a sandy beach. The entire meaning of this happiness resides in the action of participating in a transformation that is taking place. Among the delights of construction, this is real.

Any well-founded architecture or any urban plan is like the behavior of a person. There is no way to cover up a person’s inherent nature; it could be wicked, crazed, inimical, narrow-minded, or ill-meaning. Similarly, we can see how people express good-hearted desires and appeases their soul by means of cities and architecture. But what we see more frequently is how people mutilate themselves, how they are filled with enmity, how they worship deities. This is why, when entering a city, I say: People here are crazy. People here cannot be fortunate. For people here have no way to understand the order of nature.

They have no means of feeling the contact between the sun’s rays, rain drops, and wind and the exterior surface of a building.

They have no mysterious light and fast-changing shadows, no complicated space or form, no macroscopic understanding, no open attitude, no fine details. People here are numbed. They are crude, or they cling to styles, methods, and expressions that never change.

Architecture is not the theories, skills, styles, and schools promulgated by architecture schools. Architecture is the appropriate manifestation of morals. It is the ultimate manifestation. It must rid itself of doctrinal ties and sensibilities. It must become itself. Good architecture originates in good morals. It is necessarily a good judgment. It necessarily possesses spiritual meaning. It is necessarily innately beautiful. It necessarily cannot be repeated. Good architecture cannot be repeated. It is a

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one-off means of viewing the world. And our conclusion about the world determines who we are.

Modernism is not a fad; it is not a style or trend. Modernism is an attitude toward life. It is a worldview. It is a means for people today to decipher today and tomorrow. Among many types of cultural thought, only the modernist manner of thinking is effective; it is effective in all domains. Except for modernism’s understanding and analysis, all other bases and attempts are unilateral, temporary, or provisory. This includes those clichéd expressions that fly the banner of modernism.

Modernism’s understanding of people and evaluation of society is developing, uncertain, and unknown; it is also relative.

Critical modernism excludes all previously formed conclusions, including modernism itself.

Reinterpreting a very common truth is one of the delights of our game. To spare no pains in interpreting is necessary, for no matter what, we change. We are all endlessly explaining a basic truth. No matter whether or not we are willing, repetition is unavoidable. To speak of beautiful dreams and grand ideals is safe. You could speak forever. But to realize them through action is dangerous. You will stumble over the first stone in front of you. Action cannot be accomplished by means of imagination. Action can only be carried out by means of action. Interpretation of an action is but an interpretation.

Understanding is only understanding. It does not have a deeper meaning.

Citation: Ai, Weiwei. “With Regard to Architecture.” Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009. Ed. Lee Ambrozy. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011.

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HErE AND NOW Ai Weiwei // Translated by Lee Ambrozy From: Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 Blog Article Published: 2006.05.10 Transcribed into text document by Anthony Pins [BASE]

I was born in a courtyard on Beijing’s east side called “Tofu Alley”; when my father was sent down to Bongbei, we accompanied him and moved into the home of a lumberhack in the Dongbei forest; later we were transferred to Xinjiang, and moved into Soviet-style housing; when we were sent into our company of troops we first lived in a dormitory, and then in an “earthen pit” – a ditch dug into the ground and covered with branches and mud. When we vacated it, it was turned into a pigpen. After that we lived in a guesthouse, what they call an “inn” today.

Later, when I went to the United States, I lived in a Philadelphia townhouse; in the Berkeley Bay area I stayed in someone else’s home, on a hillside overlooking the San Francisco bay; I also lived in a place called a “fraternity,” a room in the rafters of a building’ in New York, I lived in an artist’s warehouse-style studio. Because I was a self-funded student, cash was tight, I either stayed someplace cheap, or I lived with someone else. All together I’ve moved almost twenty times. In New York I also lived in a long underground apartment, a television drama about New York was filmed there.

Right after I moved back to Beijing, I lived in a courtyard, and now I live in my studio. In terms of residential dwellings, I’ve stayed in essentially every possible variety. Travelling in Europe I stayed in a family-style “bed and breakfasts” and boutique hotels, in Italy I lived in a three-hundred-year-old home whose furniture and furnishings hadn’t been altered at all over the years, and I’ve bedded down in a friend’s castle and in luxurious casinos. With the exception of a prison amp, I’ve been in virtually every kind of structure.

The house I live in today is relatively to my liking, because it suffices all the potential ways that I might spend each day. It allows me to do things as I please; if I want to move around in the middle of the night, I do. I eat when I want to, there is freedom in everything. My studio is only a few steps away, and it’s convenient for me to chat with friends. It is a flexible space.

When I hear words like “sleek” or “chic” in relation to design, I can’t but think they are medical terms, something like “diabetes” or “nephritis.” I hate those words, but I rather like “simple” – which is using implicit methods to effectively deal with things in a straightforward way. Because I am a rather simple person, the things that I encounter don’t require me to use my intellect, I’m very fortunate that things requiring heavy use of my intellect don’t generally come my way. The affairs of architecture and interior design are quite simple; you merely need to rely on intuition and the simplest craft to complete your task. Basic materials and treatments are sufficient to satisfy our sense of happiness. It’s like cooking: you don’t need to throw all your spices into the pot, it’s possible that your vegetables boiled in plain water can taste good, all because the essential nature, color, and flavor of a vegetable is provided by the sun, the air and the earth.

The cats and dogs in my home enjoy a high status, they seem more like the lords of the manor than myself, and the poses they strike in the courtyard often inspire more joy than the house itself. Their overweening attitudes seem to be saying, “this is my territory,” and that makes me happy.

However, I’ve never designed a special space for them. I can’t think like an animal, and that’s part of the reason why I respect them, it’s impossible for me to enter into their realm. All I can do is open the entire home to them, observe, and at last discover that they actually like it here or there .. It’s impossible to predict.

My design has a special characteristic: It has leeway and possibility – I believe this freedom. I don’t like to force my will upon

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other people, the ways you allow space and form to return to its fundamental things, thus allow for the greatest amount of freedom. This is because fundamental things cannot be erased, and outside of these, I don’t anything else should be added.

In any space, perhaps all you need to give it a memorable feeling and look is a lamp, a table and chair, and a glass. Why must you insist on making it in a certain style? Why must you add a fireplace? I think all of this is pointless. No designer can draft human emotions, they have their own paths, and like the direction of a cat’s next step, I am powerless to predict such things.

Just like walking at the seaside, if you see a pretty shell you might collect one or two, or you’ll pick up a few interesting stones on the beach, when you see a chair that has been passed down over hundreds of years it will arouse your curiosity. You can observe the chair and imagine the postures or the ideas of previous generations, but I wouldn’t advocate it or flaunt it for this reason, I don’t believe that aside from being able to satisfy my curiosity, such a chair has any genuine value. In most circumstances there is no one influencing me. I have many book, and a decent understanding of ancient Chinese vessels, no matter if they are wooden, bronze, or jade; but most of my efforts go into forgetting these things and avoiding taking the same path, or saying what has already been said, and attempting to contribute a new way of looking at the situation in everything that I do. There can be no substitute for the “here and now.” It is the most important element in every kind of art, architecture, and design.

I don’t like Beijing, it is unfit for human habitation. It was not designed for the here and now, or we could say that in the here and now, the city’s development lack a human dimension. I didn’t use to like nature, because the nature I knew was cruel. The place that I lived in when I was a child had no electricity, and it lacked sanitary conditions. When you went to the bathroom, you only needed to walk a dozen meters from the front door, and you could relieve yourself anywhere. The sandstorms were incredible, and the winters were cold enough to freeze you solid. Humans are moving gradually, developing towards civilization, which will have its own set of problems, but comparatively speaking, these ought to be less than in lack of civilization.

Accuracy is not the highest standard in design, and high accuracy is frequently deliberately mystifying. No matter in architecture, interior design, writing or even speaking, everything has its particular details, style, method, or sentiment, this is a kind of language, it can be meticulous, it can also be boorish, but these are not critical standards. Good or bad design depends on whether or not it possesses a conceptual framework, which is derived from the designer’s worldview, aesthetic cultivation, and judgment on basic things. The thing most lacking in design is actually common sense, including on large concepts like good and evil or right and wrong, and down to little details like materials, craft, or the capacity to determine the value of one’s design. The precondition for having such common sense is many years of experience – engineering, aesthetic, and social experience.

I’ve written before on my appreciation of space. Space is intriguing; while it can be materialized it simultaneously has psychic implications. Many people think that a tall, big space is ideal, but that isn’t walkways the best, small spaces have a small flavor, low has a low flavor, narrow has a narrow flavor; every space has its special characteristics and each space has its own potential.

I’ve yet to see decent designers emerge in China, most lack a clear understanding of the here and now: as to what kind of time we are situated in, what kind of times we’ve been through, and white times will we see in the future – they haven’t thought clearly through any of these questions, yet they are extremely proud, and only because they are related to the arts.

Generally speaking they are satisfied weith merely superficial understanding, they lack the essential attitude needed for work, and their aesthetics are muddled. Despite the fact that interior design has existed for already more than a dozen years in China, beginning in the early Great Hall of the People and developing into private homes, finally into second-homes or villas, designers today should clearly recognize their position and obligations, avoid previously existing styles and create a stylistic schema that at once belongs to the local environment and is related to the experience of the native people. Such a system could be small, and even if they elaborated clearly on merely one or two issues within the entire work, that would be a great improvement.

Say what you have to say plainly, and then take responsibility for it; or speak when you have the chance, don’t waste your space saying something meaningless, that’s what I care about. However, this actually is pointless to me: I’m not interested in

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fame, and because all kinds of social critics are within an extremely limited framework, they can bring you honor or they can also destroy your honor, I’ve no illusions about that. I’m also not too interested in the public’s criticism of me, I’m one part of the public, and my critique of myself is not interesting.

I have no regrets, and I’ve never exerted any great efforts. I became away of many things only after I finished working on this or that project: when I finished building my house, I learned that I was an architect; I like to have fun, and after I made some things, people said I was an artist; because I like to talk, and people say that I’m on top of trends or that I’m fashionable … but all of these things emerged from my most fundamental needs, because I’m a human, and therefore I think, I don’t want to conceal my opinions. I won’t admit my mistakes were my own, I think they must be the will of heaven, and because I haven’t the time to understand everything completely, how could I be dissatisfied? If you think about it carefully, perhaps all news is good news. In fact, the ego is having self-confidence, and trusting in the inherent power of life. Such a power can resist education or ideals, everything. This power serves a great function, and every person has it.

My life is characterized by: having no plan, no direction, and no goals. Some people wonder, how can that be okay? But in truth, this is very important, I can throw myself into the things that I like, and because there are no obstacles, I can never be trapped.

After I finish working on the architecture that I’ve committed to, I won’t accept a single additional project. I dislike the entire process, and I could be doing something else, perhaps where I lose a little instead, this kind of success makes me embarrassed. After all, it’s the general “inferiority” in the profession that makes me successful; what am I still doing in this field? I’ve got to get one foot out the door, not do anything else related to architecture, because there’s so many other things to do, for example, fold a man of paper, or go skipping stones. It is like taste in cuisine, which is always changing, one minute Guangdong cuisine is fashionable, and Sichuan cuisine the next, but we will always have our favorite dishes, our favorite soup. When everyone can distinguish what they like best, this world will be an interesting one, and people will say with conviction, “this is what I like.” If everyone blindly followed trends, the world would become incredibly boring; lifestyle is everyone progressing towards their own place, doing the things they are most willing to do. Returning to one’s self is the most important, and most difficult thing to do; after so much struggle, suffering, poverty and ideological duress, educational debauchery, and aesthetic decay, reality is already riddled with gaping wounds. Even though returning to the primal self is difficult, it is important indeed. ww

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Ordinary architecture Ai Weiwei // Translated by Lee Ambrozy From: Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 Blog Article Published: 2006.06.22

An architectural structure that serves as a home is a place filled with one’s individual traits. It is different from the concocted meaning of “home.” It is an independent, whole entity that deserves to be respected. It embodies the free will of all those therein. It may represent the pursuit of modern comfort and of independent mind.

Its interior and exterior are linked through a relationship that joins them as a whole entity. Respect and communication exist between such a structure and the environment, the street, the neighborhood, and all those who live there together. The logic of its construction is intrinsically organic and all derives from the same origin. Because of this, it achieves true power. This allows it to refuse to imitate a single [architectural] style, a single cultural form.

A house that serves as a “home” constitutes a point of illumination on life. It tells people of the possibility of a certain life—that is, that life can be simple and real. But this sort of new possibility necessarily changes, and it is necessarily filled with creativity. It must be interesting and fresh, safe and unpredictable.

The comfort and safety of a home is derived from the self-confidence and self-respect of the people who live there, as well as from their rich creative powers. These qualities are derived from a frank and sincere attitude about life and from a happy state of being. The inhabitants possess the ability to experience and endure completely new, modern experiences. Let us state their attitudes and ideals regarding life: tolerant, different, interesting, brave.

A home is a basic necessity and possibility in life. It should also necessarily give material form to the most basic quality and potential of life. It is also a complete philosophical proposition. It expresses who we are.

If I were to use only one sentence to describe the characteristics of my design, I would only say that I do not create difficulties. No matter what one does, there are always all sorts of possibilities. In truth, all sorts of possibilities are simply all sorts of difficulties. I would simply like to return to the most basic of possibilities. I would like to minimize difficulties. I put forth as little as possible—this is the most basic characteristic of my house. This is also the most basic characteristic of the majority of the architecture that I create.

It is not a strategy; strategy is one of your choices. You can always use a different strategy. This could be understood as one characteristic of my actions. I am willing to do everything as simply as possible. If I must create or carry out a mistaken action, I will make sure that this mistake is as elementary as possible. I am willing to return to the most originary attitude. I am never willing to cross this line. If I cross it, I will return to the beginning and commence anew.

I feel that an active Chinese domicile does not exist. Much like regional dialects, because of difficulties of transportation, because of obstacles to communication with others, a special manner of behavior has been formed. But it is very difficult to attain the joy of communication; it is difficult to form a systematic, effective praxis. China is currently replete with incompetent, self-styled architects working inside this system. They are creating designs for seemingly complicated problems, but in fact, obstructions to the obvious are being formed. If such people did not exist, our architecture would be better; the city would have greater power. But this group of people is a representative of authority; they have the absolute right to speak. So in speaking of the term “Chinese domicile,” one might say that it is a word of synthesized meanings—a word signifying ignorance, confusion, inanity, corruption, vulgarity, impudence. These traits constitute the contemporary, so-called Chinese domicile.

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There absolutely do not exist any modern strategies within the Chinese domicile. We all live in the modern era. Any strategy could be a modern strategy. The modern era of today encompasses the meaning of the life of every person, every village, every town, every city, even of the whole country. In our land we have already abandoned the traditional home (jia yuan).

Today, we no longer retain the concept of the traditional home in China. We no longer have land, no longer have relatives and friends, no longer have memory, no longer have real ideals, no longer have real enterprises. It is precisely this that is the puzzle we now face. Our contemporary condition is still inferior to what it was after the war. After the war there were wounds. You still could feel sorrow for relatives and friends who had died. Now, there are too many facts that we must wait to clarify. Chinese people are unwilling to discuss these questions. If you are unwilling to discuss these questions, you become a beast like a walking corpse. So what kind of modern strategies can there be? Every day, people very busily attempt to solve all problems, yet all of these problems were created by their incompetence. The structural system of the Chinese home has rendered it unable to adapt and improve itself. In this state of affairs, it has absolute power. Its every judgment and its every decision have caused this society’s various calamities. There remains only the question of the size of the calamity, and of whether the calamity is ongoing or has already been stopped. Yet even if the calamity has already been stopped, it could be replaced by another disaster.

This is the general background. Next, we will discuss education, the state of society, social aesthetics, knowledge of personal history, and knowledge of the state of this society. What is the current condition of Chinese architecture? The position of society, societal formations, the formation of the economic upswing, its potential and the obstacles that it may encounter, as well its structure: who are the people that constitute these abstractions? In truth, how many city residents are there? How many peasants? How many workers? Now, you may see that as people speak of the Chinese domicile, they only discuss the domiciles of those people who have first become wealthy, but they do not discuss how those people became wealthy, whether or not they will continue to be prosperous, what kind of relationship exists between their wealth and the poverty of other people. If such questions are not mentioned, is true that to discuss the Chinese domicile is to discuss the conditions of life of the majority of Chinese people? What kind of possibilities do they have? Are there effective means to improve and to resolve the difficulties they face? Their basic problems of habitation and their most basic ideas about home are discussed and researched by no one. We talk and talk, always discussing the business of real estate development or schemes that seem to be outstanding. These things born of a poor value system actually become a nation’s selling point. Discussing all of this under such dire conditions is without foundation. A better strategy cannot emerge. When even your most basic conditions are unclear, how can one do anything? Do you need to check what is possible and what is impossible? In China, not only in architecture, but also in every industry, there exists such a barbaric state of affairs.

This sort of situation is given full expression in my despair and hopelessness at creating architecture in China. I think that there can be a better means of resolving everything, so I have accepted a few projects. Design basically is developed upon a revision of other people’s intentions. I am especially able to solve problems; for me, solving problems is my most important, most basic characteristic. What is the problem? Where does it appear? How can I solve it? Every person may be completely different. In the middle of different projects, we effectively controlled the original situation and revised it, proposing new possibilities. I did not want to follow a Chinese style, for I do not think that China still has a style or tradition to speak of.

For example, it is entirely possibly that the Forbidden City could be Vietnamese or Indian. I don’t think it has any relation to us today. It belongs to the monarch, to centralized state power, to tourists. It is just the Beijing of films. This is to say that people who still speak of roof tiles, roof brackets, and mortise-and-tenon frameworks when discussing Chinese architecture are not fit to appear within this industry. On these grounds I think that we are merely using local materials and are putting forth a familiar attitude toward local history, politics, and lifestyles as a means of dealing with something. I don’t desire that my architecture have any apparent cultural characteristic.

I don’t care if it has any cultural characteristic. I don’t care about culture. I only care about those things I care about.

Efficiency, reason, and suitability to one’s social standing—those sorts of things. I think that if you do things, you necessarily have a method. This is simply another system and the logic that it creates. For example, take a handrail—no matter whether it is ten centimeters or one centimeter wide, its function is already fulfilled. The characteristic embodied by the logic of this handrail could be “thick, heavy, and stable”; but also it could be “dangerous.” It cannot be denied that danger is also a basic situation in which people find themselves. Sometimes, I am simply reawakening people’s consciousness and vigilance of danger. Danger and vigilance are one part of architecture. All architectural standards say that safety is a necessity

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for people. As far as I am concerned, danger is actually a part of people’s state and quality of life. It is an element that architecture cannot ignore. This is a philosophical interpretation, not an interpretation based on architectural standards; for there are no standard people. There do not exist two people who are completely alike, so there should not exist two buildings that are exactly alike. In this society people who are people are too few. Thus, one can only can obey musty rules and commandments. Laws are determined by people. Laws do not tell people anything. They only tell people to give up thinking and feeling at this moment.

I think that the meaning of home differs completely with different people. For example, if an individual feels that he is special, his home may, as far as other people are concerned, be a completely uncomfortable place. I believe that I am an absolutely ordinary person, so the majority of people who come to my home will be comfortable. In here they see many ordinary things. They can enter audaciously. They can walk into any space that they would like to enter. I think that ordinariness is my most basic trait. Ordinary people similarly have their own individual traits. My architecture is ordinary architecture.

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CHINA’S NEW HOME LIFE Elaine Louie From: The New York Times Article Published: 2006.04.20

ON a cold, gray day in late March, Guan Yi, one of the most influential collectors of contemporary art in China, lifted this reporter by the elbows and pushed her up a steep brick ramp of his own design, toward the second floor of his new house here. Later he jogged down another ramp as his guest followed on tiptoe to avoid losing a heel in its steel-grate surface.

“I don’t like women in high heels,” he said through an interpreter when asked why he had designed such treacherous means of access to the house, which he finished last year. “I prefer women to be in sneakers.”

After a pause, Mr. Guan added: “There haven’t been glamorous women in my life lately. Perhaps I’m not so attractive.”

Mr. Guan, a self-taught architect, is one of a group of artists and designers with varying levels of formal training who are changing the definition of the Chinese house one idiosyncratic project at a time. Using traditional materials like red and gray brick and wood, along with an often quirky, instinctual approach to design — and relying on the low-cost services of China’s vast force of manual laborers — these artists and designers are reshaping indigenous forms like the courtyard house and the canal town in a modern idiom that appeals to the country’s rising leisure class.

Mr. Guan, 40 and divorced, is a charter member of that class. He grew up in Tsingtao, where his family owns a factory that makes machines for oil production. In the 1980’s and 1990’s he started several businesses there, including a commercial photography studio, which, he said, allowed him to finance his art collection.

He began collecting in 2001, before the Chinese contemporary market took off toward its current heights, and in 2004 he spent $200,000 for a 10-year lease on a warehouse to house his growing collection. For $100,000 more he renovated the warehouse and added his own house, a 650-square-foot duplex attached to the original 2,600-square-foot building, which now serves as a “private” museum for some 200 of his 500 artworks.

Outside the complex, the only suggestion of what goes on inside are some sculptures, including an airplane wing, broken and rusted, resting on the sidewalk; the wing is a part of an art piece by Huang Yong Ping, who modeled it after the United States spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan Island in 2001. (A second part, with a real cockpit and a bamboo fuselage, is on display in the artist’s show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass.)

The museum section of Mr. Guan’s house — which he said is open by appointment to art collectors, curators and students — allows him to enjoy the spoils of his success day and night. The attached house, centered on an interior hall decorated with bamboo and 100-year-old blue-green ceramic furniture, is otherwise nearly as spare in design as the warehouse. It is Mr. Guan’s first work of architecture, and it reflects the inspiration of his hero, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The living room is furnished in an early hybrid of Western and Chinese styles, Shanghai Art Deco, and is dominated by a satirical painting by Wang Guangyi of smiling politicians shaking hands. Upstairs, Mr. Guan’s bachelor bedroom is monastic, with floor-to-ceiling windows, a Ming dynasty bed designed for one person and a bathroom, enclosed in glass, that offers no privacy at all. “This home is only for me to stay,” he said, smiling. “Art is very close, and love is very far away.”

ONE of Mr. Guan’s favorite artists, Ai Weiwei, is also reinventing the courtyard house. Another largely self-taught architect, Mr. Ai, who is collaborating with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on the design of the Olympic stadium for the 2008

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Photo Credit: Doug Kanter / NY Times

Summer Games in Beijing, built a stark, modern, gray brick house for himself, his wife, Lu Qing, and a passel of formerly stray dogs and cats, in 1999, on the northeast edge of Beijing.

“People had never seen a building like this,” said Mr. Ai, who is the son of Ai Qing, the poet, and who studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in Manhattan.

The 5,000-square-foot house, surrounded by high walls, has 19-foot ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows and austere concrete interior steps. The materials and the basic architectural concept are traditional, but the expression is clearly modern.

Toshiko Mori, the chairwoman of the architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who stays in this house when she visits Beijing, called it a place of contradictions. “It is a courtyard house, yet it is not,” she said. “Functions are clearly separated, and privacy and individuality insured. Traditional courtyard houses had shared functions and spaces that made life public.” She added that the house “disrupts tradition yet constantly refers to history: one sleeps on a hard wooden bed, heating is limited, and one experiences the sobering real life under communist socialist regime,” but there is a new luxury in the large interior spaces and the indirect light that suffuses them.

This kind of tension between deprivation and luxury — an increasingly salient theme in the new China — informs much of Mr. Ai’s work, including the art piece he displayed on a recent visit: in one of the cavernous, sparely furnished rooms in his house, two enormous celadon bowls, about three feet in diameter, were each full of 500 pounds of freshwater seed pearls that gleamed in the sunlight. When he was young, he said, and his family was poor, he associated pearls with “the corrupt,” the only people in China who could afford to buy them. Earlier this year, after commissioning artisans to make the bowls, which are copies of ones in the Forbidden City, he bought the entire batch of pearls — cheap irregulars — for $5,000 in the south of China. He added, “You cannot buy a perfect pearl for less than $5,000.”

Mao Ran, a friend of Mr. Ai’s and a designer of buildings, liked Mr. Ai’s studied balance of austerity and luxury so much that he commissioned him to design his house and office, also in northeast Beijing, in 2005. He also suggested that he and Mr. Ai

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team up with Urs Meile, Mr. Ai’s European art dealer and the owner of Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne, Switzerland, to build a walled compound of three live-work-gallery spaces on a 21,000-square-foot lot nearby.

Mr. Meile, who travels to Beijing five times a year, owns half the complex, or one and a half units, one of which serves as a piedà-terre for him and his family, upstairs. (He contributed $700,000 toward rent of the land and construction, which has come to a total of about $1.2 million so far, although the complex is not yet finished; the three men, who took out a 20-year lease, together pay an annual rent of $24,000 to Cao Chang Di, the local village.) In January Mr. Meile’s 22-year-old son, Rene, a student at the Beijing Language and Culture University, moved into the space after having spent five months in a 12-by-15-foot sparsely furnished dormitory room. Suddenly, he had a 7,000-square-foot loft.

“I was astonished by the space,” he said, almost dwarfed by his surroundings. “It was hard to imagine living here.” It was vast and, for the first week, empty.

Mr. Ai designed a voluminous gallery on the first floor of Mr. Meile’s living space — it is Photo Credit: Doug Kanter / NY Times now the Beijing branch of his gallery — and a two-bedroom apartment on the second. The main gallery is lighted by angled skylights at either end, so the light is dispersed. Traditional Chinese houses can be dark, but many of the spaces in Mr. Ai’s architecture, including Mr. Meile’s unit, are dim to diffuse, and are lighted by clerestories, or long, slender windows. “In darkness,” Mr. Ai said, “the mind is more peaceful, and big windows don’t necessarily give you a sense of home.” On the other hand, the only way to reach the apartment upstairs is to exit the building and cross an open-air balcony, which has a stunning view of the courtyard and the vast expanse of sky.

The expansive space has been furnished with pieces from Mr. Ai’s collection of antique armoires and chairs, and dining and coffee tables made from huanghuali, a coveted Chinese hardwood. Mr. Meile asked Nataline Colonnello, the 29-year-old director of his Beijing gallery, to take his son shopping for pots and pans and sheets and towels at Ikea, and to buy sofas at Qu Mei Furniture Shop, a Beijing store specializing in Scandinavian-style furniture. One week and $2,500 later, the loft became a home.

Mr. Ai was scrupulous in his arrangement of buildings on the small site. “I made it similar to a Chinese garden,” he said, “with a constant change of view” for anyone moving within it. The building facades are sharply angled and paths twist. Even patches of lawn are asymmetrical.

For the compound wall, which runs along a working-class street dotted with bicycle-repair shops and pork-bun stands, Mr. Ai used a lattice of gray bricks instead of creating a more conventional solid wall. “The holes in the walls are not for

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decoration,” he said. “They are to look at the reality.”

THAT kind of reality has been largely banished in the area surrounding Cambridge Watertown, an 800-unit mixed-use complex that takes up 70 of the 1,400 acres that will form a new suburb outside Zhujiajiao, about 30 miles west of Shanghai.

Before the area was rezoned for development in 2003 it was home to rural villagers, who farmed the land. In 2002 the Shanghai municipal government decided to create nine new developments in the city’s outlying districts, in an effort to alleviate congestion in the city by persuading upper-middle-class residents to move to the suburbs. In a maneuver that has become familiar all over China, the government relocated about 300 families from the area that became Cambridge Watertown to new apartments about a mile away.

Although most of the new commuter towns are “characterless,” according to Sun Jiwei, the local government’s vice district chief in the Qingpu district, Zhujiajiao New Town, where Cambridge Watertown is situated, is an exception. That is partly because Zhujiajiao proper is a 1,700-year-old “water town,” built around a cluster of waterways, and its new suburb, which will add 20,000 people to the old town’s 30,000, also follows the natural contours of the water.

Ben Wood Studio Shanghai, which under the name Wood & Zapata designed Xintiandi — a commercial district that is considered the SoHo of Shanghai — created Cambridge Watertown as a “contemporary interpretation of a traditional water town,” said Ben Wood, the principal architect. Unlike Guan Yi and Ai Weiwei, Mr. Wood, 58, is neither Chinese nor self-schooled (he studied architecture at M.I.T.), but he and his partner, Delphine Yip, are similarly intent on creating an architecture that marries traditional Chinese materials and building types to a modern vocabulary.

Gray-roofed villas and town houses line the banks of Cambridge Watertown’s network of canals, interspersed with willows, camphor trees and maples. The symbolic center of the development is an 18th-century house that was probably built for a scholar or a merchant. Jeffrey Wong, a retired businessman and preservationist in Shanghai, who was the original leaseholder of much of the land that now makes up the development, brought the house there — along with other vernacular structures, including temples, teahouses and pagodas — to create a never-realized artists’ colony. He took most of the buildings with him when he left, but he sold the house to the developer for one renminbi, or about 12 cents, with the proviso that it be preserved.

The surrounding houses are gray brick and white plaster, with contemporary interiors. One model show house, whose interior was done by Gravity Partnership in Hong Kong, was created for design aficionados, an influential minority in China’s new upper middle class. It features a one-and-a-half-story living area with black granite walls, maple floors and a fake oversize flatscreen television. The open kitchen has a black stainless steel counter.

Among bourgeois Chinese, Ms. Yip said, there are two schools of thought on kitchens: “Some like them enclosed, when the maids do the cooking, and you can hide the dishes, smells and grease. Then there’s the newer generation, who have gone abroad, who like to cook,” she said, and who consider “the kitchen the soul of the whole house.” (The houses in Cambridge Watertown have open kitchens, but buyers can elect to close them, since the houses are sold unfinished.)

One hundred units have been completed so far, and since last May, 56 of them have been sold for prices ranging from $170,000 for a 2,200-square-foot town house to $375,000 for a 3,000-square-foot villa. The buyers are chief executives, businessmen and designers, said Guo Wei, vice manager for sales at the development.

David W. Wang, president of Starwaly Properties Group, the developer, created Cambridge Watertown with the expectation that people would live there and commute to Shanghai, less than an hour away by car. His first customers, however, have bought the houses as second homes, and will take possession on June 30.

But they will not necessarily move in right away. “People will spend six months to one year decorating,” Mr. Wood said. “In a Chinese house, white plaster walls are not enough.” Since the development still has 700 other houses under construction, it may be a ghost town for a while.

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Photo Credit: Doug Kanter / NY Times

But Mr. Wang is optimistic. Within six years, he predicted, Cambridge Watertown will have a coffeehouse, a teahouse, restaurants, a grocery store, a primary school and a light-rail system that will connect it to Shanghai, 20 minutes away. Ma Qingyun, the founder of MADA s.p.a.m., an architectural firm in Shanghai and a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University, is more guarded about the development’s promise. “It will be filled up, if they adjust their expectations,” he said. “They may have to lower their prices” to attract enough upper-middle-class buyers “who want more space and can’t afford Shanghai proper.”

Whatever its immediate commercial prospects, Zhujiajiao New Town may soon find itself with plenty of competition, as other high-style bedroom communities pop up around Shanghai, offering a new way of living for the city’s growing professional class.

“A lot of wealthy people don’t know how to spend their money on design,” said Tong Ming, an associate professor of urban planning at Tongji University in Shanghai, and one of five architects designing a complex of 10 courtyard houses south of Shanghai that is expected to be completed this year. “They choose white marble and chandeliers, the more expensive the material, the more luxurious.”

But he has recently seen a growth in design awareness, he said. As young Chinese professionals become more familiar with new forms of housing, he added — “the modern spatial layout, the open kitchen, private bedrooms, combining indoor and outdoor spaces” — they are beginning to see how well these forms suit their new way of living.

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Fragments, Voids, Sections and Rings Adrian Blackwell From: Archinect Interview Conducted: 2006.06.16 Article Published: 2007.08.16

Ai Weiwei (Beijing) is an artist, curator, and architectural designer who has been working in China and the United States since the late 1970’s. An original member of “Stars,” a group of artists working in Beijing in the late 1970’s during the first years of reform, Ai attended film school with directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. He then traveled to the United States where he made conceptual art focused on the alteration of readymade objects and situations. In the early 1990’s Ai returned to China to edit a series of three books on the art a new generation of artists, based in Beijing’s Eastern Art Village: “Black Paper,” “White Paper,” and “Gray Paper.” Since that time he has produced work which focuses on China’s cultural history, centralized political system, and the contradictions of modernity. His work has shown across Europe, North America, and China.

Ai uses a set of tactics for the production of his work: undermining the meaning of existing artifacts, attacking fixed hierarchies of power, privileging developed vernacular knowledge and simply letting things take their own course. Over the past few years he has moved closer to architecture, beginning with the design of his own studio, the China Art Archives and Warehouse, and the Urs Meile Gallery all in the outskirts of Beijing; the plan for a Park of architectural follies in his family’s home town of Jinhua in Zhejiang Province; and a collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron Architects on the Beijing Olympic Stadium.

This interview by Adrian Blackwell took place on June 21, 2006 at Ai Weiwei’s studio/home in Cao Chang Di Village on the outskirts of Beijing.

----------------------------------------------------------------Adrian Blackwell : There are two things we are interested in with your urban work. The first concerns your thoughts about the contemporary city: what’s happening right now with Chinese urbanization? The second is the approach you take in your own urban interventions. I thought we could begin by talking about some of your recent projects. You started making art in the late 1970’s, architecture in the late 1990’s, and then quite recently, just a few years ago, you began to making works that are about urban space, documents of your city. I know of four of them: the Beijing video map, the void photographs, the Chang’an boulevard project and the Ring Road project. They are each fascinating ways of reading Beijing. What made you start making work like that, what made you start documenting the city?

Ai Weiwei : It’s not exactly documenting. It has that function, but it has no documentary purpose. It’s not being used as evidence or testimony for anything, but rather to materialize our physical life, its condition in the moment. If you are in place A or on line A or line B, then that present there or that movement is simply as it is. We’re living in a constantly changing world and everybody sees it and knows it, but as an artist who is also involved in issues of design and urban planning, I always try to find a way to most efficiently capture what I call fragments, or very small pieces which carry the flavor or carry the essential meaning of the city. So it’s a very small effort that I have made, even if it looks quite massive in terms of the length of the videos, its just one section of a fact - the concrete world.

AB : So maybe we could talk briefly about each of those pieces. Let’s start with the first piece, the video which follows every street in Beijing within the fourth ring road.

AB : It’s about the street network and it makes me think of Zhu Jianfei’s book Chinese Spatial Strategies . He talks about the public space of the city of Beijing arguing that in a western city you have squares, public space is organized around openings

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in the fabric, while in the Chinese city (his example is Ming and Qing dynasty Beijing) public space is in the street, so the public space is not a void, but a network of space, and the active spaces are simply nodes, or widenings in that network. One of the things that I like about this project is that it is an attempt to map this entire network using video, but it also conflates the map and its opposite, which is the experience of simply being lost in the city. What were you thinking about with this network of every street in Beijing?

AW : I think that a city is a three dimensional or multi-dimensional thing, but the work itself is not even two-dimensional, it’s just one point to another, to another, to another. So of course in time this weaves a net if you are thinking of the road you have been traveling along or if you join the individual points. It covers the whole city, all the hutongs and streets, but actually it is made at one time, at a moment. Still it follows a line, a line made by a vehicle which has more than a dozen people on it, and from day 1 to day 16 it passes through different parts of the city. So it appears to be a complete view of Beijing, but if you look at any point, it’s just dots, because there is no camera movement except the movement of the car.

Very little changes, but the attitude or position that drives it is not passive, it’s fixed through a very concrete concept. So I think it’s quite ironic in that sense: after 150 hours it documents the city, but nobody would watch 150 hours and at any moment you see, you are confined to a single point, or proportionally stretched points form a very short time within this big work. It only works when it is so long, more than six days and nights. It shows how big, how impossible, how crazy this city is, or how meaningless at the same time, because our proportion, our sense of time, and also our visual contact with the city is really limited by where we are and which direction we go.

The moment is about a certain period of time, so when you just look at one moment you don’t really know what is before or what is next, even if you can pretty much guess.

Images from the Urban Voids series

AB : With the void photographs you are documenting a moment where there is nothing. If you think about Chinese cities as constantly being torn down and rebuilt, then this is a moment of quiet in between. It seems that this is a moment of potential, but I don’t know if you are that optimistic about this possibility all the time. What made you take those photographs?

AW : I think that’s a special landscape in today’s China, you are the largest construction site in the world and each year Beijing has one hundred million square metres of construction which exactly equals the area of the whole city in 1949. Every year you have this total amount of construction, but you only finish a third of it, thirty million square metres. You know these are just numbers, but they really tell you something about the urban condition, especially when you see that China builds 20 times the area built in Beijing. The whole country is building crazily. So you have a kind of landscape that destroys the old, because the old is really garbage I think. It’s really shelter in its worst condition, like Harlem. We used to say that Harlem was 100 times better than most ordinary people’s houses. Then after you destroy you make it flat - we call this san tong yi ping (three [infrastructural]connections and one leveling).

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Pei Zhao : By now its jiu tong yi ping (nine connections and one leveling) AW : Then all this land will be rebuilt by powerful people, developers. Most of them, are connected to the government.

They make big profits from land, which is not constitutional. After 1949 land was taken from the landlords. They killed the landlords, and the land was given to the people, under the control of the state. Now all the land is being auctioned to people in favor or associated with the state, who are profiting from their privileged background. So you have a landscape that is just waiting for this future. Even if it’s totally empty, it will soon be built. Soon it will change the whole landscape of Beijing and of China.

It’s a very sad condition, you see a nation or a city rip up the past, not to benefit the people, or the situation, but for profit, it’s really the idea of all those new rich. It’s like a country girl has to be a prostitute, because there is no other way to get out of the village. China’s development is so much based in this idea: to let somebody ruthlessly become rich, but they can’t become rich unless the party and government also profits, otherwise it’s impossible. So who has become rich? Who has become more powerful? Who benefits and who is losing their rights, or their property. This property belongs to everybody, it belongs to somebody who never sees this property, because you know we are a communist country and this of course for the past 10 to 20 years has been a hidden secret (I mean nobody talks about it). It’s stealing. I am not criticizing, these are only the facts. I record the condition after things are torn down and before they are built up, you know it’s a very short moment, but in that moment nobody wants to look. There’s a question mark there, a big, big void. The old is so sad, but the new is also sad. It is a very sad condition, so I think it’s interesting to record it. It’s a unique situation, a void with many questions, yet people don’t want to look, or raise these questions.

Images from Chang’An Boulevard

AB : If the void project looks at empty moments inside the city, the Chang’an boulevard project moves in a straight line from outside through the city. It’s a section. You were interested in the movement from rural space through urban space and back to the rural. How do you see that piece describing the contemporary city?

AW : I think that surprisingly enough when I started to make it, I did not know what it would be. It’s not based on very sophisticated thinking, more on an attitude than on careful planning. It started when one of our friends said they had a son who wanted to come to Beijing, but had nothing to do. After he arrived I asked him if he could do this for a while. Then after days of planning what he should do, I found that Chang’an from the 6th ring road to the 6th ring is 45 km. So I made a very simple decision: just take one video shot for one minute every 50m. No technical requirements: push down, count 1 minute, turn it off, move another 50m, push down... Whatever happens in front of the lens is fine. It took months, the whole winter, because in the winter there is no better or worse view. I think in Beijing the winter really reflects northern landscape very well.

You know there is a kind of sadness there. So after months he had taken 1000’s of shots: from a very rural, primitive village, to the business district, to the political center, to an old town and later on ended up in the Capital Iron Company, which has just been destroyed and moved to another city township. This video was the last possible time to take these shots of the

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Capital Iron Company, a symbol of socialist industry. They made all the iron for the nation.

AB : When you look at maps of the growth of Beijing from 1949 to the present it is amazing to watch Chang’an Boulevard, it draws the city out, away from the old city. So much of the growth of the city is along that line that it is much longer than the rest of the city. The Last work that I know about that deals with the city is your Ring Road project.

AW : I made two pieces, one about the second ring and the other about the third ring. The video of the second ring is structured through the 33 bridges, taking one minute shots on each side of the bridge. So standing there you see the car traffic moving from overhead. Then I did the third ring, 50 some bridges and the same thing, the only difference is that second ring is taken on cloudy days (in Beijing most days are like that), while the third ring is taken on sunny days. If you look at it immediately you know that one’s second ring and one is third ring. One is just grey color, and sometimes snowing. It’s very boring and not an exciting thing to do, but nevertheless it records the condition at the time, its very much like a witness passing through: what he would see, his eye, anybody’s eye. There is no artistic or aesthetic value, not much judgment there.

Its very, very simple situation; it’s very much like a monitor actually.

Stills from Second Ring Road

AB : We have talked a little bit about these works you have done about the city. But the other thing I am interested in is the way you live in the city. You live in a village; you don’t really live in the city.

AW : Well this city, Beijing, surprisingly enough is not a real city. I cannot call it a city, it’s still very flat, not dense enough, not strong enough, it doesn’t have enough variation and mixed conditions, it’s still very even.

Today I live in Beijing. I was also born in Beijing, but soon after we moved to Xinjiang and I grew up there. My father owned a courtyard in Beijing, but for years other people lived in it, because our family was considered an enemy of the people, an enemy of the state, and an enemy of the party. Three enemies. Being just one of them was enough to be exiled. Then after 20 years away we returned and lived in different parts of the city. We borrowed places, because our home was inhabited by other people. We lived in different places: West, North, East or South, so I have a very clear image of what the city looked like. At the time the city was occupied by bureaucratic compounds: universities (of course at that time were not open), government, military and so-called scientific research institutes. All these different departments were all under the same conditions, communist, without private property, everyone belonging to the work unit. So there was only one condition: you were either one of the people or an “enemy of the people.” So simple. I guess there weren’t so many “enemies of the people,” but from time to time that vein was very consciously mined. They were trying to find out who is an enemy of the people for years while I was growing up. It was one political movement after another after another. It was crazy every day. Today you talk about it and it sounds more like a joke: “what a joke, why are you still talking about things like this?” But this was true: many people lost their lives. I think that that ghost is still haunting China today. Not the communist ideology, the ideology may be good, but the way that this power is maintained within society and how brutal the state can be towards a human’s basic condition, not to talk about human rights, but essential needs.

So that is basically what this city was and still half of the city is still based in this and the other half is the so-called new rich, after Deng Xiaoping’s getting rich first policy. Of course who is going to get rich? It’s not the ordinary person. But this is not a complaint, it’s simply the truth. You know in China, you still talk about people who have the right to live in the city or not to

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live in the city. It’s called hukou , dividing people into locals, non-locals.

PZ : You need a license, or special registration to live in the city. Throughout the entire world only North Korea and China have a policy like this one.

AW : Locals don’t have many rights, besides the privilege of enrolling in school, but in the newspaper they often talk about the crimes caused by non-locals. There is a crazy amount of discrimination against people who are not local. A small example of this is that the city has laws against illegal structures like this one (Ai Weiwei’s home and studio). Think about it this way: the city is built solely by migrants from the outside, but none of them are locals except the boss and where are they going to live? Nobody provides any space for them. Of course they gather at the outskirts of the city...

PZ : And in the village in the city...

AW : Just to build a place that they can stay, whether it’s legal or not.

AB : But this village, Cao Chang Di, is it a village that pre-dates the city, or is it a village like you are talking about now, a village that is built illegally? Most people that live here appear to be migrants, but did they build this village, or did they inhabit an existing one?

AW : In the 1960’s this was a so-called “China Albania Friendship Farmer’s village.” These were very privileged farmers, who were supposed to provide an example for the country, growing vegetables for the city.

So when university or high school students graduated, and Chairman Mao sent them to be re-educated on a farm, they would send some people here. At that time people working here found much better conditions that you would find in more distant areas. At least on the weekend they could ride their bicycle home. These were example farmers, so it was a good farm.

Recently I heard that it is no longer a village and the former farmers are buying out their hukou to become citizens, instead of farmers. The real reason this is happening is so that the land can be returned to the government, because if you are a farmer no one can take your land. Of course there is real benefit for these new citizens, they have some new citizen’s rights, but at the same time the land is returned to the state, so that it can sell the land to anybody it wants to. There are a lot of tricks and games, but it is really so simple: the state is the only beneficiary. But in a state, like China, which is not a democratic society, far from it, nobody argues about this, the press won’t talk about it, intellectuals never discuss it. Probably I am the only crazy guy who always talks about it. But they think: “This shit guy, why is he always talking about this?”

So what kind of city is this? I can’t see a city without citizens. It’s like you don’t see a religion without followers. Nobody can decide how the city is going to be; everything is done through governmental decisions, today we need a road here, tomorrow...

It’s by very simple decisions from the top. If Sanlitun (a Beijing bar street) becomes nice they say: “Oh, lets change it, we’ll plan big buildings so that someone can profit from it, not all you street vendors.” It’s crazy, whenever they see people benefit, they will grab the profit. It’s so simple, they change here or there not as they say, to make the city better. The city is already better when they do nothing, take 798 (a contemporary arts district, in a former model industrial work unit) as an example, but once they see this they always take action.

So that’s my understanding of this city. I really have no relationship with it, except when journalists come to visit me.

Otherwise I just go to one restaurant, which I designed (called Where to Go? ). A lot of friends go as well, so we have a place to meet and eat dinner, and then I come back here.

AB : This is a courtyard house, and it seems to me that the kind of city you are talking about when you say you live here and in your restaurant, has very few elements, its not so much about the city space in between. I am interested in that because a lot of people, for instance New Urbanists in North America, might say you make a good city by making lively streets, by concentrating energy on the public space of the city. I don’t know if it is the way you would like to make a city, but the way you live is different from that, its much more about autonomy, creating a separate space through the compound, but still

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Still from Third Ring Road

finding forms of community. The restaurant for instance is a kind of public space, which can’t be here in Cao Chang Di; it’s better that it’s in the city, because people can get to it more easily. I am wondering if you are interested in making a city that starts from the way you live in it, which I think is quite different from the way many others think a city should work.

AW : Of course most European cities are based in convenience and efficiency. But it’s not necessary to me that these functional requirements are supported, what is more important is the use. You need a real variety of intention and purpose: people who are doing things that you would never think about. So you know that’s important. I think a city can be very brutal and lacking in qualities of life, because these are not desired, but without many different purposes, the city loses its initial reason for becoming a city.

Many places, like this city, have vast areas without use. It is so strange, these spaces are not for individuals; they’re for a special group that has no meaning. This group gives the city no meaning; it’s a negative force, working against other people.

AB : Maybe we could finish, with a question about the different processes you use in making art. I’ll list some of the different techniques, or tactics, that you use. I am interested in how you might see them applying to your design thinking and its relationship to processes of urbanization.

The first is the notion of detournment, this Situationist idea of diverting the meaning of existing artifacts, taking found things and altering them slightly to change their purpose. You’ve used this technique in architecture, in the projects you did at Beijing’s Soho housing development, the silo and the upside down house, and in the project we’re sitting in - your own studio.

Even though it’s not a found object, it looks like one. You use ordinary typologies and vernacular forms and slightly modify

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them.

The second involves letting things go, you just drop a Han Dynasty vase on the ground. You let it go to see what happens. I think this works like the video pieces as well, you set up a process to see what ensues.

But then there is another tactic you use: an overt “fuck you!”, working very strongly against authority, centrality...

AW : ...order and the state, establishment...

AB : And I guess the final one which is in some ways the opposite of the last one, is that you use the power of developed knowledge, a general intellect, vernacular techniques, you have a deep respect for the way people do and make things.

So I am wondering how you see these tactics in relation to the city, can you see your practice of making urban space in relation to these same techniques?

AW : I think we are in a very special moment, As Chinese people, but also internationally, we have gone from the cold war, an unjust society, towards so-called globalization, or a stronger capitalist society, or an information age. Everything happened with a purpose leaving us with unknown conditions. I don’t think humans can ever really control this, and it has become even less controllable. Circumstances are now much more complicated than we can predict. For example until quite recently there was no China or India and now suddenly they are the factories of the world. But people are still trying to figure out what this means in relation to ideology, social and political structure, and all kinds of other problems, like education and the environment. I don’t think there is a single reaction, at least for myself that can answer these questions, or put me at peace. So I constantly think about the condition of being lost. Once you’re lost, you try to figure out where to go. Imagine you’re in the middle of a train station and you try to understand the much larger, much more complicated, space around you, or the travel you are embarking on.

So I think it’s crazy, the whole thing is crazy. I am not very clear about what I am doing. If I have a character, I don’t have much purpose in my life, but more of a natural flow. The only fact is that I am still alive. I’m here. This is solid now, but even this might change. I can’t figure out what is going on. Really that’s true. Honestly, I don’t have a clear answer for this. The clearest answers look ridiculous to me.

----------------------------------------------------------------Adrian Blackwell teaches architecture and urban design at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Pei Zhao practices architecture and urban design with Parsons Brinckerhoff in Beijing.

Together they curated the exhibition Detours: Tactical Approaches to Urbanization in China at the University of Toronto’s Eric Arthur Gallery . The exhibition features projects by nine contemporary architects and two artists, including Ai Weiwei’s “INTERVAL” - From Da Bei Yao to Da Bei Yao, 8.10. - 7.11.2003 .

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Fragments, Voids, Sections and Rings Bert de Muynck From: MARK Magazine #12 Interview Conducted: 2007.11.11 Article Published: 2008.02.01

Ai Weiwei is China’s most renowned conceptual artist. The latest Documenta in Kassel featured his Template structure, as well as the Fairytale project, which entailed the on-site participation of 1001 Chinese people. Born in 1957, Weiwei was raised in Shihezi, a town in Chinese Turkestan to which his father, the poet Ai Qing, had been exiled. A self-proclaimed architect, Ai Weiwei established FAKE Design eight years ago. Since then, his firm has designed and realized an impressive number of projects.

Recently Weiwei served as artistic consultant to Herzog & de Meuron for the Swiss architects’ design of the Olympic Stadium in Beijing. Weiwei lives and works in Chaochangdi, a village on the outskirts of Beijing, not far from the airport expressway.

Many of the buildings in this area are his work. The subject of countless interviews, Weiwei claims that talking about his work is never boring. If he weren’t discussing his projects with me, he says, he’d probably be talking to one of his staff or even a neighbourhood cab driver. At the end of the interview I ask what will happen to the stadium – known as the ‘bird’s nest’ – after the Olympics. He reveals that Jacques Herzog envisions the stadium being used for weddings. We laugh. A bird’s nest transformed into a love nest? Not a bad idea.

----------------------------------------------------------------Please tell us about your first experiences with architecture.

Ai Weiwei: I grew up in a camp in the countryside under very difficult circumstances. In order to survive, we had to do everything ourselves, from building living quarters and doing agricultural work to digging clay for bricks. By the age of ten, I was used to this type of work. To me, architecture is a question of survival. It’s about making efficient, cost-effective structures and not about creating something beautiful. It’s about work with a purpose.

Do you think a lot of architecture has no purpose?

AW: Let’s put it this way – if there is a purpose, it’s one I don’t admire. There is too much waste, the language is often unclear, and frequently the architect’s efforts are not intelligent. Architecture is a moral-political question, not just a technical one. The desire to build is a basic instinct, a necessity if one is to survive in nature. Today architecture has become a profession taught in universities by instructors whose courses are devoted to making architecture crazy. All those students want to be stars.

They are far less interested in how to survive. Architecture can be intelligent only when it’s true to its fundamental nature.

Your architectural career started with your own house.

AW: Yes, but initially I wasn’t aware of what I had done. Later, Shigeru Ban saw this house and said the only architect in China is Ai Weiwei, blah blah blah. His words made me more conscious of what I was doing. After that, many friends came asking for help. Often I said yes, because the problems I’d confronted could all be solved with basic common sense. My work doesn’t look special. It doesn’t require a great deal of special training. It’s really all about making moral and aesthetic judgements rather than technical ones. During the past seven years, we’ve done about 40 projects, including housing, landscaping, a stadium, a cultural facility, a bar and a restaurant. If it can be called ‘architecture’, we do it.

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Magazine spread from MARK Magazine // Photos provided by FAKE Design

Would you say the design of your house is fundamental?

AW: I’d call it ‘essential’, because I used minimal materials to create a maximal volume. It has a very practical layout and not much interior design. The architectural language isn’t trendy. Maybe it’s become trendy because you live in it. It has become fashionable, and it’s been copied in this area. When it was being constructed, however, the farmers who helped build it thought it wasn’t finished. They didn’t understand why I didn’t want any interior design. I had to tell them I’d run out of money.

How would you describe your architecture? Do you talk about style?

AW: No, I don’t talk about style, but if you deny all styles, your style emerges anyway. My style is to reduce all superfluous effort – to do the work in an essential and necessary way. In discussing my projects, people use terms like ‘minimalism’ and ‘purity’, which are incorrect. The work is essential, and the results are rooted in that essentiality.

Speaking as both artist and architect, what are your thoughts on contemporary China?

AW: Currently China is at a stage I would call the most extreme condition that humans can experience. Culturally, though, this condition is like a desert absolutely lacking in new philosophies, new morals, new aesthetics – all the aspects that should accompany the kind of activities taking place. It’s a sad story and one I often talk about, but nobody else seems to be discussing these matters. And that’s disturbing. Chinese architects are simply blind or mentally retarded in some way. They don’t realize they’re living at a unique time in history. There is no intellectual discussion, no meaningful practice. I wrote a few articles on how architects should change and be more conscious of what they’re doing, urging them to make work that addresses the current state of affairs – to consider density, speed, scale and unfamiliar building regulations. Only then can a meaningful new architecture be realized. It’s wrong to make an incorrect analysis of Western architecture or to simply copy Western buildings.

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The National Stadium is one of the highlights of both the Olympic Games and Beijing’s urban transformation.

Unavoidably the building has a form . . .

AW: [laughs] The right word is ‘unfortunately’.

The discussion surrounding this structure focuses on its value as a symbol – as an icon. What do you see when you look at the stadium?

AW: At the moment, the people of China are unable to comprehend this building, even those who use it. It’s too far beyond their understanding, and that’s not a snobbish remark. Although an ambitious project like this one had to be realized in Beijing, the city’s naïve officials, who have no knowledge of architecture or stadiums – not to mention a showcase type of architecture – had to commission international architects for the project. This stadium is more than a showcase, however.

As architecture, the building is top quality, and it can continue to be used for huge events. Initially it drew criticism from every corner of the architectural world. A barrage of experts were against it, citing reasons of safety, foreign occupancy, colonialism. It was a highly sensitive subject. Had it not been the Olympic Stadium, the structure would never have been built.

Ultimately, the budget was cut and the retractable roof eliminated, but the result is very satisfying. We wanted to design a democratic form. If you look at the building from different angles, you see a uniformity in which one side doesn’t dominate the others. From the outside, it’s not clear where the entrance is. You have the freedom to ‘float’ into the building. Inside, the space is not clearly structured but rather chaotic. It lacks obvious reference points. At the same time, you don’t feel as though you’re on the wrong side or in a corner with a poor view. By maximizing the view for everybody, the architects have raised gamewatching to its highest level. What a pity that no one mentions these qualities. At the moment, the overall image is all that counts.

The Template structure displayed at Documenta collapsed after a couple of days. Was it the engineer’s fault?

AW: There was no engineer involved. I am fully responsible. I designed Template to be erected indoors, where it would never fall down. At the last minute I was asked to contribute another piece for Documenta. I hadn’t done any research on the weather in Germany. When the structure collapsed, I realized it was okay. The structure changed form, but preserving its original shape was not crucial. Displaying the collapsed structure was a good decision and perhaps worked even better than my initial idea. When nature entered the picture, people found themselves discussing the process and the life span of art, including possible changes and unpredictable conditions.

What has happened to Template?

AW: After the collapse, we asked engineers at Kassel University to make a complete calculation of the measurements. We’re thinking about the possibilities of removing and rebuilding the structure in its present condition. It’s more interesting than it was. I think of it as dealing with change and remaking a miracle – the same shit but in a different form.

The dialogue between past and present is part of your art. Isn’t it awkward to put the same sort of dialogue into architecture?

AW: The windows of the Template structure come from old towns and villages in Northern China that have been destroyed.

Such windows are sold in marketplaces as decorative items. They came from ruins, and we made something out of them.

When history appears in art, as a material used for construction, it holds not only memory, but also knowledge, reflecting the conditions of the time. Using historical materials allows me to show the contradictions and conflicts of the current condition.

It comes naturally to me when I’m making art. New and old should be integrated more often in architecture; the combination makes sites and cities more interesting. This is not what is happening in today’s China, however, where government policy can lead to the overnight eradication of entire areas. Such brutality and violence goes beyond buildings, ignoring residents, citizens, memories, traditions, the past. It shows the kind of society we’re living in.

The Jinhua Architecture Park – a landscaped urban area already featured in several publications – was a project

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for which you commissioned several young architecture firms, both Chinese and European, to design 17 pavilions.

What is the current state of affairs?

AW: The architecture park just opened. The original brief asked for the design of a memorial for my father. The question in my mind was: Why should I, of all people, create this memorial? But leaving the job to someone else might have produced a poorer result, of course.

Did that thought motivate your decision?

AW: Yes. If you don’t do it, you can’t tell people to do it differently. If you do it, people will surely understand your point of view – it might be the wrong point of view, but it will be clearly understood.

How does the design process work at your office?

AW: I work with a group of about ten young architects from all over the world. We discuss concepts and I make drawings.

I have a great sense of proportion. Even at the construction site, when I tell workers their lines are not straight and they challenge me by making their own measurements, they have to agree I’m right.

Are straight lines important?

AW: To me they are. I don’t like curves, except on the human body. I like Le Corbusier’s statement that the donkey likes the curved line, but humans like the straight line.

But the stadium is curved, isn’t it?

AW: That’s true. I never thought about that. But it’s a necessary curve and not one based on an aesthetic preference.

Do you think contemporary Chinese architecture is contributing to the world and to the profession?

AW: Chinese architects are blindly building everything without the aid of clear judgment – if that’s a contribution, I concede that it’s being made. It’s a case to be studied.

Is architecture in your plans for the future?

AW: No. I won’t be doing any more architecture. But I do have a few projects to complete. Then it’s over. Done.

You’re retiring as an architect?

AW: I never started. I just hopped on the wrong train by mistake. I don’t care where it’s going or where it stops. I have to get off.

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Conversation Between Ai Weiwei and Eduard Kogel Eduard Kogel From: FAKE Design in the Village Pages 4 – 8 Interview Conducted: 2007.__.__ Transcribed by Anthony Pins from photographs of the book (no longer in print)

EK: First, I would like to talk about Caochangdi. What was the village like when you arrived? And why did you go there in the first place?

AWW: It was a typical village community producing vegetables for the city. At the time I had to find a place for myself, so I took a tai and went around. Caochangdi was nice in the sense that it had paved streets and was clean. I found a piece of land, and the landlord told me that I could build on it. There were no relevant codes or regulations, nobody would interfere, as long as your building was not over two levels high. So, one afternoon, I drew a simple sketch and then built it. That was in 1999.

I chose Caochangdi because it’s not far from Beijing and close to the old airport expressway. Because I don’t drive, the cars coming back from the airport were a good opportunity to go to the centre. Since the village lies next to a railroad, I thought urban development would not reach it. With those factors in mind, I decided to take the risk.

EK: How is the village today? Do the people still live off agriculture?

AWW: They have actually started to rent out land since they cannot any longer subsist on agriculture alone. In this way, they are earning much more money.

EK: When I came to the village for the first time in 200_, I saw a lot of taxi drivers who all seemed to live in the village.

AWW: Yes, because for taxi companies it’s cheaper to use the villages around the city as their work base.

EK: Would you say that the villages….

AWW: The village is a place for migrants who are also the people who really built the city, construction workers, people who leave their own home to come to the city trying to find work, students before they enter university, and also the wives and children of the migrant workers. Because expenses are much lower than in the city, the village has become a gathering place for the poor, but also for those who came from the countryside looking for a new life.

The employment structures they find are made up of small firms like the taxi companies, warehouses, or metalwork. IN Beijing, they often do the household cleaning in the ______ and all kinds of other low income jobs city dwellers don’t want to do anymore. There are millions like these people and the state never provides any sort of housing for them. So they gather in places like Caochangdi. In China there are thousands of village like that. The government just let it happen and so it became a sort of gray are, there is no social awareness and nobody takes care of the situation. In such economical and political conditions poor people are forced to build at their own risk.

EK: It seems that Caochangdi has become more dense in recent years without growing.

AWW: The village cannot grow in size because the available land is limited. Instead, they become very dense. People tend to rebuild their houses, adding more levels. The local people become landlords and rent the places out to the migrants, thus making a lot of money. Even if the government decides to take the land from the villagers for a new purpose, they will get

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money according to the surface area they own. It’s a very strange phenomenon.

EK: In the last few years, a lot of cultural initiatives have moved to Caochangdi. The whole cultural business attracts visitors from all over the world to the village. Does this change the lifestyle in the village?

AWW: Basically, at first nothing changed – the structure, the policy, all was the same – except in the past two years. When I built my studio, there, the village suddenly became well known. Then people started to copy my work and also ask me to design artist studios for the village. Normally, I would not accept but that means somebody else will start to build there, and the result would most likely not look good.

So I designed a few places; first, a set of design studio for some of my friends, call Court 105. It was a casual renovation of the old buildings with some small additions to them. Four parties can now share this space. The existing complex was not destroyed, but at the same time the result looks very new. We added less than 200 square meters to the whole area. It totally changed and is very easy to use. And then, next door, the same owner asked me if I wanted to design another one on an empty lot. So I designed four studios which are connected to each other. They can be used individually or as one space with an irregularly shaped courtyard. We maximized the land use – the structure is very dense. After it was finished, Urs Miele set up his gallery there. Then the local government asked me to design a group of studios. It involved no extra costs, they were simple to build and everybody liked them. I didn’t have that much time, so in one afternoon I quickly designed the 17 studios.

I took some elements of what I did before and made a variation of four types. Design and construction were very fast.

The artist Rong Rong is a photographer, who wanted to build a photographic centre. It was opened last June this year and they are very satisfied. The building includes an exhibition space, a research unit, a library, also archives, a living quarter, and a restaurant. It’s a more complicated program and a public building.

The different groups have different functions. Some are commercial, some are private, some are public, and some are individual renovations. Now, we are building are largest project in the village with red bricks: five courtyards including galleries, studios and workspace. All buildings mentioned are very different in use and size, but all are based on very simple solutions.

EK: The building for Rong Rong is different from the others. The layout is complex and the façade is a relief that almost looks like an artifical ruin. What behind that, and why did you design it in this way?

AWW: The other buildings are only studios; people are moving in and using them. They are like tools.

The program for Rong Rong is much more specific. It’s a building designed for public use. It needs an identity and has to create an image. We tried to do that with a specific treatment of the façade; the bas-relief provides some kind of shadow and shape – but it is made only of bricks and I had never seen a building like that before. It reminds one of ruins. We explained to the works how to do it and made a detailed drawing of every brick. The bas-relief is composed in three layers, each projecting with a difference of six centimeters.

EK: Do you consider the wish of users to change the space according to their needs?

AWW: Yes, I search for maximum flexibility because I don’t know who will end up using the space. I know they are artists, designers or other people who work in the cultural scene, but I don’t know how they will use the space exactly. Since I know nothing about the interior final function, I try to control the proportion, the material, and the openings.

EK: You are not trained as an architect. Where do you pick up your ideas about architecture, in the local surrounding or in the international architectural magazines?

AWW: I never learned architectural design, and I don’t like the magazines. Most of the time, architects are trying to be so new, so different and this type of attitude seems to be growing. Personally, I take my inspiration from common places like villages

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or from the local, mostly poor people, or people who do not think about architecture. They might not think about it, but they know how to build their house. They have no money for an architect, so they have to find their own way. I think their solutions are often as good as those of so-called architects. Of course, their treatment of things is temporary or cheap, but I like the aesthetic quality. Because it’s cheap, because it’s necessary, because it’s done with limited means. These are essential qualities of architecture, but today nobody talks about those. All focus is on the permanent, the monumental, and the hightech solutions that do not fit into the everyday environment of China.

EK: Do you also study traditional solutions in order to translate them into your own language? Like materiality: most of the time, you simply use bricks. The entrance door is always cut into the bigger gate, with a stepping, like in the old courtyard houses of Beijing. But one point is totally missing, and that is the roof. In traditional Chinese architecture the roof was so important, but in your architecture the roof is just flat.

AWW: Roof construction has changed, because we have so little wood in China. The old roofs are based on timber construction, the shape of the roof evolved from the construction method. Today, we build roofs in concrete, so we don’t need anything shape other than flat. It’s not that I only like cubes; every method has its own logic and beauty. If I cannot use concrete I would probably think about another solution for the roof. But today we have no wood left; it’s imported from Africa or somewhere else and much too expensive. I hate this kind of architecture, just built for the show.

EK: Your architecture looks very practical, in the way you designed it and how you think about architecture. As a by-product, you not only create volume but outdoor space. This seems to me a very important point, because contemporary architecture in China is often composed as an object. Everything around it is arranged in order to produce a monument. Nobody cares about the space in between buildings except for the decoration.

AWW: The space in between buildings gives the feeling to the neighborhood. It is as important as the interior and the structure. After all, it will exist in the public area, reflecting the personality and the identity of the owner. To me, building in the village means to use the most humble language possible. Nevertheless, the community should have identity, should have a quality of life, and its own dignity – just simply built with brick. Not many architects pay attention to this kind of life and they all want to build a stadium or opera house, or a museum. It’s a pity that nobody cares about the cost related to real life, which shows a lack of sensibility for the problems. This is a real matter of education: at university you earn to be a star or part of the glamour show. But I design for the village; I live in the village, I want my house to fit into the overall environment.

It’s very humble and has to suit my purpose. I am very proud that even the villagers are copying my design. They don’t ask why it looks like that, they just like it.

EK: Let’s talk again about the public spaces. In the village house areas look very chaotic. Nobody takes care of the problem.

But in your projects the open spaces are very quiet and peaceful. This contrast gives an additional power to your projects.

AWW: The simplicity, the classic proportions, the human proportion and the light are the basic material. It’s easy to create a kind of space by using neighboring volumes to give quality to the in-between areas. Generally, in the city everybody is concerned with their own objects, they would never think about their neighbors. But in the old kind of village, people used the traditional method, which naturally creates beautiful outdoor spaces. Indoor and outdoor spaces are created in the same language and equally treated. Thus, negotiation and conversation is taking place between the indoors and the outdoors.

EK: Do the same craftsmen work on all the indoor and outdoor spaces in your projects?

AWW: Yes, the work is all done at once.

EK: How important is landscaping in your work?

AWW: In my projects there is very little landscaping because there is very little space left. I try to consider the issue from the start as I find it is very important to design both together and not separately. Landscape is part of the project and not the rest to be decorated at the end.

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EK: This makes up the overall quality, if we can feel that it was developed together and not separately.

AWW: Once you walk into the neighborhood it’s already part of your home; it’s an extension of your home. It gives more strength to your indoor condition and people get an aesthetic impression before they reach their home. Usually, when you open the door of you home in China, you are shocked – it feels just strange outside. If I have the opportunity, I like to create a full setting – indoor and outdoor. To me, it’s important that the inhabitants can identify with their environment. People should be allowed to become part of the neighborhood by adoption.

EK: Do you think China needs more “barefoot architects” today to bring a minimum of quality to the hinterland?

AWW: (laughs) China is now the largest construction site in the world and is using more resources and materials for building than in any other period of human history. Each year, Beijing is producing a hundred million square meteres of new buildings, which equals the size of Beijing in 1949. But today there is no criticism or longing for a new concept. How to build a city in that speed and with limited space left? There is no consciousness there; the topic is rather global than local and all too often just crazy. This is a tragedy – people have no time to think about who they are, where they are, how they can uses their lives, what could be meaningful for today’s society. Officials have a lot of advantages from the development, but mostly they don’t know how to deal with the local conditions.

EK: It seems the education for architect also goes completely the wrong way. Young students mostly look to the international avant-garde development in architectural form and then take these ideas back into a Chinese computer. That works, but it does not bring quality out t the site. Most of the students are not educated in construction but only in computer aided design.

They are perfect in rendering, drawing, and copying formal things.

AWW: It’s very strange but true. To learn about architecture is the same as to learn how to make love. You cannot learn that from great literature, nor through a fantastic sex movie. You must do it yourself. Architecture is based on the knowledge of the craftsman, on industrial prefabrication or local solutions. There is a large gap between designers and craftsmen; they are starting to hate each other, so nothing good can come out of this relationship. It’s a waste of time and energy.

EK: One last question about the village. So many things have changed in the last few years. Do officials in the village realize they have to invest in the public space?

AWW: They are practical. They don’t have a method from the top government to the bottom; China is willing to change, but nobody has the knowledge how to do it. There are no good examples and they are not educated for the challenge. Often, they tend to blame each other for failures. Now, in Caochangdi they are realizing that people from the cultural sector like what I did, so they are also starting to appreciate it. But they cannot understand why. They probably say “Oh, it’s by Ai Weiwei and he’s famous.” But they can never really figure out why so many people like it.

EK: The officials from the party and from the govrnment level are captured by their ideology and don’t see the cultural value of such buildings. They only realize what they were taught to see and these new things are outside their value system.

AWW: That’s true. The people don’t select the structure of the government and don’t elect party officials who are selected by the system and only need to survive. Nothing good is coming out of that system. These are the true problems of the future.

EK: Do you have any idea what Caochangdi will look like in 10 years?

AWW: The village as such is only land attached to the city. There will be a sort of grass roots architecture versus statecontrolled development. I think we are not going to win this war. Eventually, they will pull all my buildings down But I am very happy for one moment I had the opportunity to make my statement there. The system is just too strong and I doubt they will become more sensible. For me, it’s a fantastic opportunity to build in the village where I live. Most of the buildings are located within five minutes walk from my place, although I never paid a visit to the building site during construction. The

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craftsmen understood the design and I know that they are doing things right. It’s just so easy.

EK: This is probably the secret and the most important part of your projects. You give the craftsmen the possibility to take responsibility and this is what architects all too often try to avoid.

AWW: Architects and craftsmen in China do often not understand each other, so they end up doing things exactly against their own will. Their skills are paralyzed instead of used. .

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VILLAGE URBANIZATION Eduard Kogel From: FAKE Design in the Village Pages 24 – 26 Transcribed by Anthony Pins from photographs of the book (no longer in print)

Beijing’s inexorable urbanization, which has already ringed the historic center with four concentric highways, has now reached the formerly peaceful village of Caochangdi. The area is wedged between a fifth highway ring and the expressway to the airport in the northeast. Traffic permitting, the commute to the city center is a half an hour.

Ai Weiwei moved to Caochangdi at the end of the 1990s, when inexpensive land was available. In agreement with the parish council, local construction crews and tradesmen erected a residence and studio building a in a performance lasting one hundred days. This project launched Ai Weiwei’s second career as an architect and urbanist, allowing him to realize novel spatial concepts within the village. The buildings are special refuges in a gigantic revolution, which does not stop at this typical village. The rough detailing and the witty application of vernacular material have become his trademark in Caochangdi, where he has already realized seven structures within the last few years, all dedicated to the needs of art production and sales.

Like implants of a counterworld, they connect the village life to the international art market. The fast gentrification f the nearby Dashanzi Art District (originally Factory 798) drives many galleries and artists to outlying Caochangdi. These unique conditions – only possible in China – coupled with a heady rush of activity are transforming Caochangdi into Beijing’s new hub of cultural production, Today’s Caochangdi buzzes like a giant building site, where inhabitants, more or less on their own accord, are expanding, finishing, or converting their humble abodes in order to take advantage of the real estate boom. Hundreds of migrant workers, drawn by the promise of construction jobs, spark new public life amidst their temporary structures of eating houses, shops, and markets. Likewise, many galleries have spring up which constantly draw international visitors. Meanwhile, both the local population and new coming investors exploit private property, develop lasts mostly without local authorities’ approval, and often fail to meet regulations. It is assumed that new buildings are constructed for a maximum lifetime of twenty years.

In a three-point agenda the village leaders announced in April 2007 the goals for the New Socialist Village Construction: 1.

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Infrastructure improvement like new gas pipelines and the separation of storm, sewer, and water lines Security issues like fire and theft protection Environmental protection and beautification for the 2008 Olympics

In concluding remarks the mayor announced, “The cultural industry in the village is now about 40 percent of all industry, and by the end of the year it will reach 60 to 70 percent. Previously the village’s purpose was agriculture, but now its service has shifted to cultural enterprise.”

Village authorities do not specifically initiate urban development or public space projects, but rather wait for large investors who are expected to develop housing here in the future. The evolving system neglects public facilities like the streets and green areas but does cater to villagers’ private development projects. Amid this grass roots activity, Ai Weiwei’s simple approach has translated the notion of traditional construction into a contemporary idiom, thus highlighting the contrast between private and public. His solution adapts to local technical possibilities that also connect interior and exterior space using a basic vocabulary in a congenial way. Ai Weiwei understands the individual building not as an object but as a type, which he may diversify, but which nevertheless, by adapting to the palace, exhibits a magnificent spatial quality.

The aforementioned Studio House and China Art Archives & Warehouse contain the seeds for the further development of

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Ai Weiwei’s village architecture. These first two projects were shaped by the necessity and legal circumstances, which give owners occupancy rights for a maximum of twenty years. Even the mayor is not allowed to plan for a longer timeframe.

Additionally, building code requires new structures to blend into the already existing fabric. In answer to these limitations, Ai Weiwei produces a minimalism that has nothing to do with Western minimalism where simple solutions are achieved with complicated details and extra cost. He bases his approach, rather, on the most affordable solutions. Construction is simple: Reinforced concrete structures whose frameworks are filled with brick. The facades of six of the seven village projects incorporate traditional blue-gray brick, which is also used in the traditional Beijing courtyards. The blue-gray is achieved by cooling the bricks with water after the first firing, and then refiring them. In all the structure masons used English bond, only very seldom using Flemish bond. Variation among the structures is achieved by other means.

Whether a structure is public or private dictates the treatment of the brick. The enclosing wall and central pavilion in Courtyard 105 employ brick whose stretchers and headers are trimmed like natural stone, creating a rough surface. For Courtyard 104, Ai Weiwei allowed masons to freely mix 30 percent red bricks into the wall; but he precisely planned every bricks position for Three Shadows Photography Center. The last and largest project, Red Brick Art Galleries, uses reinforced concrete frameworks whose panels are filled with red brick to form almost blind facades.

Projects for private clients like Courtyard 105, Courtyard 104, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, the restaurant Go Where, and the bar 55 reveal a carefully planned emotional opposition to a rational basic concept. Such unconventionality and quirky inefficiency alienates the socialist realism permeating other standard constructions, and endows them with an individuality that is impossible to copy. Juxtapose with the banality of the village commons, these carefully planed compositions recall a collage steeped in Dada or Fluxus concepts and finish with a surreal note.

All buildings in the village by FAKE Design by simple technical facilities and detailing, but with a spatial concept, that is custom-made for art production and sales. Each building’s center is a double-high space, usually for work or exhibits. In all case the relationship between interior, private court, and semi-public space is carefully considered.

Space and material are central to Ai Weiwei’s architectural vision. Volumes are used to create enclosed courts and passages in complex geometries that can only be understood by passing through them. Density and narrow alleys create a tension that is counterbalanced by the calm atmosphere in the courts. The courtyards’ materiality and the brickwork of the facades heighten this sensuality. The brick refer to the village’s other contemporary buildings, but even more importantly the brick has the ability to weather. Such weathering makes time visible and stands in opposition to many contemporary architects and buildings, who neglect memory in the obsessive use of artificial, timeless surfaces.

For Ai Weiwei, architecture is not just a repository for daily activity but also an opportunity to further its inhabitant’s possibilities. With his Caochangdi projects, Ai Weiwei shows that contemporary architectural conceptions are not beyond the reach of local craftsmen as long as the architect gives freedom to both builder and user. Such flexibility, the witty application of the Chinese traditional values, and local technique create a nexus of engagement for local citizens, inhabitants, and visitors.

The development of the village into a hub for contemporary cultural production is strongly linked to the architectural creations of FAKE Design and Ai Weiwei.

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PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS Eduard Kogel From: FAKE Design in the Village Transcribed by Anthony Pins from photographs of the book (no longer in print)

Studio and Home Starting with his own studio, the artist Ai Weiwei launched his career as an architect. A wall separates the studio from the street and neighboring building and an inner court is planted with grass, bamboo, and pines. In the corner of the property a small pavilion serves as an office, atelier, and exhibition space. A combined studio and living area occupy the site’s full width at the northern end. The reception room’s double-high window is the only aperture in the otherwise closed-front façade facing the court. The structure is sheathed with locally fired, blue-gray brick, which also appears in the court’s footpaths.

Indie, simple red brick, partly painted white, fill the exposed reinforced concrete frame. Skylights flood the double-high atelier and exhibition space. Private rooms form two stories adjacent to this main space. The structure’s transparency creates an expanse of openness and preserves exciting visual axes fro various points in the building. Such sophistication combines with simple materiality to foster a calm atmosphere for the inhabitants’ cultural production.

Chinese Art Archive and Warehouse Courtyard 105 Courtyard 105 is comprised of one-story office buildings and warehouses for a small company in contemporary style of the village, built on the perimeter of the site. The new owner wanted to convert it into a studio complex consisting of a few independent living units, office rooms, and a rehearsal space for Living Dance Studio. Two one-story structures attached to the existing building form a private exterior space within the semi-private court. Two other simple, rectangular, one room building complete the extension. The jointly used, double-high briefing room creates proportion and measure, and is placed in front of the entrance, to block sightlines into the court. This building is almost without windows, but is lit with a skylight.

New and existing buildings are knit together by the use of the same blue-gray brick. The brick is generally laid in English bond and only the briefing room has knocked off headers and stretchers. Such a surface treatment recalls hand-trimmed natural stone. The courtyard is programmatically laid with paths made of the same brick found in the exterior walls. The proportions of the new windows and openings, the material, and spatial structure orchestrate the assimilation of the different elements of the complex, which has now been expanded by 280 square meters.

Courtyard 104 Three Shadows Photography Center The Chinese photographer Rong Rong and his Japanese wife Inri commissioned the Three Shadows Art Center. It is the first professional Chinese art institution to focus on photography and video art. The complex comprises an exhibition hall with 1,00 square meters, an information center and library, three dark rooms, an ink jet studio, and space for film and video postproduction. Space is also allotted for an artist-in-residence program and a café. Built on a former auto repair shop, the Three Shadows Photography Center’s zigzag layout conforms to its irregularly shaped site. The main structure and an enclosed wall define two triangular outdoor space. A separate building and three pavilions form the rest of the site. The garden space with its grass, trees, natural rough-cut stones, and the simple and functional arrangement of the path define the structure. Paths are laid with blue-gray brick and varied three-dimensional arrangements, which echo patterns in the walls.

The main building’s façade is the most expressive part in the complex. Several layers of brick carefully compose a relief and evoke a ruin – a romance furthered by the ad hoc decision to simply leave the irregular pattern of scaffolding holes on the surface.

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Red Brick Galleries The huge complex contains twenty-five galleries and a dozen living units, organized around five courtyards and a central spine. Structures along the village street are three stories high and interior structures are two stories. All are topped with one-meter-high-parapets. Brick latticework shield the roof terraces of the living units on the third floor. The sold outer wall consists of exposed reinforced concrete filled with red brick, laid out in simple English bond. Two displaced rectangular forms with additional breaks and transverse truncations define the irregular, semipublic courtyards. The main access is four meters wide and opens onto an irregularly shaped plaza. The alleyways between the different units are merely 1.6 meters wide, in contrast to the roughly ten-meter height of the units. This extremely dense construction is only possible because the sometimes double-high first and second floors are used as exhibition, office, and storage space, lit by skylights. The use of a prevalent urban form allows the project’s elements, such as alleyways, to blend into neighboring sites. In this way, the merely monofunctional complex reproduces the traditional urban fabric of a village, where cars are banned and human scale dictates proportion and space.

17 Studios The slightly irregular property consists of twelve square plots and seven rectangular plots for galleries and artists’ studio. An L-shaped, two-story building stands on each of the L-shaped structures. The remaining there buildings, which face south to the street, are simply rectangular. All the units, except these three, have access to the garden court, which is borded by the neighboring building. The rigid basic concept is transformed into an exciting space by irregular positioning of some of the untis. A few are turned 180* to form a common outdoor space that is itself partitioned with a wooden fence. A grid of alleys is thus formed, each between two and five meters wide. Alleyway lighting is integrated into the vertical wooden boards of the fence. Although the alleys do not connect to the neighboring plots, each leads to a cluster of trees. Each garden court is also planted with grass and at least one tree. Entry paths to the single units stretch either diagonally across the court or along the unit’s wall. These paths and alleys form a semi[public space. The blue-gray brick appears throughout the development and is just one of its unifying formal elements. Such use of homogenous materials contributes to a strong aesthetic expression.

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INTERVIEW Metropolitan Scum [Blog] Blog Article Published: FAKE Design in the Village

What is the method of construction of your latest exhibition?

This is Chinese household furniture that folks have been using for thousands of years. They are the most ordinary objects in southern China. The material is bamboo. If you look closely, the poles and the chairs are one thing.

How does the piece reflect your relationship with Herzog and de Meuron?

We have been doing several projects together and we have a mutual understanding about art and architecture. We often share concepts and ideas. The relationship is part of architecture but its also more important than architecture.

Was the Bird’s Nest stadium the first part of this collaboration?

Yes. After that we did several projects, more conceptually driven. Life is always more interesting than art.

Did you watch any of the Olympics?

I didn’t, but so many people did. One person not watching doesn’t make a difference.

Were you pleased with the generally positive reaction once the Games had started?

It gave me a chance to see how society functions both in the West and the East, and how this communication is superficial.

Also, how people avoid talking about the issues, people want celebration after celebration.

Did the Olympics give you a platform to make criticisms?

You always have to be alert of the stage you are on and how you use it, and know why or for what cause you are discussing.

We have to continually adjust our positions and speak out on matters.

Why do you think the reaction to the stadium showed a superficial relationship between East and West?

I think we have completely different histories, philosophically, morally, and in real life. The approaches can be quite different.

But I think the interesting thing is to make contact and to try to integrate each other’s point of view. The stadium offers us a platform for analysing our differences.

How many buildings have you designed?

About 60 projects in Beijing.

And how did the first project come about?

I needed a place to live and I needed it quickly. I had spent a lot of time with my mum and suddenly she got a bit tired of the big child who always stayed at home with no job. I came back from the United States, without a university diploma or a degree. It was weird to always stay at home, so I decided to build my own studio. I designed it in one afternoon and then we

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built it in the next 60 days.

When and where was the house built?

In 1999, in the north east of Beijing. I am still living in it. I never applied for planning.

So people saw this and said, ‘can you do one for me?’

All my work came from people saying ‘can you do one for me?’. I never went out looking for a job.

You say you work in architecture, but you do art and you do design. Do you divide your practice?

Now, we have to do that. We have maybe 20 people working solely on architecture. We have others working on art practice, installations, designs and production.

You were critical of the demolition of old buildings in Beijing. Have the authorities stopped demolition?

Whatever they do the result is completely different from the reason they do it.

Please tell us about the Ordus project.

It is an international architecture event. Hundreds of architects gathered in one place, 45 minutes from Beijing by plane. The designs that came out are so surprising, so crazy. I did the urban plan, but it was really to set up the basic rules. They have a lot of freedom.

What are the local materials?

Like western materials, but not very good quality. It will be finished in two years.

Who’s the client?

It’s a private client but the local people are very much like people in Dubai where they have a lot of natural resources, like gas and coal. They have the highest income in China in that small area.

How have the architects involved reacted?

I was surprised. When you see hundreds of architects from all over the world together, it reflects the art, our culture, and architecture culture in the past decades: the education, the lifestyle, the habits they have and how they face the challenge of the new conditions. It is more like a festival.

Do you think of it as an architecture, planning, or art project?

To me, it’s a human project. It has art, architecture, imagination and politics. It’s a lot of communication between architects, and an exchange of ideas.

Why is it so easy for you to work across scales, compared to a western architect?

I grew up in the desert. The desert is vast. A human is so small and insignificant there. Also, I grew up in a culture of revolution. You really have a big ideology, you think very big. Today, China is developing so fast: you always try to make yourself reflect the time. Before you would never have imagined what is possible today.

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Do you feel that the Olympics had a positive effect on Beijing in particular, on China, or is it mainly negative?

Watching the authorities in China is like watching a random attack. A man tries to hit you but instead someone else gets killed and you are so happy because it was someone else who got killed and not you. When you talk about the result you generally talk about intentions, but not here. The intention and the result are completely different things. It’s like 9/11. What happened on 9/11 changed a lot of things but it was not what was in these terrorists’ minds. Chinese society is not aware or selfreflective. The authorities try to impress the world for the wrong reasons.

Do you sell your art in China or abroad?

I have almost no sales in China and my art only started to sell worldwide after 2005. My buyers are mainly Europeans now, with some in the United States.

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OP-ED: STICKs and Stones; Ai Weiwei and the Uses of Architecture Fred Scharmen From: Archinect Article Published: 2011.05.26

This op-ed was initially conceived as a series of critical Twitter messages by Fred Scharmen, aka sevensixfive, directed at blogs (including Archinect) that have been providing ongoing exposure of new architecture projects in China, considering China’s unfair capture and treatment of artist/activist Ai Weiwei. In an effort to investigate this issue further, and hopefully spark a little productive debate, we invited Fred to pen this op-ed.

Should the media protest the treatment of Ai Weiwei by ceasing promotion of all new architectural work in China? Should architects refuse to take on new work in China? Should we continue to support the work of architects and artists in China, but only with a disclaimer? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

----------------------------------------------------------------At the time of this writing, the artist Ai Weiwei has been detained without charge by Chinese authorities for 53 days. Given the history of Ai Weiwei’s unique relationship to architecture, and the ways in which our discipline, and Weiwei himself, intersect with the Chinese state, the ongoing uncritical promotion of design work within China by international media outlets feels naive at best, and destructive at worst.

Weiwei has famously compared the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing, for which he is credited as co-designer, to a “pretend smile”, worn by the Chinese state, along with the rest of the pageantry surrounding the 2008 summer games, to distract the world from internal issues like human rights, corruption, and pollution. This false smile persists.

Ai Weiwei is no stranger to the political uses of architecture. In addition to the Bird’s Nest stadium and other projects, in 2007 he designed and built his own studio complex in Caochangdi Village, a suburb of Beijing that has since become a thriving arts district. The same year, he co-organized, along with Herzog & deMeuron, the Ordos 100 project, an even larger arts district in Inner Mongolia. This area is rich in the coal used to fuel China’s economic expansion, and has one of the fastest growing GDPs on the planet. The project is based around one hundred 10,000 square foot villas, each designed by a seperate architect, hand selected by Ai and H&dM. In the center of the vast neighborhood plan is a copy of Weiwei’s Beiing studio complex. Only phase one has begun construction, and the city of Ordos is currently one of China’s famous ‘Ghost Cities’ the empty shell of an overspeculated and underpopulated real estate bubble, or strategically banked housing stock for China’s rapidly urbanizing population, depending on who you ask.

Weiwei was invited by officials in Shanghai to design and build yet another version of his studio complex in that city, as a catalyst for even more arts based development. In early 2011, his permit was revoked, and the central government destroyed the building while it was still under construction. It’s widely believed that the destruction of his Shanghai studio was intended as warning and retaliation for other ongoing projects that had begun to occupy a continuum between art, architecture, and political activism.

After the devestating Sichuan eathquake in 2008, Weiwei began collecting names of students killed when their school buildings, many constructed without regard to safety inspection and regulations, collapsed. This was a situation that had been downplayed and hidden by local and national governments in China. He began continuosly posting these names in many online venues, as part of his wide ranging internet presence. When police harrassment began to intensify, he further fed

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the cycle by documenting the harrassment itself. In 2009, he was beaten so badly with sticks by the police, that he required emergency brain surgery on a stopover in Munich.

In pre-olympic China, optimism abounded among western architects about the prospects for openness and democracy within their new client state, and there was much speculation, particularly among prominent academic practitioners, about the role that their projects could play in the transformation. Weiwei’s collaborator on the Bird’s Nest, Jaques Herzog, told Der Speigel in 2008, just before the games: “We too cannot accept the disregard for human rights in any form whatsoever. However, we do believe that some things have opened up in this country. We see progress. And we should continue from that point. We do not wish to overemphasize our role, but the stadium is perhaps a component of this path, or at least a small stone.”

The diffuse, porous space of the stadium’s perimeter would be difficult for authorities to monitor, new forms would engender new social relations: “... our vision was to create a public space, a space for the public, where social life is possible, where something can happen, something that can, quite deliberately, be subversive or -- at least -- not easy to control or keep track of ... We see the stadium as a type of Trojan horse.”

And as early as 2004, Rem Koolhaas was writing, in WIRED Magazine, about the potentially transformative effect of the looping form in OMA’s newly designed CCTV Building: “But in China, money does not yet have the last word. CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence – a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.”

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Beijing National Aquatics Center (Beijing Water Cube). Photo: © Fred Scharmen From the perspective we now occupy, in mid - 2011, we can point out, in no uncertain terms, the falseness of these claims, and the failure of these hopes. Things have not opened up in China. The stadium was not a component, or even a stone, on the path to any openness. It was not a Trojan Horse. Sharing conceptual space has not resulted in a decrease in paranoia.

And in China, as elsewhere, money does have the last word. In early 2011, in a publication entitled “Building Rome in a Day”, the Economist noted: “At current rates of construction, China can build a city the size of Rome in only two weeks.” Despite concerns (despite the Ghost Cities, and the existence of 100,000 unsold apartments in Beijing), the Economist assures its readers that the Chinese real estate boom is not a bubble about to burst. According to the Economist, there is still money to be made. Real estate prices in Shanghai increased by 150% from 2003 to 2010. In 2011, housing investment as a component of Chinese GDP tripled.

Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, coverage of iconic architecture in China has continued unabated. The hollowness that accompanied words about new form and social change from a previous wave of academic western practitioners has faded away. Instead of broad critique of those empty claims, the international architectural press has moved towards coverage of even more spectacular projects in China. Instead of opening up a dialogue about the possible role of architecture in social transformation, architects working in China have backed away from any expression of hope for increased openness and respect for basic human rights, but they haven’t stopped working.

Even as, at the burst of the bubble, work elsewhere in the world has begun to again take more of a social and organizational turn, China is still a place where large shiny double curvature wins the day. The press has embraced China as a kind of last redoubt for parametric digital formalism and iconic shapeshifting, seemingly blind to the role that these cultural projects play as loss leaders for large development schemes. As the Economist notes, there is still money on the table when it comes to Chinese real estate, and there is still soft power to be capitlized on when it comes to the transmutation of cultural institutions into global prestige and legitimacy. The false smile gets wider, and toothier.

To trace Ai Weiwei’s architectural trajectory is instructive. From his involvement with, and later disavowal of, the (iconic, mediated, overstructured) Bird’s Nest stadium, to his turn towards the (hidden, censored, understructured) school buildings in Sichuan, there is the path of someone who has started to realize that his work in building was being used by the state, who then turned built work back against the state, using it to reflect the human cost of internal corruption.

This isn’t to raise again the question of wether or not to work with “evil” clients, we are free to work for whoever we choose (or who chooses us). This is about recognizing the political and economic uses of architecture. To most institutions and governments, architecture is literally a tool. Weiwei’s engagement with built work, and his artistic practice, with its focus on reproduction, authenticity, individuality, and the constant issue, in a large country like China, or any networked society, of people-as-pixels, became enmeshed in these issues. Given that he was beaten, nearly killed, and forcibly detained, while advocating for building code enforcement, you might say he’s taken these questions to their furthest possible conclusion.

There are no easy answers. I personally believe that new form does have the potential to enable new social relationships.

If we, as architects, didn’t believe that built space could change lives, we wouldn’t do what we do. The students whose bones were broken in Sichuan certainly had their lives changed by architecture. When I was in Ordos in 2008, to present the villa project I had worked on for Keller Easterling Architects, spending a week in that environment, with those people, and meeting Weiwei certainly had an effect on my life. It is not enough to merely say that CCTV is an office building for government censors, and the Bird’s Nest is a giant political distraction, Rem and Herzog were wrong, and that all building in China is wrong. Just as it is equally unproductive to simply reproduce the press releases for the latest spectacular cultural institution to be completed or proposed in China , without caveat or disclaimer: this state jails artists. “Stunningly Omnipresent Masters Make Mincemeat of Memory”. Architecture is large enough to be both radical social transformer and retrograde political instrument, if we’re willing to talk about it. These things must be the beginning terms in a larger conversation about architecture in China, and in the world.

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project descriptions Caroline Klein From: Ai Weiwei Architecture Published: 2011

Studio and Residence The artist Ai Weiwei launched his career as an architect with the design of his own studio house. A wall encloses a courtyard whose northern width is spanned by the building that is constructed of red bricks and poured-in-place concrete with a façade made up of Beijing’s traditional blue-gray bricks. Inside, the red bricks, partly painted white, filled the exposed, reinforced concrete frame. Skylights flood the two story-high atelier and exhibition space. The reception room’s window is the only aperature in the otherwise closed-front wall facing the courtyard. The open intnernal structure preserves exciting visual axes from various points. The rough detailing and the witty application of the vernacular material have become Ai Weiwei’s trademark in Caochangdi, a district recently transformed into Beijing’s new hub of cultural production.

Courtyard 105 Starting from pre-existing one-story office spaces that were built in the village’s vernacular style, the architect preserved the majority of the original volumes and converted them into living units, offices, and a dance studio. Two one-story structures attached to the existing building form a private exterior space within the semiprivate court. Two other simple rectangular, one-room buildings complete the extension. A double-height briefing room is located in the coutyard’s center to block site lines into the court. New and existing buildings are knitted together by the use of the same blue-gray brick. The proportions of the new windows and openings, the material, and spatial structure orchestrate the assimilation of the different elements of the complex.

Courtyard 104: Urs Miele Gallery Designed to be a gallery, Courtyard 104 consists of two-story buildings that are broken up primarily on the ground level only. The woven interior circulation creates private zones and mezzanines overlooking the double-height ateliers and attached livings units. Skylight illuminates the workspaces. An enclosure wall of vernacular brick lattice work dampens street noise and a small maintenance alley runs between it and the neighborhood buildings. Seventy-percent of the bricks used for the façade are blue-gray and thirty-percent are red. Entering the courtyard, the visitor is immediately confronted with a two-story volume extending itself, creating a canopy that funnels the visitor into the courtyard’s interior. Unadorned walls, ceilings, and floors affirm the materiality of their construction: humble concrete and bricks.

Three Shadows Gallery Built on a former auto repair shop, the Three Shadows Photography Center’s zigzag layout conforms to its irregularly shaped site. It serves as an institution for the education, production and display of photography and video. The main structure and an enclosing wall define two triangular outdoor spaces, a separate building and three pavilions form the rest of the site. The garden spaces with its grass, trees, natural, rough-cut stones, and the simple and functional arrangement of the paths define the structure. The main building’s façade is the most expressive part of the complex: several layers of brick compose a relief, added by an irregular pattern of scaffolding holes in the surface.

241 Caochangdi The slightly irregular property consists of twelve square and seven rectangular plots for a total of nineteen galleries or artist studios. Ai Weiwei designed three different building sizes. All the units, except for three, consist of L-shaped structures with

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courtyards, bored by the neighboring building. The rigid grid is transformed into an exciting space by irregular positioning of some of the units. Some L-shaped structures are rotated, opening up larger gardens and varying qualities of the long perspectives through the site. Paths and alley form semi public spaces, partitioned with wooden fences that reduce the starkness and severity of the complex of gray brick structures and gray brick paved pathways. The homogenous combination of gray brick and wood creates a bold statement in the creative village.

Red Brick Galleries The complex contains twenty five galleries or artist studios and a dozen livings units, organized around five courtyards and a central spine. The corridor is lined with approximately 10-met-high walls of red bricks, red grout, and red window frames, contained and reinforced by poured-in-place concrete beams and columns. The proportions of the four-meter- wide corridor and the 1.6-meter-wode secondary circulation in relationship to the walls give a severe and dramatic passage. The use of a prevalent urban form allows the project’s elements, such as alleyways, to blend into neighboring sites. In this way the merely mono functional complex reproduces the traditional urban fabric of a village, where cars are banned and human scale dictates proportion and space. The red brick galleries are a departure from the gray brick structures that Ai Weiwei made popular in the Caochangdi area of Beijing.

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TALK WITH AI WEIWEI Mathieu Wellner From: So Sorry Book Published: 2010 Interview conducted: July 4th and 5th, 2009

You described yourself as “a person who does different things”: Sometimes it ends up being art, sometimes architecture – you can’t control it, and you only realize later looking back on what you did. If you think about the last few weeks, what was your dominant occupation?

Last week, my dominant preoccupation was Fan Fou, the Chinese Twitter. You write posts on events maybe every second, you make comments, talk to friends, you discuss. I’m immensely attracted by it, because you always have to be ready. It’s very intense and you have to know what’s happening on the outside on different levels. It can be very personal or it can be very political. It’s like an individual broadcast. Last week, the officials shut off ten of my IDs on Twitter because I was receiving too much attention. The moment I got into it, I had thousands of people following me. I broke the record in term of numbers … In the beginning, I had two IDs that they shut off, so I used another identity. After a while they found out – they shut it off. So after ten different IDs, I’m still alive, but suddenly you realize that there are 40, 5 people named like me on Fan Fou. Like: Ai Weiweiwei or Weiwei Aiai, or Wei Aiai. They all use my image, so they make the whole system very, very confusing. Nobody knows which one is really me.

Blogging seems in general much more popular in China than it is in Europe. In democracies, the media monitor politics. In China, the media weren’t effective in doing this, so the blogs took over their role to spread information and to discuss politics. You have a powerful voice that the government is trying to shut down. You were even arrested by the police – how was the tea at the police station?

Ha! That was a funny situation. But it’s also sad what is happening in China, because our society is lacking platforms. It is very different from Europe: You have public and private. We have neither a public nor a private life. We don’t have a choice – we’re always ignored. That’s very frustrating. Only since 200, for the first time, have we had the means to really get information and to speak up with our own voice and discuss with people. It is absolutely outrageous.

The police came to me here and tried to use the old-fashioned way to convince me of their views. But they did not have any legal documents. So I told them, “You have no right to talk to me.” It’s worse than driving without a driver’s license. But nobody dares to check them – they are so powerful, like a secret police. So I called the police station, dialing 110, and made a complaint. I told them, “ I have a person in my house without identification. I want him to be out, but he refuses. Can you come over?” So they came. It was very funny, because of course they knew each other. “It’s our boss, here,” they said. “Okay, so if this is your boss, you have to take him to the station. How about the two of you show me your identification?” The two guys acted very nervous. I asked them to show me their police badge, but they did not have one either. They said something about their jackets that were at their houses, so they would have to drive back to get them. The whole night, we went back and forth. Four hours later, I walked out of the station. This guy didn’t have the chance to tell me what he wanted to tell me – that was it. I wrote on my blog: “Don’t try to take me out for tea. I don’t want to talk to you. We don’t have common ground for discussion because our worldviews are really too different. If you want to see me, make sure you have the right to arrest me, make sure you bring handcuffs, and I will go with you.” They never came back.

But this is still dangerous – the police could come anytime with legal permission.

It is dangerous, but if I don’t react, it’s also dangerous, because they can always bother and intimidate you. I’d rather use the tool of blogging to expose everything, to show it to all. It’s like they’re still hesitant on that matter. They have to find a good

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reason.

Your father was a famous poet loved by common people. Is this maybe also protecting you?

I don’t think so, because I am consciously trying to cut myself off from my father’s past, my family’s past. But it could be possible, because everybody knows who my father was. They all know he was the one who influenced many people to join the revolutionary fight for the independence of this nation, for justice and fairness, for change. So that could be an underlying reason.

But maybe it’s a combination: The myth about your father and the fact that you are known in the Western world?

Yes, I am very, very publicized in the West, but also in China. Not because of my at – I never really showed my work here.

But a lot of magazines come to interview me; I am still one of the most interviewed people in China. They are not always asking me about political matters, but more about art, about architecture, about culture, design, or fashion. This makes me a public figure, and also, being quite successful as an artist, the government is a little bit hesitant because of that. People would ask why they were doing something to me.

Still, it is a totalitarian system…

But you know, they are famous for making mistakes, so I don’t take it for granted.

Could you imagine leaving the art world for politics?

I don’t think I could entirely stop doing art for politics, but I can imagine using my artistic skills entirely for politics ends.

When we went quite on the internet recently, we did it as an artistic expression. I know that in our constitution we are allowed to strike. In reality, China has not had a strike in the past sixty years. So we held a strike on the internet, and nobody could do anything about it because it was virtual, it was just us. So it was very personal and it wasn’t something you could see. It really taught everybody how you can react by restraining yourself, which is a very important act. I take the constitution and the political situation in China as a readymade. I transform it in my own way to show people the possibilities of this reality and a way to change. That, I think, is directly related to my art; it’s the same thing for me.

You take it as a readymade because you know the constitution – maybe that is the point. Others don’t say anything, don’t question or criticize, because they don’t know.

It’s all about investigating the questioning. At the same time, there is a role reversal in order to make the impossible work – to make the function disappear. That is what I always do in my art, but it is absolutely a new way for me to practice it.

Art and architecture are what you make for a living. But your civic engagement is what you do as a person?

For example, we did an investigation to find out about these dead Sichuan students. Who died, and why they died. And this investigation went into a very protected territory; it was like a national secret. We did it openly on our blog and posted the results every day. The whole nation was shocked and touched by the act.

You are talking about the victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008?

Yes. People knew students had died, everybody knew that something was wrong – but nobody knew any facts or looked carefully to find out the names of the children who died: which school they wre in, at what level, how old they were, female, male. Whatever we found out we posted on the blog. That already caused a revolution in the minds of people: you know, we found out over 5,000 names, by having 200 civil volunteers going door-to-door to talk to the parents. The volunteers got arrested over thirty times by local police, they took their finger prints and photos. But the volunteers kept diaries of everything, which I posted on the Internet. This investigation will be remembered for generations as the first civil rights

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activity in China. So to me, that is art. It directly affects people’s feelings and their living conditions, their freedom and how they look at the world. That’s very important.

Maybe the installation about the Sichuan earthquake that you are developing for your exhibition in Munich this autmn is a good example of how you combine the different levels of your work. As so often is the case, everything is linked: your political activities, your art, your blog, everything. Could you briefly explain the Sichuan tragedy and from there, how you express this on the façade of Haus der Kunst.

The Sichuan earthquake happened in May 2008. During the earthquake, the most tragic part was that many schools collapsed with the children still inside. These dead kids reminded me of those fish you put in a can.

Sardines?

Yes, sardines. It was exactly like that – hundreds, thousands – because of mistakes in the construction of the school buildings.

Who is responsible? The state?

Yes, the state. The government made big mistakes – not intentionally, but everything is very corrupt. And on my blog I kept asking the same questions: “Who is dead? How many? What are the costs Where are the bodies?” Nobody ever answered.

Not even the local press?

No, nobody. I thought: This is too much, this is not fair. These were children and they were part of us – how could we let it be? I had to ask those questions. I was vaguely thinking that I should do something for me exhibition at the Huas der Kunst, but I didn’t know how to include it, didn’t know how to present a tragedy in an artistic way. It’s kind of difficult, but that is the reality for artists like me who are so concerned with social change. So, not to touch upon that topic was impossible – it would have made my actions seem questionable separating my artwork from my struggle. So I thought about that very, very seriously, and I see the Munich show as the best answer I have to offer. The diecsion was made to find out for ourselves if the government would refuse to tell us the truth. We are the one who demand the truth, and we can do it by ourselves, to show people how it can be done. Before we started we made over 200 calls to different levels of government … always asking the same question: “What are the numbers?”

How many deaths?

Yes, how many, please tell us, we have the right to know. And tey said, “No no no, you don’t have the right. Who are you?”

We would answer, “We are individuals,” and they said, “Individuals have no right to know. It is a state secret.” So we recorded those 200 phone calls and put them on my blog.

I only asked for one small act. As an artist, I’m always dealing with what I am familiar with, what we think is safe, what we consider safe ground, but things are never what they seem. After that, I put a not on my blog: “We are starting a citizens’’ investigation.” We said, “Respect life, bear the responsibility to exercise our rights, because we can’t wait for anybody else to do it.” And by doing it ourselves it became a reality. The effort to find out the number of the dead was our struggle for dignity of life. We asked volunteers to sign up. Then we sent them to Sichuan, from home to home, to collect the names of the missing children. I immediately found 300 people who wanted to join. They came from very different professions, very different locations. I didn’t want them to be too emotional, so I designed a questionnaire with twenty-nine questions.

Questions such as, “Are you afraid of the dark? Are your stomachs ready for Sichuan food? Can you live by yourself in very uncertain conditions? Are you afraid of authority? Do you know what you’re doing? Do you think that truth is important?”

And the last question was: “Are you sure this is what you want?” So we got very positive people wand we made a selection, because some understood the local language and some didn’t. We gave them money, just for their basic needs. Some refused it, but we initiated this and we’d rather bear the costs. The project was very successful; each day they sent back the names they found and still are doing so today. The names are very touching: You start to know who, what age, which gender, which

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school, and their parents, their telephone numbers… We eventually posted more than a hundred articles containing thousands of names on my blog. The whole nation is shocked, because people knew that there was something wrong, people knew that so many are dead, that it is unfair and unjust.

Bu to use our skill or our craftsmanship to expose the injustice, make it visible and so clear, is an act that an artist can do well.

And it educated the entire nation: Everybody started thinking, questioning their own positions, examining their means and what could be within their power. That represented the first act of the civil movement. Yes, do not just talk, do the work. We still hafve people down there, but we have come to the end; we have located almost all the missing people, more than 5,000 now…

5,000 kids?

Yes, kids. It’s very sad, from three years old to eighteen, nineteen years old. And they are all single case families; their parents are all powerless farmers. They all have been detained and harassed, and forced to sign some kind of an agreement to no ask about the wrongdoings related to the earthquake; otherwise they cannot get new payments and they cannot get into the new housing projects. So this is really a hsame and a crime. Our volunteers send their diaries on a daily basis. They are all posted on my blog and everybody can read in detail how they were treated and which parents they can talk to, what is on the parents’ minds, what problems they are having – which is completely different from the official propaganda. So, the officials they are so scared: Sichuan province sent the top officials from the educational, civil, and construction sectors, the leadership so to speak, to come to talk to me for hours, trying to stop me.

Really, they came here to Beijing?

Oh yes. This is the first time in Communist history that thye came to see an individual to try and negotiate. They told me their position, why this is so damaging for them. I explained to them clearly why I am doing it, the political reason for me to do it. Of course nobody could convince the other, so we still argue. Obviously, they have all the power, so they shut down my blog. We cannot post any names now, but we have other channels.

So you have found an alternative blog and use Fan Fou and Twitter. Do you still put the names online?

Yes, of course. We are still running the investigation, but at the same time we are taking the next step by investigating the technical mistakes of those buildings: We sent out architects and construction engineers to try to gather all the evidence. It is very difficult, but we are working on it.

Why exactly is the link between this tragedy and your work on the façade of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, where you will display a large number of backpacks?

Right after the earthquake, I went there to experience the feeling of the ruins. And then I realized that everywhere were these school bags of the children scattered around. You could see a lot of pencils, little mirrors and schoolbooks all over. And nobody picked them up, nobody care.

They were part of the ruins…

Yes. Because the bags were so vivid and colorful, they made a really strong impression on me. The are so closely related to the physical condition of the kids. That was all they had actually, besides their names. So I wanted to design a work of art related to that. At first, I wanted to cover the whole façade of the Haus der Kunst with those bags, to bring history into the current situation: the kind of life and death and the propaganda and the ignorance we are facing here. Now I am using the bags to form a sentence, which was stated by a dead student’s mother who wrote to me. She said, “Everyday they are still holding meetings with us, trying to teach us to keep quiet and behave harmoniously.” They also took away five Yuan from her salary which they had awarded her before for having only one child. And that child is dead. It’s so crazy! She wrote: “I don’t want to have their payment, because I don’t think my daughter’s life is worth taking those payments. All I want is for

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her to be remembered. The sentence we will put up in from of the building is: “She lived happily in this world for seven years,” a sentence from a victim’s mother. She is very kind, she does not have much to say about all this and she just wants her daughter to be remembered. And of course we see all kinds of tragedies in this world, but I think the worst tragedy is disrespect for life. And the victims are always young children or women.

The weak!

Yes, the weak. The ones that don’t even know how they got involved in all these tragdies. So it’s a political statement, but at the same time I wanted it to be accessible – that’s why we chose the colors of Toys ‘R’ Us… A vivid colour range.

Yes. We made it very clear and simple. We are not too artistic about it. But I think it’s a statement, yes.

And with this exhibit, the Sichuan story will be discussed and remembered in Europe.

I hope so, ad I think it should be discussed.

You spread it worldwide.

I do my best. This morning I read the sentence, “Because we are alive, we have to make out best effort to announce it – for them, but also for us, because we are inseparable.”

Chinese culture is probably the greatest in history. But it has sustained some extreme blows in the last century: The protest of May 4, 1919, a second blow by Mao in 1949, and finally his Cultural Revolution 1966 – 76. You were nineteen years when, in 1976, your father was “exonerated,” and a young student when, in the 1970s, some Western influences became important. Li Xianting, who is called the father of the Chinese avant-garde, was jus starting out then, along with other artists. This as when you left for the USA. How would you describe your relationship with this part of Chinese art history?

I left in 1981. That’s why I had no contact with this movement in the 1980s. But even in New York the same kind of mental state prevailed. It was after the Cultural Revolution, we were fighting for new ways that would intellectually suit us, to establish a new culture and to discover individual possibilities. I am very impressed with your summation of Chinese contemporary culture; it is very precise. May 4, 1919 was like the birthday for a new culture in China. At that time, they had the idea to invite Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy into the culture. Ironically, even today, we still don’t have those two guys in our country.... So eventually it was old bottles with new wine. The oath is not working. The system has collapsed. The culture still functions in parts, but the structure has collapsed. And the new has never been established. First we had Marx, then Mao, and now, on one hand it is very liberal – a crazy capitalist madness and liberalism – and on the other, we have a very old Communist structure here.

But this extreme commercialization is less than ten years old! Looking at your life, it seems a weird odyssey through extreme situations and extremely different ways of living. The situation has nothing in common with the situation grew up in as a kid.

The 1980s must have been an important phase for China.

For China, and for myself. This period prepared me mentally for all the possible struggles I’d have to face in today’s contemporary world.

But then came Tiananmen in 1989…

Yes, and the results were so clear: the tanks and the bullets.

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I looked at this provocative series of you throwing down an antique Chinese vase. In the West you could go to jail for publicly destroying an object of culture heritage.

In China, I did it while I am in jail. I always look at it that way.

Are you also making reference to the Cultural Revolution with this? A time when there was a senseless destruction of old by the Red Guards?

Yes. You know, when we were growing up, General Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one. That’s the basic concept: destroying the old one to contribute to the new.

Chinese art has been immensely successful during the past decade. The artist areas of Beijing, like the 798 District, became a part of the cultural map, they are on the tourists’ circuit – they’re kind of a Disneyland of the art world with cafes, restaurants, and fashion shows, where East and West meet. What do you think about these areas, and do you participate in any of them?

No, not even in 798. I don’t go there at all for openings or anything. I think you have to look at them from two perspectives: First, we have had a strictly Communist regime for more than sixty years – this year is the anniversary. Freedom of expression absolutely does not exist in the public space. If you want to open a gallery, you have to go to a public security bureau, because it’s classified as propaganda. Every image has to be shown to the security administration and they wills ay, “Okay, that one,” or “Change it before the show.” On the other hand, we have an entirely capitalistic economy today, which is justified by “anything that sells.” So you have these two conflicting viewpoints coming together that make these artists’ areas attractive and create the demand of the Western world, which wants to see some kind of contemporary activity there.

But it’s a really weird situation. It looks like a Chinese Soho, with artists working in public and their workshops accessible for everyone. But at the same time, there is a little Mao exhibition and the police are around.

The booming art scene is not real. They’re pretending the boom. It is really trying to serve a dish to the observer rather than allowing true creativity, which can be much deeper and darker and unpredictable… It is heavily watched, and it’s very nervous under the surface, even though the police don’t know what they are looking for, but still. They think to maintain a kind of order is the mission of the state.

There were other areas, like the legendary artists’ place next to the summer palace, the Yuanmingyuan, which used to be a free artists’ space. It was different from the situation now.

Yes, but you know, to be an artist here back then was very difficult. You had no place to show, nobody talked about it and there was no way of selling work. That didn’t necessarily make the art any better, but at least it made it much less tempting to sell out and much less commercial.

Your work has been presented in many different way: In your shows like at documenta or at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, you were given a lot of freedom and independence – a kind of carte blanche to do whatever you want.

I think traditional galleries, museums, or institutions that show art as such are like dead bodies of past wars. But the Haus der Kunst is showing the killing field.

The what?

The killing field: The artist has to struggle, he may even hurt himself or do damage to others. The title of the exhibition is So Sorry. It’s a beautiful title suggested by [director of the Haus der Kunst] Chris Dercon. It comes from how we look at the world: It’s a world of rationality, a result of our logic, it’s the result of results. It’s everything.. We are not really controlling it, even if we might think we are. It’s about how we look at the world, how we look at it as humans or as artists functioning in

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the world – you know, your own performance and the performance of others. You want to be understood this way or that.

Most of your projects are initiations. Is your work, as Hans Ulrich Obrist put it, “art as an excuse for dialogue?”

Do you enjoy the many collaborations with others?

I think art is an initiation, which means that you want to be the innocent one: You want to reach out your hand so somebody can lead you. The event can lead you somewhere and you can say, “Let’s go.” I think artists always play with people who want to walk into unknown areas, into uncertainty.

You took this idea quite literally by bringing 1,001 Chinese to Germany for documenta in 2007; you opened up a new world for them.

Yes. However, to bring 1,001 Chinese to Kassel is one side of it. But to see how difficult it is for a mountain lady to get the permission for a passport; to see how they are worried about spending five Yuan to go to the next town to take a passport photo and how neverous they were about taking that photo… Also, to see those ordinary citizens in Kassel, jumping off their bikes to talk to you and tell you that they don’t know anything about art – I think that is a beautiful thing. That makes the project worthwhile. Nobody is a genius. It is just a suggestion until a taxi driver stop just to say something to you and then you realize: Oh, art does have this function of communicating and that is interesting.

What do you think of the big invasion of Western architecture companies in China?

I think architecture is always a celebration of our stupidity. The architect acts as a smart asshole.

Did you say “smart asshole”?

Yes, who is always trapped by the desire think and act like God: To make something from nothing, and for that to become a reality. But the pity is that architecture is never an act of the architect alone, but rather a result of different political, social, and technical aspects. Just look at the great architecture in history. Of course there are also intelligent individuals making a difference within those process, showing intelligence.

But even intelligent offices like OMA and Herzog & de Meuron were severely criticized for working for a totalitarian system, for providing them with new propaganda footage. How do ou see this debate from a Chinese perspective?

The architect is always a hired hand… Hired, for example, by the church or a state. I have no objections to what they are doing. What I am saying is: What the architecture will finally be used for can often conflict with what architects have professionally been trained to do. They like to confront challenges; they like to design a building. You can never really control the use of your building. This is only a fantasy of some stupid architects.

Yes, but architects also know that within 100 years, a building may change its function several times.

You should know the metaphysical power of architecture, being used by a totalitarian society. It still functions the other way, because a totalitarian society will not necessarily last, but the architecture often stay much longer. What I am saying is to just use a very simple moral judgment to denounce the effort of people trying to use an opportunity to create something – which might exemplify this particular period of time, or this condition – that kind of temptation is too childish.

But not all large-scale projects in China are commissioned by the state or by the party. You work on private commissions, the Ordos 100 project being one example. Can you explain how that started?

Ordos is by a private developer, but of course the developer has to work with the state.

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Still it wasn’t the state that approached you, but the developer.

Yes, of course. I have competed sixty projects and I have never had someone from the state approach me. I don’t think they ever would, unless it is another state, for which I am always willing to make an exception. Anyway, the developer came to me and wanted me to do a project. I told him that we had announced not to do architecture projects anymore, so I could only create the curatorial outline, because I think the process itself is more important. I asked Herzog & de Meuron to come up with a list of 100 architects who could design the individual buildings. They happily agreed to give me the list of names and I made the phone calls. Almost everybody accepted. It was very exciting to see those architects from India, from Brazil, from Chile, Mexico, Israel … They all came together in a desert area in China, using their knowledge and wisdom to create on common project.

And the project was for each team to build one villa.

A villa of a special size, only for rich people. I don’t know who they are. I don’t even know why they are developing it. Maybe because they think there is potential in this area, which is developing very fast. But the most interesting thing to me is so many architects coming together: We had wine, we discussed, and finally, 100 design objects came out of it. Communicating with all those architects – they had never had this kind of experience before.

Who designed the master plan?

I did the master plan, because I wanted to direct it before having a look at the architects. For me, the result was very surprising. This energy to initiate that kind of possibility can make people feel so different. And everybody in Beijing is asking about this project. But just in Beijing, there are 100 projects every year on the same scale.

But they always use the same type of architecture.

Yes, that’s true.

When each of the 100 villas will be realized in Ordos, they will all be different because the selected architects come from different backgrounds. Do you think you will be satisfied with the result?

I am more satisfied with the anticipation of architects, the interaction between sincerity and temptation. The result will be very hard to judge, because some have very good intentions but lack understanding. It is always like that: You can have a perfect meaning and manifest it in the wrong way. This is the problem with architecture education as a whole in the past ten years. Nobody should be superior in front of judgment.

You were actually very involved in designing this Olympic Stadium in Beijing with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. How did this fruitful collaboration come about?

This successful collaboration came from a very small incident: Since they had never been to China before, the asked [Swiss] ambassador Uli Sigg thought of me – I was deeply involved with architecture then – and I accepted without thinking, because Uli told me that they were relatively famous in Switzerland. I knew nothing about them. Only later on, I bought a catalogue of their work. I was attracted by a very small building, like a wood model, which was never realized. The book was about this object, but my cat took a big pee on that book, and it smelled and stank so much that I threw it away.

So we started the project. During the first serious discussion we had in Basel, I asked them what I could do. They just wanted me to tell them whatever was on my mind, like a critic. And I agreed. I never think about the stadium as an Olympic building.

I think of it more as an urban object: what it means to the city and how people are going to appreciate it. Of course, they had much bigger expectations than me.

You saw the stadium not as a place for sporting events, but as a part of Beijing. You know that the Olympics would

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be finished after two weeks.

The sporting event is really more of a technical matter – it is why we had to meet certain conditions, like 100,000 people had to fit in it, or how long it takes the visitors to exist the stadium, the viewing angle. But we were talking much more about the human condition rather than how much people would look at it from the inside and from the outside and how the event would relate to the building itself. Then we had a quick drawing and some discussion about how the roof should be, what kind of façade it should have. We came to a conclusion very quickly. So they were very happy and clear about the direction in which it should develop.

They continued the work.

Yes. I left and we communicated through letters. I struggled a little bit with the shape, because it’s a new and completely irregular, but also a geometric shape. The structural engineers from Arup made the best possible calculations for it and gradually it became the way it is and we won the competition. So it was a very clear shot.

You followed the whole building process with your pictures.

Yes, we had a lot of discussions there. They also asked me to initiate the landscape design around the buildings. So I developed that concept and they accepted it.

Your participation made you even more popular in the West. Do more people follow your blog since you were involved with the stadium?

It did not give much popularity to my blog, because in China it was never officially announced that I was part of the competition. I was only part of the team Herzog & de Meuron, which is true, so they didn’t have to mention my name. I was very critical of the way they handled the Olympics and one of the first to openly announce the boycott. So maybe that was a little embarrassing for them.

One of your assistants told me that you are a real master when it comes to communication. He said you always find the right words when you have to talk to craftsmen, interns, or clients. You instructions are always clear and understandable. At the construction of the Gallery Urs Meile, you told the craftsmen that for one of the facades they could only use thirty or forty percent of the bricks normally used and that they should their own way to solve it. Is this your strategy, giving a lot of freedom to the people you work with?

Yes, I often trust other people’s intelligence and I also have doubts about my own decisions at the same time. I only set up certain conditions, which limit my influence and give maximum space for them to work with. So I am not afraid of certain socalled mistakes and unexpected conditions. One project of mine was a group of buildings next to my office, 100 meters from here, and I never went to the construction site once during the whole process of building. No architect would do that.

No – definitely not.

But it came out very nicely. Of course, with any building there are always problems, but by doing that I think the beauty is to show what we care about and what we don’t care about. On thing Wittgenstein said about a good architect: “Somebody who insists not on what he wants to, but rather on what he doesn’t.” And I share that attitude because I see so many architects that always want to see the next development in architecture, they always jump on the next wagon. I have never been to the stadium since it was built. Jacques asked me, “Weiwei, will you really not go there?” And I said, “No, because I want to show you what arrogance is..” And he laughed. I think it’s okay. It’s just something to keep in mind – you don’t necessarily have to jump on every train. After all, it’s a mind game. That’s more enjoyable than anything else.

For German philosopher Peter Sloterdejk you can choose between two living conditions: the nest or the cave.

Which would you prefer?

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I am more of a cave person. I lived underground for a long time when I was a baby and I see the possibility of digging and hiding.

So you designed a bird’s nest with Herzog & de Meuron but you prefer living in a cave.

Yes, I think so.

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FAKE_ART AND BIOGRAPHY

ChilD OF REVOLUTION IN REVOLT Steve Meachum From: The New York Times Book Published: 2008.04.24

Ai Weiwei admits his popularity in China allows him certain freedoms, writes Steve Meacham.

Those pro-Tibet demonstrators lining the route of the Olympic torch relay in Canberra today might be surprised to find they have an unusual ally: the Chinese artist/architect who helped design the much-praised “bird’s nest” stadium that will host the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing on August 8.

Ai Weiwei, the son of two poets who were exiled and made to clean toilets during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution , is one of the Chinese Government’s most prominent internal critics.

Variously described as a cultural commentator, artist, filmmaker, photographer, architect, curator, editor, designer and writer, Ai has achieved almost rock star status in Beijing, which, he admits, allows him certain freedoms of expression not open to other of his countrymen.

Now 51, he has made no secret of his disappointment at the way the Government has squandered its Olympic opportunity, using the event as “propaganda” (his word) rather than the catalyst for reform he would have preferred.

Last year, The Guardian newspaper reported Ai as saying he would boycott the opening ceremony as a mark of his “disgust”.

That’s not quite right, he says by phone from his home in Beijing, with just a hint of the American accent he picked up while living in New York from 1981 to 1993: “I’ve never used the word ‘boycott’.”

But there’s a good reason for that. “I’m not intending to go to the opening ceremony. No one invited me. And I’m not a sportsperson. I don’t care about the Olympics. That’s the truth. I’ve never been to a stadium in my life.

“So I have never really boycotted the ceremony. I just told the press that I’m not interested in this stupid kind of celebration.

Because, to me, the meaning of the Olympics [should be] to be more open, to fit in , to be part of the international community, to share the same basic values as other societies.

“So I am a bit disappointed [with how the Beijing Olympics have evolved]. I know it takes time, I know there have been big changes [ in Chinese government and society]. But still, as an individual, I have a responsibility to say what is on my mind.”

What then is his view of the pro-Tibet protests around the world as the torch relay makes its way to China? “Any kind of tension, such as Tibet, comes from a long time of neglect, a long time lacking any real communication, a long time of unwillingness to listen to each other. That’s a fact. In China, minority peoples are not carefully considered.”

On Saturday Ai will arrive in Sydney to finalise the installation of Through, a massive new commission which has been reassembled at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Paddington by five carpenters from his team in Beijing.

The work, made from 30 recycled ironwood beams and pillars from destroyed Qing Dynasty temples and 10 antique tables, is an adjunct to a major retrospective of Ai’s work, Under Construction, curated by Dr Charles Merewether, which opens at Campbelltown Arts Centre next Thursday.

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The Campbelltown show will give Sydneysiders a chance to see the full range of Ai’s idiosyncratic talents, surrealistic whimsy and irreverent humour. There’s a photograph of his wife, the artist Lu Qing, flashing her knickers in Tiananmen Square; a condom sewn at crotch height on a raincoat at the height of the AIDS panic during his time in New York; three sequential photographs of him smashing a Han Dynasty urn; another Han Dynasty urn, made around the time of Christ, which he repainted with the Coca-Cola logo.

Destruction of historic objects is a prominent theme of Ai’s work, which seems ironic given that he grew up in remote Chinese Turkestan, where his father, Ai Qing, and mother, Gao Ying, had been banished for political dissent.

As a child of the Cultural Revolution , when intellectuals were punished and traditional cultural items vandalised, Ai acknowledges it had a profound effect on his art and philosophy: “I understand what it is like to be living at a time of no humanity.”

But, unlike the Red Guards, Ai says he is not interested in destruction for destruction’s sake. “For me, it is about exploring possibilities, understanding values of so-called construction and destruction. It’s merely a gesture without political intentions, although people always want to associate it with political intentions.”

Yet much of his art, in which consumer goods such as shoes and chairs or culturally significant items such as temple beams and ceramic bowls are recycled into impractical, playful sculptures, seems to be overtly political, a clear statement of Ai’s distaste for the rampant materialism of post-Maoist China.

Still, it is his work on the Beijing Olympic stadium that will be most prominent in the next few months. He was asked to collaborate on the gigantic stadium, not by the Chinese Government, which he says would never have issued such an invitation, but by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron.

Despite his antipathy towards the Olympics, Ai is delighted by the creation. “Yes, I am very proud of the product. It’s very good. It was such a collective effort: the designers, the workers, the builders. Everyone made it possible. And at this moment it is much loved by the Chinese people.”

However, he wishes to dismiss one myth: it is not meant to look like a bird’s nest. “If we had wanted to make a bird’s nest we would have made it look more like a bird’s nest,” he laughs. Rather, the bird’s nest connection is meant to refer to the way the distinctive steel grid was assembled, like a bird laying twig on twig.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Ai Weiwei From: Ai Weiwei Book Published: 2009

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Giant provocateur Karen Smith From: Ai Weiwei Book Published: 2009

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The Real Thing Karen Smith From: Ai Weiwei Book Published: 2003

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A Handful of Dust Chin-Chin Yap From: Ai Weiwei: Works, Beijing 1993-2003 Book Published: 2003

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Ai weiwei in conversation with Chin-chin Yap Chin-Chin Yap From: Ai Weiwei: Works, Beijing 1993-2003 Book Published: 2003

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CHANGING PERSPECTIVE Charles Merewether From: Ai Weiwei: Works, Beijing 1993-2003 Book Published: 2003

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Ai Weiwei Jonathan Napack From: Ai Weiwei: Works, Beijing 1993-2003 Book Published: 2003

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Fake fuck Jerome Sans From: Interviews with 32 Aritsts // Book Published: 2009

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It’s not beautiful Evan Osnos From: The New Yorker Book Published: 2010.05.24

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lives and works on the northeast edge of Beijing, in a studio complex that he designed for himself, a hive of eccentric creativity that one friend calls “a cross between a monastery and a crime family.” Airy buildings of brick and concrete surround a courtyard planted with grass and bamboo. Ai and his wife, Lu Qing, also an artist, inhabit one side of the yard, and several dozen assistants occupy the other. The place is organized in a spirit of radical openness: visitors roam unhindered, as does a geriatric cocker spaniel named Danny and a tribe of semi-feral cats that occasionally destroy Ai’s architectural models. Ai wanders among the buildings day and night, making it difficult to discern when he is working and when he is not, a distinction that has eroded further in recent years as the line between his art and his life has become indistinguishable.

One morning in March, Ai was alone in his dining room, eating a bowl of noodles at the head of a wooden table long enough for a medieval banquet. Sunlight streamed through a two-story bank of windows. On the wall to his left was a piece he made in 1993 by altering a government poster about the dangers of fireworks in such a way that a large bandaged hand was now flipping the viewer the bird. “My wife hates this one,” he said.

For Ai, however, the gesture resonates on the level of cosmology. The Museum of Modern Art owns a series of photographs of the Eiffel Tower, the White House, Tiananmen Square, and other places featuring his extended middle finger in the blurry foreground--a profane travel album, of sorts, which he titled “Study of Perspective.” In the Times, Holland Cotter wrote that the pictures “give a sense of the versatility of an artist whose role has been the stimulating, mold-breaking one of scholarclown.”

At the age of fifty-three, Ai has a capacious belly, close-cropped hair, a meaty, expressive face, and a black-and-white beard that stretches to his chest. The full picture is imposing, until he reveals a sly and whimsical sense of humor. “His beard is his makeup,” his brother, Ai Dan, told me.

In his first two decades as an artist, Ai Weiwei (pronounced “Eye Way-way”) produced an eclectic, if erratic, stream of work: between gambling and trading antiques, he created installations, photographs, furniture, paintings, books, and films-the record of “a fitfully brilliant conceptualist,” as Peter Schjeldahl put it in this magazine. But in the past few years Ai’s unrelenting audacity and imagination have thrust him into a far more prominent role, as China’s leading innovator of provocation. This year, Ai will have fifteen group shows and five solo shows, including, in October, a coveted commission to fill the cathedral-like Turbine Hall, at Britain’s Tate Modern. In announcing the commission, the Tate’s director, Vicente Todoli, said that Ai’s installations rank “among the most socially engaged works of art being made today.”

At times, Ai can seem congenitally incapable of cooperation. He served as an artistic consultant to Herzog & De Meuron, the Swiss firm that designed China’s National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics, in Beijing. But, before the Games began, he disowned the event as a “fake smile” concealing China’s problems. When he is followed by plainclothes state security agents-as happens now and then--he likes to call the cops on them, setting off a Marx Brothers muddle of overlapping police agencies: “an absurdist novel gone bad,” as he puts it.

Recently, Ai was asked to create a piece that could fill the prominent site in Copenhagen usually occupied by Edvard Eriksen’s statue of the Little Mermaid, which was being loaned to Shanghai. Instead of replacing it with a statue, Ai decided to install a live closed-circuit video of the mermaid in her temporary home in China. The Danes thought the oversized surveillance camera that he designed was unattractive. “That’s our real life,” he said. “Everybody is under some kind of surveillance

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camera. It’s not beautiful.”

A few days before we talked, he had thrown his support behind a group of lesser-known Chinese artists who were protesting plans to demolish their studios in the name of development. Ai’s place was unaffected, but the artists had approached him for advice. He told them, “If you protest and fail to publish anything about it, you might as well have protested inside your own house.” Ai and the other artists staged a march down Chang’an Avenue, in the center of Beijing--an immensely symbolic gesture, because of the street’s proximity to Tiananmen Square. Police blocked them peacefully after a few hundred yards, but their bravado drew attention far beyond the art world. Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent legal activist, told me, “For twenty years, I have thought that protesting on Chang’an Avenue was absolutely off limits. He did it. And what could they do about it?”

Because of his overlapping identities as activist and artist, Ai has come to occupy a peculiar category of his own: a bankable global art star who runs the distinct risk of going to jail. “There are people who say that he is doing some kind of performance art,” Chen Danqing, a Chinese painter and social critic, told me. “But I think he long ago surpassed that definition. He is doing something more interesting, more ambiguous.” Chen added, “He wants to see how far an individual’s power can go.”

Ai Weiwei, whose father, Ai Qing, was among China’s foremost literary figures, occupies an awkward niche in the world of Chinese contemporary art: he has never been invited to hold a major exhibition in his own country, and he has tepid relations with his peers. “Galleries and magazines send him things, and he doesn’t even open them,” Zhao Zhao, a younger artist who works as one of Ai’s assistants, said. Chinese art has ballooned in value in recent years--driven by speculators and a generation of new Chinese tycoons--but Ai has remained largely on the fringes, and his work sells at prices that have never matched the heights of his reputation: a pair of giant ceramic basins of freshwater pearls sold for two hundred and nineteen thousand dollars at Sotheby’s last spring, and a three-legged wooden table, bent in the center so that one leg rests high against the wall, sold for a hundred and fifty-three thousand at Christie’s in February. Rather than sign on with a major dealer, who could assure him higher prices, he sells directly to collectors or through small galleries. “I don’t like the system,” he told me.

Ai spends much of his time on the road; he owns an apartment in Manhattan, in Chelsea. But when he is in China his orbit revolves tightly around his studio complex, which has acquired a role in the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of Andy Warhol’s Factory, as a magnet for creative people and patrons. As Philip Tinari, the editor of Leap, a Chinese art magazine, put it, “The ritual pilgrimage to the House of Ai” has become a “required stop on every foreign art-world itinerary.”

Ai and his wife have no children. He has an infant son from an extramarital relationship with a woman who worked on one of his films. They live nearby. He never intended to be a father. “She said, ‘Yes, I want to have the baby,’ “ he told me. “ I said, ‘I don’t normally think I should have a baby, but if you insist, of course, it’s your right, and I will bear the full responsibility as a father.’ “ Ai, who sees his son every day, is enjoying being wrong about fatherhood. “So-called human intelligence--we shouldn’t overestimate it,” he said. “When an accident happens, that can be nice.”

Ai walked across the studio’s snow-streaked courtyard to the office, where half a dozen young Chinese and foreign assistants were busy at computers. Several were working on what Ai calls his “Citizens’ Investigation” of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, an attempt to document how and why so many children died in poorly constructed schools. Eighty pieces of paper were plastered to one of the office walls--a spreadsheet containing thousands of names and birthdates. Each day, Ai’s office posts to Twitter a list of the students who were born on that day and died in the earthquake. “Today, there are seventeen,” Ai said. “The most of any day yet.”

He slumped into a chair in front of a computer and began to type. Since he discovered Twitter, last spring, he has become one of China’s most active users, with about thirty-six thousand followers. Twitter is blocked in China by the authorities, but it can be reached by signing on through a third-party server overseas, a simple technical step that has enabled Twitter to become a popular tool of communication in China. Ai usually spends at least eight hours a day on Twitter, and I asked him how that had affected the time he devotes to his art. “I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art,” he said.

“Those other works might be collectible--something you can hang on the wall--but that’s just a conventional perspective. We shouldn’t do things a certain way just because Rembrandt did it that way. If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing

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on Twitter.”

Unsurprisingly, Ai has come under greater government scrutiny of late. He wrote a popular blog for four years, until last spring, when censors blocked it. A few months later, he discovered that his Gmail accounts had been hacked and the settings altered to forward his messages to an unfamiliar address. Ai says that his bank has received official inquiries to review his finances, and, last June, a pair of surveillance cameras appeared on utility poles outside his front gate, focussed on the traffic going in and out--notwithstanding the redundancy of monitoring somebody who already broadcasts the minutiae of his life.

When he tries to make DVDs of his documentaries, duplicating services worry that they will be punished for associating with him. “Not even the porno producers will do it,” Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a rock musician who works on Ai’s media productions, told me.

Ai stood up from the keyboard and announced that it was time to go to the courthouse. Over the past year, his office has sent more than a hundred and fifty letters to government agencies seeking information about earthquake victims and construction problems, under the Freedom of Government Information Law. He has yet to receive a substantive response. Today, he was going to file suit against the Ministry of Civil Affairs, for not responding to his requests. He slid into the passenger seat of a small black sedan, with a driver and a woman named Liu Yanping, who oversees the letter-writing campaign. “According to the policy, they have to respond within fifteen working days,” she said, clutching a sheaf of papers on her lap. I asked Liu if she was a lawyer and she laughed. “For a long time, I was at home raising my child,” she said. “On his blog, Ai Weiwei asked for volunteers, so I wrote him an e-mail. The work looked interesting, and I was curious.” It’s now her full-time job. (Last summer, after she publicized the trial of Tan Zuoren, an earthquake activist, she spent two days in police custody in Sichuan, for “disturbing the social order.”)

We reached the Second Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing, a tall stone-gray tower, with a grand arched entry and a modest office at the back, on the ground floor, for processing new cases. We passed through a metal detector, where two young men in guards’ uniforms were engrossed in a comic book. There was a line of bank-teller-style windows, and, at the one closest to us, a tiny old woman in a pink padded jacket was bellowing into a rectangular opening in the glass. “How could the other side win without any evidence?” she shouted. “Did they bribe the head of the court?” On the opposite side of the glass, two women in uniform were listening with resigned expressions suggesting that she had been at it for a while.

Ai and Liu lined up in front of window No. 1 and, when it was their turn, slid the papers through the opening to a middleaged man in a tan blazer. He looked glassy-eyed and exhausted. He read the papers carefully and identified a problem: “You say that you need the Ministry of Civil Affairs to make this information public, but why are you taking an interest in this?”

Ai leaned over to speak into the opening in the window. “Actually, according to the policy,” he said, “everyone has a right to ask for this information--not that you have to agree.” After some back and forth, Ai and Liu consented to write out a description of their goals, and they found seats in a waiting area full of people holding similar sheaves of paper. “They don’t want to accept this,” Ai said, “because, once it is in the legal pipeline, they have to make some kind of judgment.” By the time Ai and Liu reached the window again, an hour had passed. Now they learned that they were using the wrong color ink.

Written materials had to be in black, and they had used blue. They sat down again to rewrite them. They got in line again.

“Kafka’s castle,” Ai said to nobody in particular. Two hours stretched into three, and I asked him why he was bothering with this if he did not expect a response. “I want to prove that the system is not working,” he said. “You can’t simply say that the system is not working. You have to work through it.” Twenty minutes before closing time, the man behind the glass finally accepted the filing, and Ai and Liu, satisfied, turned to leave. The old woman was still yelling.

Ai Weiwei always sensed that he was born into the wrong family--or, at least, an inauspicious one. His father, Ai Qing, who trained as a painter, moved to Paris in 1929, at the age of nineteen, to study. There he discovered the realism of Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev, who, as he later put it, “pulled away the curtain on the realities of society for me.” His greatest influence, however, was the Belgian modernist poet Emile Verhaeren, whose descriptions of the squalid underside of European cities focussed Ai Qing’s attention on corruption and injustice in his homeland. He returned to China in 1932, but his involvement in leftist circles drew the suspicion of the Nationalist Party and he was imprisoned. Unable to paint

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in jail, he dedicated himself to poetry and, after his release, joined the Communist Party, where he earned a reputation for clear, accessible verse imbued with the spirit of the revolution. He was especially impressed with Chairman Mao, for whom he wrote a poem of praise that began, “Wherever Mao Zedong appears /thunderous applause erupts.” In 1956, when he was forty-six, he married for a third time, and the following year his wife, Gao Ying, a young staff member of the writers’ association, had a son.

At the time, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, one of Mao’s purges of intellectuals, was gathering force, and Ai Qing’s devotion to the Party was called into question. He had written a fable, “The Gardener’s Dream,’’ that highlighted the need to permit a broader range of creative opinions. In it, a gardener who cultivates only Chinese roses realizes that he is “causing discontent among all the other types of flowers.” A fellow-poet, Feng Zhi, attacked Ai Qing, saying that he had fallen “into the quagmire of reactionary formalism.”

Ai Qing was stripped of his titles and ejected from the writers’ association. At night, he would bang his head against the wall and demand, “Do you think I am against the Party?” Meanwhile, Gao Ying recalled in a memoir, “Ai Qing and I,” published in 2007, she and her husband had to name their infant son. The father simply opened the dictionary and dropped his finger onto a character: ..., pronounced “wei,” which means “power.” The irony was too great, given the circumstances, so he altered the tone slightly to make it into a different “wei,” ..., which means “not yet.” Their son thus became “Not yet, not yet.”

The family was sent to Manchuria and then to the remote western region of Xinjiang, where Ai Qing was assigned the job of cleaning public toilets, thirteen a day. For extra food, the family collected the severed hooves of sheep discarded by butchers, and piglets that had frozen to death. When the Cultural Revolution began, things worsened. Ai Qing’s tormentors poured ink on his face, and children threw stones at him. He and his family were sent to an area known as Little Siberia, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, where they had to live in an underground cavern that had been used as a birthing place for farm animals.

They were there for five years.

Ai Weiwei prefers not to talk about his father. He seems to know that the narrative is ripe for manipulation into a cliche, and their relationship was remote. His deepest impressions were of watching his father clean the toilets. “That period in his life was the absolute bottom, the most painful,” Ai Weiwei said. “He attempted suicide several times.”

As a child, Ai Weiwei distracted himself by working with his hands, making ice skates and gunpowder. He had a weakness for mischief and playground politics that led his father to nickname him Cao Cao, after a famously cunning ancient Chinese statesman. Ai’s parents could not shield their sons from what Ai Dan called “the pressure and humiliation and hopelessness.”

Speaking of his brother, he said, “He was a sensitive, fragile child, so he saw and heard more than other people.”

Ai Dan, who is five years younger than Weiwei, lives simply, in a courtyard-house that he shares with their mother. He is a writer, though I sensed the weight of Ai Qing’s legacy: Ai Dan hasn’t finished a piece of writing in years. “The Chinese language is too complicated,” he said, with a weak smile. Ai Dan told me that their father never gave up his faith in the Party, and I asked how he had rationalized his suffering. “He believed that those at fault were a few and that those who suffered were many,” he replied. “Intellectuals like him believed that their fate was no different from the fate of the nation.”

By the time Ai Qing and his family were allowed to return to Beijing, in 1976, many readers had assumed that he was dead.

He resumed writing, and he never lost his instinct for resistance. When student demonstrators filled Tiananmen Square in 1989, Ai Qing, then seventy-nine and in a wheelchair, asked to be pushed out to the square. With other intellectuals, he signed a statement declaring, “Freedom, democracy, and the rule of law are not things that will someday simply be granted to the people from above. All truth-seeking freedom-loving people must strive to achieve what the constitution promises.” He died in 1996.

Ai graduated from high school the year the family returned to Beijing. He had already awakened to art, and a translator friend of the family gave him banned books on Degas and van Gogh, which he circulated like talismans among his friends. (He also received a book about Jasper Johns, but the images of maps and flags baffled him, and it went “straight into the garbage.”) To practice sketching, Ai visited train stations and zoos, where he could find subjects who would sit still for nothing. He enrolled

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at the Beijing Film Academy, not because of any interest in film but because it was one of few options. He found it stifling and doctrinaire, and he gravitated instead to a group of avant-garde artists known as the Stars, who challenged state control of the arts and marched beneath the slogan “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom.” He also participated in an incipient political movement called Democracy Wall, in which activists produced magazines and posters calling for reform.

But their activism was circumscribed. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping put an end to Democracy Wall; its central figure, Wei Jingsheng, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, on charges of leaking state secrets. “I felt I can no longer live in this country,” Ai said. His girlfriend at the time was moving to Philadelphia to go to school, and, in February, 1981, he joined her.

In America, Ai studied English and enrolled at Parsons School of Design, in New York. He was intoxicated by the energy of the East Village, which, to him, felt “like a volcano with smoke always billowing out of the top.” He found a cheap basement apartment near East Seventh Street and Second Avenue, and spent his weekends haunting the galleries, roaming the city like “a mud-fish burrowing wherever there is muck,” as his brother put it in “New York Notes,” a short book that he wrote after a visit.

Parsons was a poor fit. Ai excelled in the studio but hated art history: “Whoever Picasso’s lovers were, I had no interest.”

He dropped out and did odd jobs--housekeeper, gardener, babysitter, construction worker--and dedicated himself mainly to playing blackjack in Atlantic City. He also earned money as a sidewalk portrait painter, avoiding customers who were immigrants, like him, because they tried to bargain down the price.

Joan Lebold Cohen, a historian of Chinese art who knew many Chinese artists in New York at the time, recalls visiting Ai’s building. “The whole place reeked of urine,” she said. “His apartment was a single room, no furniture, just a bed on the floor, and a television. And he was riveted to the television.” She went on, “It was, I think, the Iran-Contra hearings. And he was so excited about the idea that the government would go through this cleansing, this agony, this ripping itself apart. He just couldn’t believe that this was all done publicly.”

Eventually, Ai’s English became fairly fluent, and other Chinese artists began seeking him out for help in navigating the cultural quarters of New York. His apartment became a famous footnote in Chinese art history--a way station where many of China’s future stars camped out, including the filmmakers Chen Kaige and Feng Xiaogang, and the composer Tan Dun, who arrived in New York at the end of 1985. “He started to introduce me, not just geographically but also spiritually,” Tan told me recently. “I would ask Weiwei, ‘I want to see John Cage. I want to see Laurie Anderson.’ And he would always try to find some way to help me.”

Ai was painting at a furious pace, but he had no buyers, so every time he moved he would throw away his paintings and start over. Soon he abandoned painting and began exploring the possibilities in objects. He took a violin from a friend, pried off the neck and strings, and replaced them with the handle of a shovel. (The friend was not pleased.) When Ai’s mother sent him a pair of leather shoes--a prized possession in Beijing--he sliced them and stitched them together to create a single shoe with a toe at each end, which he called “One Man Shoe.” In 1988, Ethan Cohen, Joan’s son, put the violin, the shoe, and other pieces into Ai’s first solo show, which Artspeak called “a neo-Dadaist knockout.”

At a poetry reading at St. Mark’s In-the-Bowery, Ai met Allen Ginsberg, who had come to know Ai’s father on a trip to Beijing. He began spending time with Ginsberg. “He read his poems to me,” Ai said. “One of the ones he wrote for his mom”--”White Shroud”--”and I didn’t quite understand it, but he loved reading it.” Ai was accumulating influences. The first book he read in English was “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again).” (“It was easy to understand; it was written in Twitter language.”) But nobody affected him as deeply as Duchamp, whose subversion of orthodoxy was thrilling to Chinese artists raised on academic realism. One of Ai’s earliest pieces was a wire clothes hanger bent into the shape of Duchamp’s profile.

Ai began taking photographs, and sold breaking-news pictures to the Times. He documented protests in Tompkins Square Park, and had his first run-ins with the police. “Being threatened is addictive,” he later told China’s Southern Weekend newspaper. “When those in power are infatuated with you, you feel valued.” Then he tried his own hand at protest. When

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news reached New York of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, Ai went on a hunger strike for several days. (After Tiananmen, he received a U.S. green card.)

The market for Chinese contemporary art, however, was bleak. Joan Cohen recalled, “One curator I approached said to me, ‘We don’t show Third World art.’ “ When Cohen contacted the Guggenheim, she says, “not only would the curator not see me but his secretary wouldn’t see me.” Ethan Cohen struggled to find collectors for Ai’s work: “I twisted their arms and said, ‘You’ve got to put up five hundred dollars to buy Weiwei’s hanger.’ “ When, in April of 1993, Ai got word that his father was ill, he returned to Beijing.

Ai moved into his parents’ courtyard, and artists often dropped by to hear about the New York scene. One day in 1994, the visitors included Lu Qing, a soft-spoken artist born in Shenyang, who was seven years younger than Ai. That year, she appeared in one of Ai’s most widely recognized works: a black-and-white photograph in which she is standing amid tourists in Tiananmen Square, lifting her skirt to reveal her legs and underwear. (The timing--June, 1994--was a nod to the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen demonstrations.) Ai never planned on marriage--”the final resting place of the wretch,” as he put it to his brother--but, after he and Lu Qing had been together for three years, Lu Qing wanted a commitment. “So I said, ‘O.K., let’s get married,’ “ Ai recalled. “For me, it’s just a promise. I mean, what is marriage, right?” On a trip to New York, they gathered some friends as witnesses. “We went to New York City Hall and registered there.”

At the time, in the early nineties, the Chinese avant-garde was atomized and uninspired. “The whole scene had stagnated,” Feng Boyi, an independent curator and critic, recalled. Feng and Ai wanted to ignite interest, but they didn’t have the money or permission for a show. So, together with Xu Bing and Zeng Xiaojun--artists living in New York--they decided to publish a book of images and essays. It was a subversive idea to print anything without official approval, and no publisher in Beijing would take the risk, so they found a printer in the southern city of Shenzhen, who produced two thousand copies of what became known as the “Black Cover Book” (1994). They gave it away to artists, critics, and others. They followed it with a “White Cover Book” and a “Gray Cover Book,” a trilogy that became highly influential among the artists of their generation.

In his writings, Ai took aim not only at China’s suppression of creativity but at another sensitive target as well: fellow-artists who “fail to deliver independent criticism” and find refuge in a “philistine style of pragmatism and opportunism.”

By 1995, Ai had attracted some powerful patrons. Uli Sigg, the Swiss Ambassador to Beijing, who was amassing a vast collection of contemporary Chinese art, became an avid booster and introduced him to, among others, Harald Szeemann, the curator of the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 2000, Ai and Feng Boyi organized a show as a counterpoint to the Shanghai Biennale. The show--which they called “Non-Cooperative Approach” in Chinese, and “Fuck Off ” in English--was calibrated for maximum antagonism: the most controversial piece was a photograph of the artist Zhu Yu eating what was identified as a dead baby.

With an emerging international reputation, Ai sensed that it was probably time to move out of his mother’s house. He leased some vegetable fields in the village of Caochangdi, beside the Fifth Ring Road, on the fringe of Beijing, and sketched out a studio complex in an afternoon. Construction took sixty days, at a cost of about forty thousand dollars. Ai had no training as an architect, but after designing his studio he received a flurry of commissions for buildings and public-art installations.

He launched one of China’s most influential architecture practices, which he named FAKE Design. In Chinese, the name is pronounced a lot like “fuck,” though it is also a nod to Ai’s enduring fascination with questions of authenticity. “I know nothing about architecture,” he liked to say.

The architect Sir Norman Foster, a collector of Ai’s art and an admirer of his buildings, told me that Ai’s style was “individualistic and wonderfully effective.” The buildings, he said, “in some ways remind me of the early works in brick of Alvar Aalto in Finland, and I say that as a compliment.” By Ai’s count, the firm built sixty projects in eight years. Then, in 2007, he abruptly announced that he was getting out of the architecture business. “Architecture needs great care and a lot of detail,” he told me. “If we can’t take full responsibility, then we’ll drop it.”

Turning back to art, he played with the boundaries of what constituted art work at all. For his contribution to Documenta 12, in 2007, he proposed an expedition that would bring a thousand and one average Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, to

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view the festival--an “invasion,” as he put it. (He called it “Fairytale,” in reference to Kassel’s being the home of the Brothers Grimm.) It was social sculpture on a Chinese scale, and the logistics would have staggered Joseph Beuys, the German conceptualist who held that “everyone is an artist.” Most of the Chinese applicants had never had a passport. “Some were from minority groups in which women didn’t have a formal name,” Ai said, “so we had to make up a name to get a passport.”

He raised money from foundations and others for the air travel, and his office designed every detail of the expedition, down to matching suitcases, bracelets, and dormitory-style living spaces outfitted with a thousand and one restored wooden chairs from the Qing Dynasty. The piece had a special resonance in China, where validation from the West, including visas, once carried near-mythic value. “For the past hundred years, we’ve always been waiting for the Americans or the Europeans or whomever to call our names,” Chen Danqing told me. “You. Come.”

In 2005, the Chinese Web site Sina invited Ai to host a blog. He wasn’t interested. “There was a computer in my office, but I had never touched it,” he said. Sina promised to teach him, and Ai realized that the blog “had a lot of good possibilities.” At first, he used it in an odd way--posting dozens, sometimes hundreds, of snapshots each day, depicting his visitors, his cats, his wanderings. He was putting his life under surveillance, though he did not always bother to mention that to his guests. When a delegation from MOMA’s International Council stopped by his studio, he stashed so many cameras and microphones around the complex that they picked up the bus driver grumbling, “Fuck! It takes them so long just to go to an artist’s studio.”

The blog gave Ai a far wider audience than he had ever encountered, and soon he was commenting on subjects ranging beyond art. In March, 2006, he wrote of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky and brainless gluttons” who “spend two hundred billion yuan on drinking and dining and an equal amount on the military budget every year.” He fixed on one sensitive issue after another. His assistant Zhao Zhao said, “He’d be reading the news and he’d say, ‘How can this be?’ And then the next day, and the day after that, he’d still be saying the same thing.” He skewered a high-profile government project imbued with patriotic pride: a new railroad to Tibet, which, he wrote, would “unavoidably accelerate the disappearance of a culture.” He subverted the usual Chinese mode of dissent: favoring bluntness and spectacle over metaphor and anonymity.

He shamed the system with his own transparency. In the view of the Beijing-based critic and curator Karen Smith, the author of a book on Ai Weiwei published last year, Ai was turning his blog into a public space as vibrant as “any church or grand piazza was in High Renaissance Italy.”

Ten months after the huge earthquake in Sichuan, the Chinese government said that it still did not know how many students had died in collapsed schools, much less their names. In language that was unusually harsh even for him, Ai wrote of the officials in charge of the disaster area, “They hide the facts in the name of maintaining stability. They intimidate, they jail, they persecute parents who demand the truth, and they brazenly stomp on the constitution and the basic rights of man.”

In December of 2008, he launched his campaign to collect as many students’ names as possible. He signed up volunteers and sent them to Sichuan to investigate. They collected fifty-two hundred and twelve names, and cross-checked them with parents, insurance companies, and other sources. (The government later released its own list, of fifty-three hundred and thirty-five names.) On May 27, 2009, police visited Ai and his mother to ask him about his activities. He responded with an open letter online: “Deleting my blog I tolerated. Tapping my phone I tolerated. Surveillance of my residence I tolerated. But charging into my house and threatening me in front of my seventy-six-year-old mother I cannot tolerate. You don’t understand human rights, but do you know anything about the constitution?” The next day, his blog was shut down.

A couple of months later, Ai was in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, to attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, the earthquake activist, who had been accused of inciting subversion of the state. At 3 A.M. on August 12th, while Ai was asleep in his hotel, police knocked on the door and ordered him to open it. He replied that he had no way to know if they were who they said they were, and he picked up the phone to dial the police. (He also turned on an audio recorder to capture the scene.) Before his call could go through, the police broke down the door. A struggle ensued, and he was punched in the face, above the right cheekbone. “It was three or four people,” he told me. “They were just dragging me. They tore my shirt and hit my head.”

The police took him and eleven of his volunteers and assistants to another hotel, and detained them there until the end of the day, when Tan’s trial was over. Ai and his staff, as usual, videotaped their detention, and he edited the footage into a documentary, which he posted online.

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Four weeks later, Ai, in Munich to install a show, felt a persistent headache and weakness in his left arm. He went to a doctor, who discovered a subdural hematoma--a pool of blood on the right side of his brain--caused by blunt trauma. The doctor considered it life-threatening and performed surgery that night. From his hospital bed as he recovered, Ai posted to Twitter copies of his brain scans and the doctor’s statements. (Seven months later, Ai says that he has recovered, except that he tires easily and has trouble summoning words.) Then he went ahead with the biggest exhibition of his career: a vast installation that blanketed an exterior wall of the Munich Haus der Kunst with a mosaic of nine thousand bright-colored custom-made children’s backpacks. In giant Chinese characters, the bags spelled out a statement from the mother of a child killed in the quake: “She lived happily on this earth for seven years.”

As Ai’s life and work have become more politicized, he has fallen farther out of step with peers in the Chinese art world.

I asked Feng Boyi, the curator and critic who worked with Ai on the “Fuck Off ” show, to describe how other intellectuals regard Ai. “Some really admire him, especially young people outside of art circles,” Feng told me. But among some artists another view prevails. “They attack him,” Feng said. “They say he simply wants to make a fuss. They don’t acknowledge his approach.”

To his detractors, Ai is too quick to satisfy Western expectations of “the dissident,” too willing to condense the complexity of today’s China into black-and-white absolutes that attract foreign sympathies. The fact that Ai exhibits mostly abroad fuels the criticism that he is happier allowing foreigners to project their moral longings onto him than engaging with China’s ambiguities. (At one point, so many commentators online were speculating that he had renounced his Chinese citizenship that Ai felt compelled to post images of his Chinese passport.)

After the artists’ march on Chang’an Avenue, an artist named Yu Gao posted a widely read rebuke that called Ai a “traitor,” whose flamboyant gesture of protest had “destroyed the platform for discussion” with the government. “Whoever wants to pass himself off as a hero, protecting people’s rights, go ahead, but it is just the mask of a clown,” she wrote.

The intensity of that critique reflected the sensitivity of the question at the heart of Ai’s project: forcing Chinese intellectuals to examine their role in a nation that is not yet free but is no longer a classic closed society. The relationship between Chinese artists and the regime has changed dramatically in the past decade. For much of the nineties, authorities did their part to fulfill cliches of art and authoritarianism: arresting performance artists for appearing in the nude, shutting down experimental shows, and bulldozing underground artists’ villages.

But profitability has shuffled priorities on all sides. By 2006, paintings by leading artists such Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, and Chen Yifei were selling at auction for more than a million dollars apiece, and in 2007 auction houses in mainland China and Hong Kong leaped to third place in the world in sales revenue, behind America and the United Kingdom. Government censors still interfere--satirical portraits of Mao, for instance, are not allowed in mainstream galleries--but the state has discovered that the best way to deprive Chinese art of its rebellious energy is to embrace it: after years of threatening to demolish Factory 798, a former military electronics plant that had been turned into a cluster of galleries and studios, the Beijing municipal government designated it a cultural landmark. It is now a tourist-friendly “creative industry area.”

To understand the critique of Ai’s position, I visited Xu Bing, who rose to prominence in the eighties, when he produced some highly controversial work, including “A Book from the Sky,’’ a set of hand-printed books and scrolls composed entirely of fake pictograms--a critique of China’s hidebound literary culture. Xu moved to America and thrived, earning a MacArthur award and commanding high prices for his art. At one point, he and Ai were close friends--he took over Ai’s apartment in the East Village when Ai left, and he had worked on the “Covers” trilogy of books--but they have grown apart.

Two years ago, Xu startled the Chinese art world by shedding his outsider status and returning to Beijing to become the vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the nation’s top official art school. I asked Xu what he made of Ai’s political activities. “He has held on to certain ideals, like democracy and freedom, that made a deep impression on him--things inherited from the Cold War era,” Xu said. “These things are not without value--they have value--and in today’s China he has his function. It is meaningful and necessary. But when I came back to China I thought that China is very different than it

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was when he came back to China. This place, in fact, still has a lot of problems, like the disparity between rich and poor, and migrant-labor issues, and on and on. But it really has solved many problems. China’s economy is developing so quickly. I’m interested in why that has happened.

“My school has meetings constantly,” he went on. They are a fact of life in a state-run organization. “The meetings, you discover, are really boring and useless. Sometimes, in meetings, I write literary essays, and people think I’m taking notes, that I’m especially dedicated. But sometimes I think about the fact that China is holding meetings every day, and even though these meetings are meaningless China has still developed so fast. How has this happened? There must be some reason. This is what interests me.” He added, “We can’t hold on to a Cold War attitude, particularly in today’s China, because China today and China during the Cold War are worlds apart.”

Before I left, Xu said, “Not everyone can be like Ai Weiwei, because then China wouldn’t be able to develop, right? But if China doesn’t permit a man like Ai Weiwei, well, then it has a problem.” Indeed, the degree to which China ultimately allows Ai to continue will be the true measure of how far China has--or has not--moved toward an open society. So far, it seems, he has been insulated by his famous family name, his own celebrity, and, despite his antics, a subtle sense of what is truly off limits. (He has never, for instance, promoted any political challenge to the primacy of the Communist Party.) As the liberal legal activist Pu Zhiqiang put it, “He knows full well what can be done and what can’t be done. Both he and I are trying to widen the space for legal rights to the absolute limits. I am not willing to be an enemy of the government, and I don’t believe Ai is, either.”

A few weeks after the visit to the courthouse, Ai flew to Chengdu, the city where he was punched and detained last year, to visit a bronze foundry that was fabricating a series of sculptures for him. He was travelling with an entourage that was large even by his standards; it included his assistant Zhao Zhao, who was videotaping his every move, and three other videographers, from separate documentary projects.

Returning to Chengdu carried a certain symbolism, and throughout the day Ai posted updates to Twitter about the trip.

After the foundry visit, he went to the site of a school that had collapsed in the earthquake, then drove to a cemetery where students were said to be buried, but a guard told him it was closed. Whether it was his caravan or his Twitter messages that drew attention, by mid-afternoon we were being conspicuously tailed by a black Volkswagen hatchback, driven by a lone man with a comb-over. At one point, Ai pulled his car over and ran back to the Volkswagen, which sped away. Ai Tweeted about that, too. “He fled helter-skelter,” he wrote.

All afternoon, Ai had been inviting people, via Twitter, to join him for dinner at a local restaurant that featured pigs’ trotters in broth, a Chengdu specialty. Sure enough, his fans began showing up in twos and threes, a lively crowd of mostly young professionals, including lawyers, Web designers, and journalists. The restaurant eventually ran out of seats, so it set up folding tables and plastic stools out front, and soon Ai’s group stretched along the sidewalk. It was a digital free-for-all, with everyone at the tables snapping photographs and sending updates to Twitter from cell phones. It was easy to forget that Twitter is officially blocked in China.

I sat next to a soft-spoken lawyer who introduced herself by her Twitter handle: maplered. I asked her why she had come.

“Ai Weiwei is constantly seeking more open information,” she said. “He works for society. I admire him. I should learn from him.”

A plainclothes security agent was videotaping the dinner gathering from across the street, and I asked the lawyer if she was worried about being seen with Ai. “Of course you are afraid,” she said. “You are afraid that one day you’ll get in trouble, but you can’t let this fear stop you from doing what should be done to form a normal society. What we want is normalcy, just a normal society in which we can express sorrow and mourn death, where those who do wrong are punished, and those who do good for society are encouraged, not jailed.”

At one point, Ai stepped away from the table for some fresh air, and I asked him about the criticism that he is out of touch with China’s real gains, that he is pushing too far and too fast. He shook his head. He gestured toward the restaurant full of

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people. “They are people sharing the same kinds of values,” he said. “It’s not like I made these up. And they’re very grateful for the cause I’ve been working on.” As Ai sees it, the undeniable improvements in Chinese life do not relieve intellectuals of the responsibility to agitate--on the contrary, they make the need more urgent than ever, because most of society will be satisfied enough by the accretion of opportunity to mortgage the prospect of a truly open society. “I think a lot of people-especially artists and intellectuals--just try to make excuses,” he said.

Some of his supporters worry that he has lost sight of the risks, that he could end up in jail or be prevented from returning from an overseas trip, and I mentioned this. “I don’t really care,” he said. “I think it’s very much because of my father--he faced the worst of these social enemies all his life. So I don’t think too much about this.”

On his last morning in Chengdu, Ai made a final stop: the police station on Xi’an Road, where he wanted to file an official complaint about being hit by the officers last year. He wasn’t sure how the police would respond. The police station was a small courtyard office, painted blue and white, with a line of police bicycles out front. Ai, accompanied by a lawyer, among others, approached the front desk, and an officer asked what he wanted. “I was detained and beaten in the Hotel Anyi,” Ai said. “I’ve come to file a complaint.”

The officer looked puzzled. “Who was beaten?” he asked.

“I was,” Ai repeated. His presence caused a small commotion behind the desk, as officers tried to figure out how to handle the large man with the entourage. It was an orderly scene, and Ai pulled out his phone and entered an update into Twitter: “Raised the issue, being received reasonably and kindly.” After some back and forth, Ai and his lawyer were led to a small office down the hall with bare white walls and a computer, and a pair of police officers began to take down his complaint.

By this point, all four of the videographers with Ai that day had followed him into the police station and were recording the questioning. Three of the cameras were squeezed into the room at odd angles, while the fourth poked its lens in through the window. Then a third police officer arrived, with his own video camera, and began taping Ai and his entourage. Finally, he was joined by another police officer, carrying yet another video camera, and he, too, began to tape. Looking at the scene, I realized that Ai had inverted the usual logic of art and politics: instead of enlisting art in the service of his protest, he had enlisted the apparatus of authoritarianism into his art. Dissidents, like artists, need an audience, though I couldn’t tell if that meant I was the press or a prop, or both.

The officer at the computer turned to Ai and began his questions: “What is your work unit?”

“I don’t have one,” Ai said. “I am an artist.” He thought for a moment and added, “Freelance.”

After a while, the police shooed everyone out of the room except Ai and his lawyer, and told the videographers to stop taping. A pair of officers asked to see my passport and then told me to delete the contents of my handheld audio recorder. I resisted a bit, but not much; there were four video recordings to choose from, and, besides, American police would probably not have been pleased with me taping inside a station, either.

Another hour passed, and the door to the police office reopened. Ai stepped out and grinned. “Finished!” he announced. The police had accepted his complaint. He lifted his arms from his sides and did a small happy dance--something between a bow and a penguin attempting to take flight. He grabbed his phone and thumbed out an update to Twitter. “Moved forward a little bit today,” he wrote. In the parking lot, the cameras resumed taping.

An artist takes on the system.

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mr. big Carol Yinghua Lu From: Monograph Book Published: 2008.06

In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the visibility of artist and architect Ai Weiwei has reached an unprecedented peak.

Yet despite his involvement in the design of the Olympic Stadium, he is well known for his vocal criticisms of the Chinese authorities. What accounts for his unique position in the cultural make-up of contemporary China?

I always remember my father saying before he passed away: ‘This is your country. You don’t have to be so polite. You can do whatever you want to.’

So I had to adapt.

Ai Weiwei Exactly how influential is Ai Weiwei? If numbers are any indication, at the time of writing this in April, 2008, Ai’s blog, which alongside a journal of his everyday activities contains occasional interviews and curatorial commentaries, had registered well over four million hits since he started it in November 2005. This figure is rivalled only by the number of visitors to Xu Jinglei’s blog, one of the most popular young movie stars and directors in China. Reading Ai’s blog has become something of a ritual for many who read Mandarin, particularly those working in the art world, as a means of keeping track of the national and international artists, curators, critics, journalists, celebrities and others who make it a must to visit Ai’s studio while they’re in town, and to keep up to date with his latest art works, exhibitions, friends and enviable international travels. Like most bloggers, Ai fills his entries with photographs and anecdotes of the meetings, interviews and dinner parties that comprise his personal life. On 20 December 2007, for instance, there were pictures of Ai giving an early morning interview at the BBC’s Beijing Bureau. On 21 April, it was a hotpot dinner with a large group of Westerners, including architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, in a steamy restaurant called Duobaoge, while on 25 April, there were a dozen photos of Herzog and de Meuron visiting Ai’s Beijing studio before being taken to a porcelain-making workshop in Jiangxi Province. The high profile of the people who frequently show up to his studio and parties, as well as the diversity and scope of the projects he’s involved in, not least his quirky interactions with friends and assistants – giving them bizarre hair cuts and having his body buried in sand by a friend, for instance – make his blog juicier than the private diaries of most celebrities. Content aside, Ai’s own charisma and prominence as one of the most celebrated names in Chinese contemporary culture enables his blog to provide, to some extent, a forum for the open expression of public opinion. Ai’s own candid yet balanced writings and responses are inspiring and contagious. The blog draws extremely mixed commentaries and messages in the response column from a wide variety of people, who find it an ideal platform for voicing their own views on a broad range of social, cultural and political issues. Ai’s entry on 29 March 2008 was titled ‘Fortune-telling and Democracy’ and commented on the recent unrest in Tibet and the Chinese media’s distorted reporting of the situation. ‘In an era without fortune-telling,’ he observed, ‘what is left is disdain towards the spiritual world and the denigration and violation of religion.’2 The article solicited four-page-long responses, which varied from agreement with Ai’s opinion to questioning of his moral position in supporting the Tibetans.

But the blog is just one of his many activities. In January and April 2008, Ai chaired the Ordos 100 International Architects Symposium, in the remote city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, to kick-start an ambitious and exciting venture to develop 100 villas for Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd. As the initiator and curator of this project, FAKE Design, Ai’s studio in Beijing, appointed Herzog and de Meuron to select 100 architects, who hail from 27 countries around the globe (although none are from China), to design a 1,000-square-metre villa each. For some of the participating architects this will be their first experience of working on such a vast scale. The project is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.

Ai’s own architectural career began rather modestly in 1999, and stemmed purely from the necessity of designing his own living space and studio. The result was a barren, basic, modernist block of a building, made completely of grey bricks, which would later become his signature design and spark something of a trend. Ai built his studio in Caochangdi, a village on

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the northeastern outskirts of Beijing, when the area was completely undeveloped. Today, however, it is home to numerous exhibition spaces and artists’ studios, either designed by Ai himself or built by local villagers who have tried to emulate his simple yet effective style. Since then, Ai has gone on to design his own bar and restaurant, various private homes and art spaces, and the Jinhua Architecture Park – which features 17 pavilions by architects from China, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland and the USA – in his hometown of Jinhua in Zhejiang Province. Notably, he also consulted with Herzog and de Meuron on their design for Beijing’s national stadium for the 2008 Olympics, leaving everyone wondering what he will get up to next.

Still fresh in most people’s memories, of course, is Ai’s headline-grabbing work for last year’s documenta 12, Fairytale (2007), for part of which he arranged for 1,001 Chinese citizens to visit the event in Kassel, Germany. Along with the visitors, he also transported 1,001 Qing Dynasty wooden chairs, which were dotted about the exhibition’s various sites. The sheer scale and complexity of this project testified, once again, to Ai’s ability to access a sophisticated social network beyond the reach of most. It’s hard enough for a single Chinese person to obtain a visa to visit Germany, let alone get the embassy to approve 1,001 of them – especially for a group of people who had mostly never travelled outside of China before. (As the title of the work suggested, it really was a fairy tale.) Ai divided the 1,001 visitors into five groups and brought them over to Kassel at various stages throughout the exhibition’s three-month duration. They were accommodated in a communal dormitory converted from a former textile mill. Not only did he design their uniformed beds, sheets, outfits, suitcases and towels, but he also brought along his favourite cooks to prepare daily meals for them in Kassel. The project cost a mindblowing £2.16 million – a sum that was largely raised by the Beijing and Lucerne-based Galerie Urs Meile, and donated by two Swiss organizations, the Leister and Erlenmeyer foundations – and was well-publicized and documented with videos and photographs, and frequent mentions on the artist’s blog. At the centre of all this attention, of course, was Ai. Yet with many derivative products to sell, including the 1,001 chairs, and hundreds of hours of unedited documentary footage of the entire process and interviews with participants in hand – which is destined to provide the basis for an upcoming series of video works – the artist consistently refused to elaborate on the concept for the work. One thing he could be sure of, however, was that the project testified to the social and cultural clout he has accumulated both within China and beyond.

Since his big splash at documenta 12, Ai’s work has been the subject of a number of exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands and a solo show at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, both of which opened in March this year. The latter, entitled ‘Illumination’, featured as its centrepiece Descending Light (2007), a monumental chandelier made of red crystals, which lay askew on the floor of the gallery space. The exhibition also presented another equally large-scale light fitting, Travelling Light (2007), which was a towering pillar made of Chinese tieli wood, festooned with strands of glass crystals. Both were grand declarations of Ai’s status as a world-class artist, as well as of his aesthetic sophistication and ambition.

The international reputation Ai enjoys today would have seemed an impossible dream back when he enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, as part of the first class to be convened after the Cultural Revolution. Among his classmates were Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who have since become China’s foremost film directors. Unable to bear the absence of discussion concerning the country’s troubled political situation, however, Ai dropped out of school in 1981 and went to live and study in the USA, where he developed an appreciation for art that had a certain emotional detachment, while exploring questions of artistic authorship provoked by Marel Duchamp’s ready-made. Ai was a young, unknown artist and an outsider to the American art system, but these ideas continued to find resonance in his practice after he returned to China in 1993 to look after his sick father. During the first three years after his return, Ai noticed the diffidence or lack of attention paid to Conceptual art-making among Chinese artists. Together with fellow artist Xu Bing and art critic Feng Boyi, Ai edited and published a series of three independent books: Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995) and Grey Cover Book (1997). This unprecedented, valuable collection of proposals and descriptions of concepts by Chinese artists offered different ways of thinking about and communicating art, both conceptually and literally. The timing couldn’t have been better, as the books came out at a crucial period for Chinese contemporary art.

After the crushing of the democracy movement of 1989, contemporary art was designated an underground status, and kept out of the public eye and official exhibition venues within China. Simultaneously, however, some artists, such as Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, whose work touched upon China’s political situation, began to get noticed internationally, and were chosen

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to participate in major exhibitions around the world. Many wondered how it was possible for Chinese artists to find their conceptual footing when the country appeared to lack any internal structure for art or access to the international art market.

In this respect, the ‘Cover’ series was an important validation and source of inspiration for Chinese artists, encouraging them to look inward for conceptual motivation. It was also a big boost to Ai’s fame and standing among the Chinese art community, which would continue to look to him for inspiration and support in years to come.

As he slowly developed his own artistic practice, Ai’s actions became increasingly significant in shaping the development of contemporary art in China. Subsequently, he became the artistic director of the China Art Archives and Warehouse in Beijing, which was founded by Hans van Dijk, an artist from the Netherlands, in 1993. Together, the duo developed a dynamic program that focused on emerging talent, built up a comprehensive archive of printed material about young artists and turned the institution into a bastion for vibrant artistic discussion and research. Among the pitiable few galleries that represented Chinese contemporary art in the first half of 1990s, CAAW was without doubt the most exciting and academically sound, further consolidating Ai’s art-world standing. In addition, the artist continued to make his own work. Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), for instance, was a performance carried out in private, but documented in a series of black and white photographs of Ai dropping a two-thousand-year-old urn that instantly acquires new meaning the moment it is smashed.

What would normally be an act of vandalism becomes an act of conceptual transformation.

Compared to his Chinese contemporaries, some of whom were participating in the Venice Biennale as early as 1993, Ai’s international recognition was slow in coming. Nevertheless, he is today a sought-after name on the global art circuit, frequently featured in international art magazines and museum shows, and given large-scale commissions by art institutions and biennials around the world. And he seems happily engaged in the multiplicity of his endeavours. Web of Light is a commission Ai is working on for the Liverpool Biennial in September. Costing an estimated £400,000 to produce, the piece will take the form of a spider, made from illuminated strings of crystals, suspended from steel cables that will stretch across the city’s Albert Dock, resulting in what promises to be a grand visual spectacle.

Ai flamboyantly flaunts his artistic versatility and taste through the sophisticated levels of craftsmanship and the extensive production his projects call for. In recent years, he has been moving away from his works of the late 1980s and early ’90s – which tended to have a performative element and were mostly carried out on his own, either in private or before an audience – towards a more labour-intensive mode of production, which complements his artistic and architectural undertakings. At the same time, he is also shifting further and further away from being an artist who makes studio-based work towards one who embraces a more collective and complex approach to art-making that reaches beyond the constraints and sentiments of the individual artist. For some of his works, such as those involving the appropriation of antique furniture and wood from dismantled temples, he engages the expertise of specialized craftsmen, whose skills are rooted in classical Chinese culture. While incapable of carrying out such work himself, Ai does have the ability to appreciate these antiquated skills and communicate his vision to the workers who then translate it into an art work. In the early years after Ai returned to Beijing, while he was still finding his footing in the local art community, he spent time working with his brother, a dealer in antiquities, and became quite successful at it within a short time. The knowledge he gained from this experience has proven invaluable in more recent years as his practice has developed into a marriage between time-honoured materials, forms and techniques and his international contemporary aesthetic sensitivity. Ai’s celebrated ‘Furniture’ series (1997–2000) – which includes such pieces as Crossed Tables (1997), Table with Two Legs on the Wall (1997), Stool (1997), Cornered Table (1997) and Table with Three Legs (1998) – presents humorous adaptations of Qing Dynasty furniture. Following a long-established tradition, classical Chinese furniture was ingeniously constructed without the use of a single nail, and could easily be dismantled piece by piece.

Ai adheres to this fundamental principle of construction to produce seamlessly crafted new items of furniture, which he then deprives of their apparent function with minor interventions. Although the artist himself is physically removed from the production process, the formal qualities of the resultant works render them distinctively his.

Considerations of Ai’s work and its concern with history and tradition often make reference to his late father, Ai Qing.

Although he trained in Hangzhou and Paris as a painter, Ai Qing took up poetry and became a prolific and successful contemporary poet. He was imprisoned by the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party) from 1932 to 1935, an experience that led him to denounce the Kuomintang and change his original family name from Jiang, which was the same as that of the Kuomintang’s former leader Jiang Jieshi, to Ai. It also drove him to develop more of an affinity with the Communist Party, which adopted him as a communist literary celebrity until the anti-intellectual campaign of 1957. Denounced as a rightist, he

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was sent into exile in the Xinjiang Province from 1958 to 1975. With the change of political climate in 1978, Ai Qing moved back to Beijing with his family and was offered important positions, including membership of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and resumed living a privileged life.

Ai’s childhood experience of being sent with his family to live in exile is probably the best-known part of his personal story.

Yet the impression the experience made on the young Ai, who was a baby in 1958, was far from a bleak one. Instead, he has recalled how inspirational his father was, how he remained optimistic about life, and how he carved out a mental space for himself and his family despite his personal misfortune and in the face of a turbulent reality. Ai once mentioned how his father, a 58-year-old man who had never cleaned a toilet, was forced to clean 14 public toilets in a poor village during his exile. Ai would follow his father and observe how he worked: ‘He used to stand and smoke a cigarette; this would renew his inspiration. Then he would lay the sand over the defecation holes, clean them and after about two or three hours he would be finished.’ ‘Thinking back,’ Ai recalled, ‘the most important gift he gave me was how he approached everything sincerely.’3 The artist now approaches his work in the spirit his father instilled in him. Employing materials and techniques embedded in Chinese culture, Ai’s elegant objects can overwhelm viewers who do not fully grasp the conceptual implications of his work; their imposing, meticulous physical presence and massive scale often require considerable teamwork and vast production spaces to realize, and are made possible thanks to the artist’s influence, wealth and sprawling social network. Yet, the bold approach he adopts in his reappraisal of classic Chinese furniture clearly reflects the rebelliousness that drives him to question not only his own existence, but also the current value system and hierarchies of power – a quality that has proved liberating in his cross-disciplinary practice and, above all, the formation of his world view, which is well-informed and critical without being too cynical or pessimistic. When asked in an interview what he considered the biggest difference between himself and most other people, Ai replied: ‘I am good at thinking in the opposite direction, and I tend to question all fixed concepts and overthrow certain facts that people always take for granted.’4 Ai’s iconoclastic spirit is well-known and his forthright attitude and controversial language have become something of a personal trademark, contributing to his personal myth-making. He is very much a media darling, accepting almost every interview that comes his way. He is always expected to say something outrageous not only about art and architecture, but on any given subject. In an interview he gave in February, for example, he was asked what kind of people he liked. His answer?: ‘There is no man I hold in esteem. I have not much interest in menfolk. How can I be interested in men? A person’s consciousness is the most important thing of all. I can only say that I have good feelings about human beings but if you ask a man to talk about his own gender or to be aware of the fact that he is a man, it must be related to certain motivations. Men, to be more exact, are incomplete. I am not fond of men.’5 He also challenges political authorities and plans concerning social and urban development, on issues ranging from the Beijing Olympics to the problem of stray cats. On 11 January 2008, after the film director Zhang Yuan had been arrested for taking drugs with friends at home, Ai commented on his blog: ‘That the police broke into a citizen’s home late at night is an infringement of every citizen’s rights. The potential harm of such an act is far greater than what a drug user does.’ He went on to quote the constitution to argue how the police’s actions were a violation of civil rights, and called for the empathy and responsibility of the media to protect the privacy of those involved and to look into what he regarded as the key issue resulting from the situation.

His outspokenness is such that he has criticized the propaganda the Chinese government has been employing in an attempt to stir up feeling about the Olympics and has gone as far as announcing that he won’t be attending the opening ceremony, even though it will be held at the stadium he himself helped to design. It is inevitable that Ai would eventually be regarded by the art world and general public alike not only as an artist, but also as a serious spokesperson.

Ai firmly established himself as the godfather of the Chinese avant-garde art movement when he co-curated (with Feng Boyi) ‘Fuck Off ’ at Shanghai’s Eastlink Gallery in 2000. This dissident exhibition featured a roster of over 40 experimental artists from various regions in China. Timed to coincide with the opening of the third Shanghai Biennial, the provocative show – whose title was translated into Chinese as ‘Do Not Cooperate’ – exhibited numerous works of an extreme nature, which often involved live animals and corpses, and was shut down by the police shortly after it opened. The real strength of the show, however, was not the controversy that some of the exhibits caused, but the statement it made about the importance of maintaining an independent artistic position at a time when the official Chinese art system was starting to make an effort to appease the country’s contemporary artists and take control of the contemporary art world. This was the first time since the

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late 1980s that the Shanghai Biennial, organized by the state-owned Shanghai Museum of Art, had opted not only to work with independent curators such as Hou Hanru, but also to include contemporary art in the exhibition. Ai was quick to warn his fellow artists of the danger of contemporary art being institutionalized and thus compromised by the system. He insisted at the time that this ‘critical stance is basic to art’s existence, and its status of independence, freedom and plurality’.6 Even though this event has gone down as a heroic historical moment, ultimately it wasn’t able to prevent Chinese contemporary art’s inevitable succumbing to institutional and market powers. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the elasticity and tolerance of these powers turned out to know no bounds, for notwithstanding Ai’s frequent criticism, his appointment by Herzog and de Meuron as design consultant to the Olympic Stadium in Beijing went unchallenged. Apparently happy to use the opportunity to promote himself and broaden his international influence as an architect and cultural icon, Ai insisted on various occasions that he enjoyed designing the stadium purely from an artistic and intellectual point of view, but that if he had been hired by the state to do the same job, he would have turned it down.

Ai occupies a very complex position in the cultural make-up of China today. Unlike most of his fellow artists, he frequently steps out of his personal space, literally and metaphorically, to interact with society on a multitude of levels. His social prominence and independent status as an artist give him the credibility to speak his mind directly. As a result, he has become something of an accepted symbol – both for members of the state apparatus and the general public – of a more open, tolerant society. Yet, as with his series of photographs, ‘Study of Perspective’ (1995–2003), in which he gives the finger to national icons such as the White House, the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square, Ai’s provocative remarks and his critical and irreverent stance towards authority run the risk of becoming an empty gesture or harmless role-play. For all his apparent boldness, Ai enjoys a certain degree of security not only as a result of this international clout but also thanks to the privileged reputation his father has continued to maintain in the eyes of the authorities.

Ai doesn’t shy away from the opportunities and attention his profile has given him and he continues to be the centre of his own empire, which anyone can take part in, either by entering the confines of his studio and personal circle, or by looking at his art and reading his blog. It’s clear that Ai continues to honour his father’s dying words: ‘This is your country. You don’t have to be so polite. You can do whatever you want to.’ Ai has made his adaptation.

1 ‘Changing Perspective, Ai Weiwei with Charles Merewether,’ in Ai Weiwei: Works: Beijing 1993–2003, edited by Ai Weiwei, Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2004, p. 27 2 ‘Fortune-telling and Democracy’, Ai Weiwei’s blog, 29 March 2008 3 ‘Changing Perspective, Ai Weiwei with Charles Merewether,’ op. cit., p. 22 4 ‘A Dialogue with Ai Weiwei’, Zhou Jie and Xu Kaiqiang, Chutian Metropolitan Daily, 13 April 2005 5 ‘On Men’, Ai Weiwei and Wu Hongfei, Ai Weiwei’s blog, 8 February 2008 6 ‘Preface’, Fuck Off, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, 2000

Carol Yinghua Lu is a writer living in Beijing.

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Salt in their wounds From: The Economist Book Published: 2009.05.16

“CITIZENS of the disaster zone are marching towards a new life,” proclaimed China’s president, Hu Jintao, on May 12th, a year after an earthquake in Sichuan Province left more than 86,000 dead or missing and millions homeless. But for all Mr Hu’s talk of the victory won by China’s colossal relief efforts, some survivors are deeply unhappy.

China’s immediate response to the earthquake won international praise for its speed and openness. Journalists, who are often kept away from disaster scenes, were given largely unfettered access. But officials soon began trying to limit their access to the angry relatives of the thousands of children crushed to death by collapsing school buildings. While Mr Hu spoke at a ceremony attended by foreign diplomats in the badly hit town of Yingxiu, close to the epicentre, police around the zone were on heightened alert to prevent parents from airing their grievances.

In the town of Juyuan, about 20km (12.5 miles) south-east of Yingxiu, police surrounded the fenced-off remains of a middle school where hundreds of children were killed. Foreign journalists now have to register with the government to report from the earthquake zone. Officials in Dujiangyan, a nearby city, insisted that a government minder accompany your correspondent to Juyuan. But once there, three black-shirted security agents soon put a stop to the tour. They drove the visitors to a police station where an officer declared that Juyuan was under “special controls”.

Buildings near Juyuan Middle School show few visible signs of earthquake damage. Parents suspect that this is because they were better constructed than the school’s two collapsed buildings. In the days after the earthquake, senior officials vowed to investigate whether shoddy construction was to blame for the destruction of more than 7,000 classrooms in the disaster. But the issue was soon played down. It was not until a few days before the anniversary that the government finally gave a figure for the number of students killed or missing: 5,335. But officials also insisted that not one school had collapsed because of poor building quality.

Some of Juyuan’s bereaved parents are not convinced. The father of a 15-year-old boy killed in the middle school accuses the local government of fearing a public investigation “because there is corruption involved”. Officials ordered this man and several other parents to join a sightseeing trip on May 12th, apparently to keep them out of town over the anniversary.

Because of China’s strict family-planning policy, many of the parents had only one child.

In Beijing, a prominent artist, Ai Weiwei, famous as a designer of the “bird’s nest” Olympic stadium, has organised a team of more than 50 volunteers to travel around the earthquake zone and collect the names of students who were killed (he believes there were more than 7,000) and record interviews with their parents. He says team members have been stopped by police more than 20 times. The police usually confiscated or erased their recordings and threatened further retribution if they continued their work. On two occasions, volunteers were beaten. Several of the victims’ parents as well as foreign journalists have suffered similar thuggery. Parents have been warned not to protest. Some who have refused have been told they will be treated as supporters of Falun Gong, an outlawed sect, or of Tibetan independence, says Mr Ai. Officials have not directly attempted to stop Mr Ai’s activities, but internet portals in Beijing often remove blog postings with updates on his name-gathering mission. In March police in Sichuan arrested an activist, Tan Zuoren, engaged in a project similar to Mr Ai’s. He is still in custody, as is Huang Qi, who was charged last year with possessing state secrets after gathering information on collapsed schools.

Mr Ai says the refusal of central leaders to admit policy failures has exacerbated parents’ frustration. In the 1990s, he says, shoddy school buildings were erected across China because of the government’s drive to provide enough classrooms for all children to undergo nine years of compulsory education. Building costs were supposed to be shared by central and local

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authorities, but the latter often failed to chip in. This led to quality problems.

A law took effect this month requiring that schools and hospitals be built to withstand quakes of magnitude eight, about the scale of Sichuan’s. This will be only a crumb of comfort to Juyuan’s grieving parents. They say local officials have banned them even from visiting the school’s weed-filled compound to mourn.

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So Sorry Chris Dercon and Julienne Lorz From: So Sorry Book Published: 2010

The title of this exhibition, So Sorry, refers to the thousands of apologies expressed recently by governments, industries, and financial corporations worldwide in an effort to make up for tragedies and wrongdoings - though often without shouldering the consequences r the desire to acknowledge the consequences or the desire to acknowledge let alone repair. Saying sorry – or not saying it – is in the headlines everywhere and thus also in China.

That Ai Weiwei should take this opportunity to comment on the state of global affairs is not surprising. In numerous interviews in the media and his own internet blog, Ai Weiwei outright criticizes the Chinese government, call for freedom of the press and speaks up for human rights. In Ai Weiwei’s view it is impossible to have “a real civil society, a democratic society, unless people take responsibility. However, in China this is often hampered by strong cultural traditions. In the words of professor of Chinese Philosophy Francois Julien, “The Chinese have a different ideological machine, which they refer to as ‘harmony.’ This suggests not the separation but the integration of the human being into the cosmos, nature, family, the state.

Even Confucius idealized harmony, and China’s current government with its president Hu Jintao has taken up harmony as a propagandistic leitmotif and regulating tool. Anything disturbing harmony is quickly demonized. However, modern technologies such as the internet make it very difficult to maintain control. In his blog, Ai Weiwei expresses his personal views on Chinese politics, but he also uses it as a platform to show and tell about his everyday life. “Art is life” and “life is art” is Ai Weiwei’s credo.

Ai Weiwei’s self-proclaimed biggest influence is the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) and his concept of the readymade, which purports that anything ca be turned into an object of art if the artist decides to do so. Ai Weiwei, though, who says “I’m my own readymade,” introduces a new element, the “ancient readymade,” recycling displacing, manipulating and sometimes even destroys traditional objects like old furniture or ancient vessels, in order to create something new. It is his way of criticizing the selling out of culture, thereby redefining cultural heritage. “People can still recognize them [as artifacts], and for that reason they also value them, because they move from the traditional antique museum into a contemporary art environment, and they appear in auctions or as some kin of collector’s item.” (Ai Weiwei) Ai Weiwei realizes his ideas within a team, which operates under the trade name FAKE Design, and produces works in a factory-like manner. The team is composed of specialized workers, such as skilled carpenters adept in ancient traditions. With some of his artworks, Ai Weiwei toys with or “fakes” Western modern art, while also dealing with contemporary Chinese society and its capacity to absorb the “outside” without giving up its own traditions. Therefore, Ai Weiwei’s works sometimes look plain even to the point of being bland to Western eyes. In Praise of Blandness by Francois Julien argues that the plainness treasured in Chinese aesthetics, even though it seems to be suffused by an “absence of flavor” is in fact superior to any flavor, since I is open to all potential variations.

In his project Fairytale for documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, Ai Weiwei invited 1001 Chinese citizens to visit Germany, providing each with luggage and bedding, and designing living quarters for them. By providing this opportunity, Ai Weiwei wanted to plant the seeds for potential cultural exchange; photographs and other “souvenirs” of this trip are displayed in the exhibition.

The sheer mass of the materials and reproductions in this show embodies another important aspect of Ai Weiwei’s work: repetition, copying and mass production, all of which are deeply rooted in Chinese tradition. For centuries, Chinese have had

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experience in pursuing multiple paths (Tao) at the same time without choosing or judging.

“Why Chinese citizens don’t take responsibility and speak their views is partially for cultural reasons,” Ai Weiwei observes.

Yet, Ai Weiwei believes in the role of the artist not only as a spokesperson, but also as a transformer. Taking on the whole of the Haus der Kunst’s façade, Ai Weiwei’s new work Remembering consists of 9,000 children’s backpacks that spell out the sentence “She lived happily for seven years in this world” in Chinese characters. In a symbolic way, the work addresses the Chinese government’s attempts at covering up the death of thousands of school children in the recent earthquake in the province of Sichuan in 2008. In the art of Ai Weiwei these victims regain their identity.

Ai Weiwei’s various activities, be it art, design, architecture, curating, writing, publishing, or even cooking and cutting hair, distinguish him as one of the most versatile, complex, and engaging contemporary artists working today. Given his own biography, it is very apt that Ai Weiwei has chosen the Haus der Kunst, known for its own history of iconoclasm induced by the politics of the Third Reich, to express his views on authority and power. He does so, however, in a poetically slow and subtly humorous way. As Francois Julien has noted, “Chinese thinking is full of trust: no tragedy, no metaphysics. Rather, it is a way of observing the world in its quiet transformations. One reaches out to the future – without worrying too much about an ideal. The term ‘ideal’ does not exist in Chinese.”

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TALK WITH AI WEIWEI Mathieu Wellner From: So Sorry Book Published: 2010 Interview conducted: July 4th and 5th, 2009

You described yourself as “a person who does different things”: Sometimes it ends up being art, sometimes architecture – you can’t control it, and you only realize later looking back on what you did. If you think about the last few weeks, what was your dominant occupation?

Last week, my dominant preoccupation was Fan Fou, the Chinese Twitter. You write posts on events maybe every second, you make comments, talk to friends, you discuss. I’m immensely attracted by it, because you always have to be ready. It’s very intense and you have to know what’s happening on the outside on different levels. It can be very personal or it can be very political. It’s like an individual broadcast. Last week, the officials shut off ten of my IDs on Twitter because I was receiving too much attention. The moment I got into it, I had thousands of people following me. I broke the record in term of numbers … In the beginning, I had two IDs that they shut off, so I used another identity. After a while they found out – they shut it off. So after ten different IDs, I’m still alive, but suddenly you realize that there are 40, 5 people named like me on Fan Fou. Like: Ai Weiweiwei or Weiwei Aiai, or Wei Aiai. They all use my image, so they make the whole system very, very confusing. Nobody knows which one is really me.

Blogging seems in general much more popular in China than it is in Europe. In democracies, the media monitor politics. In China, the media weren’t effective in doing this, so the blogs took over their role to spread information and to discuss politics. You have a powerful voice that the government is trying to shut down. You were even arrested by the police – how was the tea at the police station?

Ha! That was a funny situation. But it’s also sad what is happening in China, because our society is lacking platforms. It is very different from Europe: You have public and private. We have neither a public nor a private life. We don’t have a choice – we’re always ignored. That’s very frustrating. Only since 200, for the first time, have we had the means to really get information and to speak up with our own voice and discuss with people. It is absolutely outrageous.

The police came to me here and tried to use the old-fashioned way to convince me of their views. But they did not have any legal documents. So I told them, “You have no right to talk to me.” It’s worse than driving without a driver’s license. But nobody dares to check them – they are so powerful, like a secret police. So I called the police station, dialing 110, and made a complaint. I told them, “ I have a person in my house without identification. I want him to be out, but he refuses. Can you come over?” So they came. It was very funny, because of course they knew each other. “It’s our boss, here,” they said. “Okay, so if this is your boss, you have to take him to the station. How about the two of you show me your identification?” The two guys acted very nervous. I asked them to show me their police badge, but they did not have one either. They said something about their jackets that were at their houses, so they would have to drive back to get them. The whole night, we went back and forth. Four hours later, I walked out of the station. This guy didn’t have the chance to tell me what he wanted to tell me – that was it. I wrote on my blog: “Don’t try to take me out for tea. I don’t want to talk to you. We don’t have common ground for discussion because our worldviews are really too different. If you want to see me, make sure you have the right to arrest me, make sure you bring handcuffs, and I will go with you.” They never came back.

But this is still dangerous – the police could come anytime with legal permission.

It is dangerous, but if I don’t react, it’s also dangerous, because they can always bother and intimidate you. I’d rather use the tool of blogging to expose everything, to show it to all. It’s like they’re still hesitant on that matter. They have to find a good

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reason.

Your father was a famous poet loved by common people. Is this maybe also protecting you?

I don’t think so, because I am consciously trying to cut myself off from my father’s past, my family’s past. But it could be possible, because everybody knows who my father was. They all know he was the one who influenced many people to join the revolutionary fight for the independence of this nation, for justice and fairness, for change. So that could be an underlying reason.

But maybe it’s a combination: The myth about your father and the fact that you are known in the Western world?

Yes, I am very, very publicized in the West, but also in China. Not because of my at – I never really showed my work here.

But a lot of magazines come to interview me; I am still one of the most interviewed people in China. They are not always asking me about political matters, but more about art, about architecture, about culture, design, or fashion. This makes me a public figure, and also, being quite successful as an artist, the government is a little bit hesitant because of that. People would ask why they were doing something to me.

Still, it is a totalitarian system…

But you know, they are famous for making mistakes, so I don’t take it for granted.

Could you imagine leaving the art world for politics?

I don’t think I could entirely stop doing art for politics, but I can imagine using my artistic skills entirely for politics ends.

When we went quite on the internet recently, we did it as an artistic expression. I know that in our constitution we are allowed to strike. In reality, China has not had a strike in the past sixty years. So we held a strike on the internet, and nobody could do anything about it because it was virtual, it was just us. So it was very personal and it wasn’t something you could see. It really taught everybody how you can react by restraining yourself, which is a very important act. I take the constitution and the political situation in China as a readymade. I transform it in my own way to show people the possibilities of this reality and a way to change. That, I think, is directly related to my art; it’s the same thing for me.

You take it as a readymade because you know the constitution – maybe that is the point. Others don’t say anything, don’t question or criticize, because they don’t know.

It’s all about investigating the questioning. At the same time, there is a role reversal in order to make the impossible work – to make the function disappear. That is what I always do in my art, but it is absolutely a new way for me to practice it.

Art and architecture are what you make for a living. But your civic engagement is what you do as a person?

For example, we did an investigation to find out about these dead Sichuan students. Who died, and why they died. And this investigation went into a very protected territory; it was like a national secret. We did it openly on our blog and posted the results every day. The whole nation was shocked and touched by the act.

You are talking about the victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008?

Yes. People knew students had died, everybody knew that something was wrong – but nobody knew any facts or looked carefully to find out the names of the children who died: which school they wre in, at what level, how old they were, female, male. Whatever we found out we posted on the blog. That already caused a revolution in the minds of people: you know, we found out over 5,000 names, by having 200 civil volunteers going door-to-door to talk to the parents. The volunteers got arrested over thirty times by local police, they took their finger prints and photos. But the volunteers kept diaries of everything, which I posted on the Internet. This investigation will be remembered for generations as the first civil rights

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activity in China. So to me, that is art. It directly affects people’s feelings and their living conditions, their freedom and how they look at the world. That’s very important.

Maybe the installation about the Sichuan earthquake that you are developing for your exhibition in Munich this autmn is a good example of how you combine the different levels of your work. As so often is the case, everything is linked: your political activities, your art, your blog, everything. Could you briefly explain the Sichuan tragedy and from there, how you express this on the façade of Haus der Kunst.

The Sichuan earthquake happened in May 2008. During the earthquake, the most tragic part was that many schools collapsed with the children still inside. These dead kids reminded me of those fish you put in a can.

Sardines?

Yes, sardines. It was exactly like that – hundreds, thousands – because of mistakes in the construction of the school buildings.

Who is responsible? The state?

Yes, the state. The government made big mistakes – not intentionally, but everything is very corrupt. And on my blog I kept asking the same questions: “Who is dead? How many? What are the costs Where are the bodies?” Nobody ever answered.

Not even the local press?

No, nobody. I thought: This is too much, this is not fair. These were children and they were part of us – how could we let it be? I had to ask those questions. I was vaguely thinking that I should do something for me exhibition at the Huas der Kunst, but I didn’t know how to include it, didn’t know how to present a tragedy in an artistic way. It’s kind of difficult, but that is the reality for artists like me who are so concerned with social change. So, not to touch upon that topic was impossible – it would have made my actions seem questionable separating my artwork from my struggle. So I thought about that very, very seriously, and I see the Munich show as the best answer I have to offer. The diecsion was made to find out for ourselves if the government would refuse to tell us the truth. We are the one who demand the truth, and we can do it by ourselves, to show people how it can be done. Before we started we made over 200 calls to different levels of government … always asking the same question: “What are the numbers?”

How many deaths?

Yes, how many, please tell us, we have the right to know. And tey said, “No no no, you don’t have the right. Who are you?”

We would answer, “We are individuals,” and they said, “Individuals have no right to know. It is a state secret.” So we recorded those 200 phone calls and put them on my blog.

I only asked for one small act. As an artist, I’m always dealing with what I am familiar with, what we think is safe, what we consider safe ground, but things are never what they seem. After that, I put a not on my blog: “We are starting a citizens’’ investigation.” We said, “Respect life, bear the responsibility to exercise our rights, because we can’t wait for anybody else to do it.” And by doing it ourselves it became a reality. The effort to find out the number of the dead was our struggle for dignity of life. We asked volunteers to sign up. Then we sent them to Sichuan, from home to home, to collect the names of the missing children. I immediately found 300 people who wanted to join. They came from very different professions, very different locations. I didn’t want them to be too emotional, so I designed a questionnaire with twenty-nine questions.

Questions such as, “Are you afraid of the dark? Are your stomachs ready for Sichuan food? Can you live by yourself in very uncertain conditions? Are you afraid of authority? Do you know what you’re doing? Do you think that truth is important?”

And the last question was: “Are you sure this is what you want?” So we got very positive people wand we made a selection, because some understood the local language and some didn’t. We gave them money, just for their basic needs. Some refused it, but we initiated this and we’d rather bear the costs. The project was very successful; each day they sent back the names they found and still are doing so today. The names are very touching: You start to know who, what age, which gender, which

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school, and their parents, their telephone numbers… We eventually posted more than a hundred articles containing thousands of names on my blog. The whole nation is shocked, because people knew that there was something wrong, people knew that so many are dead, that it is unfair and unjust.

Bu to use our skill or our craftsmanship to expose the injustice, make it visible and so clear, is an act that an artist can do well.

And it educated the entire nation: Everybody started thinking, questioning their own positions, examining their means and what could be within their power. That represented the first act of the civil movement. Yes, do not just talk, do the work. We still hafve people down there, but we have come to the end; we have located almost all the missing people, more than 5,000 now…

5,000 kids?

Yes, kids. It’s very sad, from three years old to eighteen, nineteen years old. And they are all single case families; their parents are all powerless farmers. They all have been detained and harassed, and forced to sign some kind of an agreement to no ask about the wrongdoings related to the earthquake; otherwise they cannot get new payments and they cannot get into the new housing projects. So this is really a hsame and a crime. Our volunteers send their diaries on a daily basis. They are all posted on my blog and everybody can read in detail how they were treated and which parents they can talk to, what is on the parents’ minds, what problems they are having – which is completely different from the official propaganda. So, the officials they are so scared: Sichuan province sent the top officials from the educational, civil, and construction sectors, the leadership so to speak, to come to talk to me for hours, trying to stop me.

Really, they came here to Beijing?

Oh yes. This is the first time in Communist history that thye came to see an individual to try and negotiate. They told me their position, why this is so damaging for them. I explained to them clearly why I am doing it, the political reason for me to do it. Of course nobody could convince the other, so we still argue. Obviously, they have all the power, so they shut down my blog. We cannot post any names now, but we have other channels.

So you have found an alternative blog and use Fan Fou and Twitter. Do you still put the names online?

Yes, of course. We are still running the investigation, but at the same time we are taking the next step by investigating the technical mistakes of those buildings: We sent out architects and construction engineers to try to gather all the evidence. It is very difficult, but we are working on it.

Why exactly is the link between this tragedy and your work on the façade of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, where you will display a large number of backpacks?

Right after the earthquake, I went there to experience the feeling of the ruins. And then I realized that everywhere were these school bags of the children scattered around. You could see a lot of pencils, little mirrors and schoolbooks all over. And nobody picked them up, nobody care.

They were part of the ruins…

Yes. Because the bags were so vivid and colorful, they made a really strong impression on me. The are so closely related to the physical condition of the kids. That was all they had actually, besides their names. So I wanted to design a work of art related to that. At first, I wanted to cover the whole façade of the Haus der Kunst with those bags, to bring history into the current situation: the kind of life and death and the propaganda and the ignorance we are facing here. Now I am using the bags to form a sentence, which was stated by a dead student’s mother who wrote to me. She said, “Everyday they are still holding meetings with us, trying to teach us to keep quiet and behave harmoniously.” They also took away five Yuan from her salary which they had awarded her before for having only one child. And that child is dead. It’s so crazy! She wrote: “I don’t want to have their payment, because I don’t think my daughter’s life is worth taking those payments. All I want is for

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her to be remembered. The sentence we will put up in from of the building is: “She lived happily in this world for seven years,” a sentence from a victim’s mother. She is very kind, she does not have much to say about all this and she just wants her daughter to be remembered. And of course we see all kinds of tragedies in this world, but I think the worst tragedy is disrespect for life. And the victims are always young children or women.

The weak!

Yes, the weak. The ones that don’t even know how they got involved in all these tragdies. So it’s a political statement, but at the same time I wanted it to be accessible – that’s why we chose the colors of Toys ‘R’ Us… A vivid colour range.

Yes. We made it very clear and simple. We are not too artistic about it. But I think it’s a statement, yes.

And with this exhibit, the Sichuan story will be discussed and remembered in Europe.

I hope so, ad I think it should be discussed.

You spread it worldwide.

I do my best. This morning I read the sentence, “Because we are alive, we have to make out best effort to announce it – for them, but also for us, because we are inseparable.”

Chinese culture is probably the greatest in history. But it has sustained some extreme blows in the last century: The protest of May 4, 1919, a second blow by Mao in 1949, and finally his Cultural Revolution 1966 – 76. You were nineteen years when, in 1976, your father was “exonerated,” and a young student when, in the 1970s, some Western influences became important. Li Xianting, who is called the father of the Chinese avant-garde, was jus starting out then, along with other artists. This as when you left for the USA. How would you describe your relationship with this part of Chinese art history?

I left in 1981. That’s why I had no contact with this movement in the 1980s. But even in New York the same kind of mental state prevailed. It was after the Cultural Revolution, we were fighting for new ways that would intellectually suit us, to establish a new culture and to discover individual possibilities. I am very impressed with your summation of Chinese contemporary culture; it is very precise. May 4, 1919 was like the birthday for a new culture in China. At that time, they had the idea to invite Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy into the culture. Ironically, even today, we still don’t have those two guys in our country.... So eventually it was old bottles with new wine. The oath is not working. The system has collapsed. The culture still functions in parts, but the structure has collapsed. And the new has never been established. First we had Marx, then Mao, and now, on one hand it is very liberal – a crazy capitalist madness and liberalism – and on the other, we have a very old Communist structure here.

But this extreme commercialization is less than ten years old! Looking at your life, it seems a weird odyssey through extreme situations and extremely different ways of living. The situation has nothing in common with the situation grew up in as a kid.

The 1980s must have been an important phase for China.

For China, and for myself. This period prepared me mentally for all the possible struggles I’d have to face in today’s contemporary world.

But then came Tiananmen in 1989…

Yes, and the results were so clear: the tanks and the bullets.

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I looked at this provocative series of you throwing down an antique Chinese vase. In the West you could go to jail for publicly destroying an object of culture heritage.

In China, I did it while I am in jail. I always look at it that way.

Are you also making reference to the Cultural Revolution with this? A time when there was a senseless destruction of old by the Red Guards?

Yes. You know, when we were growing up, General Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one. That’s the basic concept: destroying the old one to contribute to the new.

Chinese art has been immensely successful during the past decade. The artist areas of Beijing, like the 798 District, became a part of the cultural map, they are on the tourists’ circuit – they’re kind of a Disneyland of the art world with cafes, restaurants, and fashion shows, where East and West meet. What do you think about these areas, and do you participate in any of them?

No, not even in 798. I don’t go there at all for openings or anything. I think you have to look at them from two perspectives: First, we have had a strictly Communist regime for more than sixty years – this year is the anniversary. Freedom of expression absolutely does not exist in the public space. If you want to open a gallery, you have to go to a public security bureau, because it’s classified as propaganda. Every image has to be shown to the security administration and they wills ay, “Okay, that one,” or “Change it before the show.” On the other hand, we have an entirely capitalistic economy today, which is justified by “anything that sells.” So you have these two conflicting viewpoints coming together that make these artists’ areas attractive and create the demand of the Western world, which wants to see some kind of contemporary activity there.

But it’s a really weird situation. It looks like a Chinese Soho, with artists working in public and their workshops accessible for everyone. But at the same time, there is a little Mao exhibition and the police are around.

The booming art scene is not real. They’re pretending the boom. It is really trying to serve a dish to the observer rather than allowing true creativity, which can be much deeper and darker and unpredictable… It is heavily watched, and it’s very nervous under the surface, even though the police don’t know what they are looking for, but still. They think to maintain a kind of order is the mission of the state.

There were other areas, like the legendary artists’ place next to the summer palace, the Yuanmingyuan, which used to be a free artists’ space. It was different from the situation now.

Yes, but you know, to be an artist here back then was very difficult. You had no place to show, nobody talked about it and there was no way of selling work. That didn’t necessarily make the art any better, but at least it made it much less tempting to sell out and much less commercial.

Your work has been presented in many different way: In your shows like at documenta or at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, you were given a lot of freedom and independence – a kind of carte blanche to do whatever you want.

I think traditional galleries, museums, or institutions that show art as such are like dead bodies of past wars. But the Haus der Kunst is showing the killing field.

The what?

The killing field: The artist has to struggle, he may even hurt himself or do damage to others. The title of the exhibition is So Sorry. It’s a beautiful title suggested by [director of the Haus der Kunst] Chris Dercon. It comes from how we look at the world: It’s a world of rationality, a result of our logic, it’s the result of results. It’s everything.. We are not really controlling it, even if we might think we are. It’s about how we look at the world, how we look at it as humans or as artists functioning in

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the world – you know, your own performance and the performance of others. You want to be understood this way or that.

Most of your projects are initiations. Is your work, as Hans Ulrich Obrist put it, “art as an excuse for dialogue?”

Do you enjoy the many collaborations with others?

I think art is an initiation, which means that you want to be the innocent one: You want to reach out your hand so somebody can lead you. The event can lead you somewhere and you can say, “Let’s go.” I think artists always play with people who want to walk into unknown areas, into uncertainty.

You took this idea quite literally by bringing 1,001 Chinese to Germany for documenta in 2007; you opened up a new world for them.

Yes. However, to bring 1,001 Chinese to Kassel is one side of it. But to see how difficult it is for a mountain lady to get the permission for a passport; to see how they are worried about spending five Yuan to go to the next town to take a passport photo and how neverous they were about taking that photo… Also, to see those ordinary citizens in Kassel, jumping off their bikes to talk to you and tell you that they don’t know anything about art – I think that is a beautiful thing. That makes the project worthwhile. Nobody is a genius. It is just a suggestion until a taxi driver stop just to say something to you and then you realize: Oh, art does have this function of communicating and that is interesting.

What do you think of the big invasion of Western architecture companies in China?

I think architecture is always a celebration of our stupidity. The architect acts as a smart asshole.

Did you say “smart asshole”?

Yes, who is always trapped by the desire think and act like God: To make something from nothing, and for that to become a reality. But the pity is that architecture is never an act of the architect alone, but rather a result of different political, social, and technical aspects. Just look at the great architecture in history. Of course there are also intelligent individuals making a difference within those process, showing intelligence.

But even intelligent offices like OMA and Herzog & de Meuron were severely criticized for working for a totalitarian system, for providing them with new propaganda footage. How do ou see this debate from a Chinese perspective?

The architect is always a hired hand… Hired, for example, by the church or a state. I have no objections to what they are doing. What I am saying is: What the architecture will finally be used for can often conflict with what architects have professionally been trained to do. They like to confront challenges; they like to design a building. You can never really control the use of your building. This is only a fantasy of some stupid architects.

Yes, but architects also know that within 100 years, a building may change its function several times.

You should know the metaphysical power of architecture, being used by a totalitarian society. It still functions the other way, because a totalitarian society will not necessarily last, but the architecture often stay much longer. What I am saying is to just use a very simple moral judgment to denounce the effort of people trying to use an opportunity to create something – which might exemplify this particular period of time, or this condition – that kind of temptation is too childish.

But not all large-scale projects in China are commissioned by the state or by the party. You work on private commissions, the Ordos 100 project being one example. Can you explain how that started?

Ordos is by a private developer, but of course the developer has to work with the state.

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Still it wasn’t the state that approached you, but the developer.

Yes, of course. I have competed sixty projects and I have never had someone from the state approach me. I don’t think they ever would, unless it is another state, for which I am always willing to make an exception. Anyway, the developer came to me and wanted me to do a project. I told him that we had announced not to do architecture projects anymore, so I could only create the curatorial outline, because I think the process itself is more important. I asked Herzog & de Meuron to come up with a list of 100 architects who could design the individual buildings. They happily agreed to give me the list of names and I made the phone calls. Almost everybody accepted. It was very exciting to see those architects from India, from Brazil, from Chile, Mexico, Israel … They all came together in a desert area in China, using their knowledge and wisdom to create on common project.

And the project was for each team to build one villa.

A villa of a special size, only for rich people. I don’t know who they are. I don’t even know why they are developing it. Maybe because they think there is potential in this area, which is developing very fast. But the most interesting thing to me is so many architects coming together: We had wine, we discussed, and finally, 100 design objects came out of it. Communicating with all those architects – they had never had this kind of experience before.

Who designed the master plan?

I did the master plan, because I wanted to direct it before having a look at the architects. For me, the result was very surprising. This energy to initiate that kind of possibility can make people feel so different. And everybody in Beijing is asking about this project. But just in Beijing, there are 100 projects every year on the same scale.

But they always use the same type of architecture.

Yes, that’s true.

When each of the 100 villas will be realized in Ordos, they will all be different because the selected architects come from different backgrounds. Do you think you will be satisfied with the result?

I am more satisfied with the anticipation of architects, the interaction between sincerity and temptation. The result will be very hard to judge, because some have very good intentions but lack understanding. It is always like that: You can have a perfect meaning and manifest it in the wrong way. This is the problem with architecture education as a whole in the past ten years. Nobody should be superior in front of judgment.

You were actually very involved in designing this Olympic Stadium in Beijing with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. How did this fruitful collaboration come about?

This successful collaboration came from a very small incident: Since they had never been to China before, the asked [Swiss] ambassador Uli Sigg thought of me – I was deeply involved with architecture then – and I accepted without thinking, because Uli told me that they were relatively famous in Switzerland. I knew nothing about them. Only later on, I bought a catalogue of their work. I was attracted by a very small building, like a wood model, which was never realized. The book was about this object, but my cat took a big pee on that book, and it smelled and stank so much that I threw it away.

So we started the project. During the first serious discussion we had in Basel, I asked them what I could do. They just wanted me to tell them whatever was on my mind, like a critic. And I agreed. I never think about the stadium as an Olympic building.

I think of it more as an urban object: what it means to the city and how people are going to appreciate it. Of course, they had much bigger expectations than me.

You saw the stadium not as a place for sporting events, but as a part of Beijing. You know that the Olympics would

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be finished after two weeks.

The sporting event is really more of a technical matter – it is why we had to meet certain conditions, like 100,000 people had to fit in it, or how long it takes the visitors to exist the stadium, the viewing angle. But we were talking much more about the human condition rather than how much people would look at it from the inside and from the outside and how the event would relate to the building itself. Then we had a quick drawing and some discussion about how the roof should be, what kind of façade it should have. We came to a conclusion very quickly. So they were very happy and clear about the direction in which it should develop.

They continued the work.

Yes. I left and we communicated through letters. I struggled a little bit with the shape, because it’s a new and completely irregular, but also a geometric shape. The structural engineers from Arup made the best possible calculations for it and gradually it became the way it is and we won the competition. So it was a very clear shot.

You followed the whole building process with your pictures.

Yes, we had a lot of discussions there. They also asked me to initiate the landscape design around the buildings. So I developed that concept and they accepted it.

Your participation made you even more popular in the West. Do more people follow your blog since you were involved with the stadium?

It did not give much popularity to my blog, because in China it was never officially announced that I was part of the competition. I was only part of the team Herzog & de Meuron, which is true, so they didn’t have to mention my name. I was very critical of the way they handled the Olympics and one of the first to openly announce the boycott. So maybe that was a little embarrassing for them.

One of your assistants told me that you are a real master when it comes to communication. He said you always find the right words when you have to talk to craftsmen, interns, or clients. You instructions are always clear and understandable. At the construction of the Gallery Urs Meile, you told the craftsmen that for one of the facades they could only use thirty or forty percent of the bricks normally used and that they should their own way to solve it. Is this your strategy, giving a lot of freedom to the people you work with?

Yes, I often trust other people’s intelligence and I also have doubts about my own decisions at the same time. I only set up certain conditions, which limit my influence and give maximum space for them to work with. So I am not afraid of certain socalled mistakes and unexpected conditions. One project of mine was a group of buildings next to my office, 100 meters from here, and I never went to the construction site once during the whole process of building. No architect would do that.

No – definitely not.

But it came out very nicely. Of course, with any building there are always problems, but by doing that I think the beauty is to show what we care about and what we don’t care about. On thing Wittgenstein said about a good architect: “Somebody who insists not on what he wants to, but rather on what he doesn’t.” And I share that attitude because I see so many architects that always want to see the next development in architecture, they always jump on the next wagon. I have never been to the stadium since it was built. Jacques asked me, “Weiwei, will you really not go there?” And I said, “No, because I want to show you what arrogance is..” And he laughed. I think it’s okay. It’s just something to keep in mind – you don’t necessarily have to jump on every train. After all, it’s a mind game. That’s more enjoyable than anything else.

For German philosopher Peter Sloterdejk you can choose between two living conditions: the nest or the cave.

Which would you prefer?

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I am more of a cave person. I lived underground for a long time when I was a baby and I see the possibility of digging and hiding.

So you designed a bird’s nest with Herzog & de Meuron but you prefer living in a cave.

Yes, I think so.

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CHINA’s Tears Mary Hennock From: Newsweek Published: 2008.05.17

Hu Rong, 43, watches emergency crews erect a mile-long tent city along Happiness Avenue. Since a magnitude 7.9 earthquake hit Sichuan province on May 12, her home in the city of Dujiangyan has been a small tarpaulin, a couple of planks and one bamboo chair by the road. Times were bad already; Hu hasn’t had regular work since the uranium mine went out of business in 1994. Still, her week had one bright spot: soon after the quake, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited an aid station nearby. Hu raced over. “I wanted to see for myself that the prime minister had really come here and that he came so fast,” she says, with steady pride. “We were very moved.”

An unbelievable tragedy, the Sichuan earthquake has nevertheless given China’s leaders a chance to repair the country’s battered image, and they’re determined not to blow it. Many survivors told of seeing Wen in person as he toured the disaster zone, and TV newscasts showed him wielding a bullhorn and begging exhausted rescue teams not to give up: “Every second lost could mean lives lost!” An estimated 10 percent of Dujiangyan’s buildings were destroyed, including a high school where some 900 students were attending their midafternoon classes. Chen Gang, a volunteer helping with crowd control at a collapsed market, says Wen’s visit made a huge difference. “He is so much worried. You can see it in his eyes,” says the 49-year-old executive. Late in the week President Hu Jintao made his own televised tour of the area, clasping hands with survivors in one of the hardest-hit spots, the little mountain-valley city of Beichuan, where a few untoppled buildings poke out at crazy angles from landslides that smashed entire apartment blocks.

China took a beating for its ham-handed response to the Tibetan riots in March. But this crisis is different. For one thing, it’s exactly the kind of problem at which the Beijing leadership excels: a test of mass mobilization and logistics. At the weekend nearly 29,000 were confirmed dead, although the government said the final toll might run as high as 50,000, and 4 million homes had been damaged or destroyed. In response, 130,000 soldiers and about 100 helicopters were sent to comb the wreckage for survivors. Officials emphasized emergency shipments to places like Aba prefecture, a scene of ethnic Tibetan violence in March. And Beijing’s handling of the quake was even more impressive next to the horror in Burma, where the official death toll from Cyclone Nargis is likely to keep climbing far past 78,000, worsened only by the junta’s lackadaisical attitude toward survivors.

Moderates like Wen seem to have learned from the Burmese example, as well as Beijing’s own mistakes. Shi Anbin, professor of media studies at Tsinghua University, cites three basic rules for public communications in a crisis: “Tell the truth, tell it fast and tell it first.” China’s authorities neglected those principles in Tibet, he says. “Their earthquake response is the very first time they’ve lived up to international standards.”

The results are unpredictable. The shocking immediacy of the news coverage touched off an explosion of civic action. On the outskirts of shattered towns like Hanwang, police set up checkpoints where people from outside could drop off their contributions. Deng Zhigang, a Red Cross medic there, says volunteers are driving from as far away as Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou with donations of food, medicine and clothing. “The government can call up more people, but we don’t need that call,” says Mu Jin, an economics student from Chengdu Normal University. “We came anyway.”

Such enthusiasm can turn quickly. Government-run reconstruction programs can’t hope to match such an unprecedented display of personal generosity. As days drag into months, people are sure to grow impatient and angry that the cleanup isn’t happening faster, and to question shoddy construction in the area. That would make a perfect opportunity to attack official corruption at the roots—and to wrest some good from a monstrous tragedy.

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Politics of Sichuan Earthquake, 2008 Dennis Lai Hang Hui From: Mary Hennock Published: 2008.05.17

The purpose of this research note is to give an overview of the Chinese Government’s political response to the May 2008 deadly earthquake in Sichuan province. The specific focus lies in the political success of the Chinese government in managing the crisis in the context of a drastic socio-economic transition. The way in which the Chinese government on the one hand publicly shifted her traditional reliance on authority by incorporating transparency and responsibility and on the other hand was able to rely on an unprecedented spirit of voluntarism shared among the Chinese population at large, facilitated a fast, efficient and appropriate response to this crisis.

1. Introduction On May 12 2008, a deadly earthquake of 8.0 points on the Richter Scale hit Sichuan Province in the middle of China as a result of the tectonic collision between the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate (Caltech, 2008). The quake resulted in 69,266 fatal casualties and left 374,643 people injured (Xinhuanet, 2008a), some 15 million buildings were destroyed in the quake (Beijing Daily, 25 May 2008). Even after the original quake, rescueworkers and the population were not free from danger because of recurring after-quakes and the emergence of so-called Quake Lakes. Side by side with the colossal damage is a record mobilisation of citizens living in the affected area. Until the 25th of August 1,486,405 people were rescued and resettled, 1.58 million buildings were built and 67.03 billion dollars has been allocated by the Chinese government for the relief effort (Xinhuanet, 2008a). Within this context, this short research note highlights how the Chinese Authority and Chinese society reacted to the emergency situation in a way which contradicted traditional expectations.

2. Politics Politically speaking, the Sichuan earthquake reaffirms the conviction that for the legitimacy of a state there is nothing as important as efficient crisis management (Bo¨hm, 2008). This emphasises the politicisation of the crisis when the state assumes its normative responsibility to defend the lives of its citizens (Rosenthal et al., 2001). The Chinese authority discovered in recent years that ‘externalities’ of the state-centric approach of political administration such as fraud and corruption, which seem to have been intensified by recent socio-economic restructuring, was put under national and international public pressure. The relation between state and society became even more tense where local officials made administrative blunders and implemented controversial policies (Cai, 2008). In this regard, it could be predicted that the Sichuan Earthquake would serve as a critical juncture for the Chinese Authority in which it could renew or lose its legitimacy.

The need for leadership and efficiency in dealing with this crisis of such enormous scale was imminent.

The efficiency of the centralisation of control, which has been a longstanding feature of the Chinese polity, was tested in its fullest extent during the earthquake crisis. Immediately after the quake, the highest administrative organs of the Chinese Government, visibly took control in organising contingency measures. On the night of the quake, the Chinese Politburo organised an emergency meeting and a General Headquarters of Quake Relief was immediately set up within the State Council to coordinate the rescue and relief effort. The Headquarters was chaired by Mr. Wen Jiabao – the Premier of the People’s Republic of China – himself.

Between the quake on May 12 and September 1, some 25 meetings of the General Headquarters were held within the national State Council to decide upon relief and post-disaster development measures (Xinhuanet, 2008c). The message was clear: the commitment of the Central Authority towards the crisis was substantial.

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This centralised mode of crisis management served also another purpose. In a state like China in which hierarchical power relationships and an authoritarian political culture remain an important and powerful factor, the autonomy of local authorities like provinces is not clear-cut and sometimes enhances contradictions. This is demonstrated by the tendencies of local governments to downplay the intensity of a crisis, which is what happened during the SARS episode in 2003. These problems can only be addressed by strict disciplining from the central authority (Lai, 2004). Modern theories of crisis management tend to be in favour of decentralised modes of crisis operation, which is considered to yield higher efficiency and immediacy (Boin et al., 2005). However, within such centralised state as China these theories cannot be implemented overnight.

In this context, the assertiveness and visible commitment of the Chinese national leadership became a critical factor in enforcing local party discipline. The visit of such Chinese leaders as Mr. Wen Jiabao and Mr. Hu Jintao to quake-ravaged area has communicated not only the sympathy of the Chinese Government but also the utter necessity of local officials to demonstrate their competency and responsibility. This message was further strengthened by the swift dismissal of four officials in Dujianyan on the ground of either negligence or lack of reasonable commitment to the rescuing effort (Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, 2008).

3. Efficiency and Transparency The efficiency of the governmental response can be accounted for by the gradual socio-political transformation that has been taking place in recent years. Essentially, the governmental responses were without doubt heavily influenced by the government’s heightened attention towards potential outbreaks of crisis. After the SARS episode in 2003, the snowstorm which paralysed national transport in 2008 and in light of the 2008 Beijing Olympics the Chinese Central Authority directed substantial attention towards disaster management and mitigation. The legal basis for disaster management was consolidated by the Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic of China (2007), which, depending on its nature and scale, prescribes the appropriate organisational responses to a given disaster, and assigns responsibilities towards relevant people and institutions (Wu, 2008). This process also coincided with an accelerated process towards the espousal of modern political values such as the respect for individual rights and rule of law. Indeed the Chinese Authority understands that the long term political-economic development of China required more protection for individual properties and elimination of governmental arbitrariness of course without losing the primacy of the state (Jiang, 1998; Peerenboom, 1999).

When the quake hit Sichuan Province, it took the government just two hours to publicly acknowledge the severity of the disaster by issuing the Second Warning Level, and during the first night it was elevated to the First Level, which requires the largest possible scale of mobilisation (People’s Daily, 21 May 2008). All the government departments and the People’s Liberation Army were then mobilised.

The swift response to the quake was also influenced by the gradual progression of the Chinese Government towards a more transparent mode of governance. This improvement is demonstrated by the adoption of the Regulation of the People’s Republic of China on the Disclosure of Government Information on the 1st of May 2008 which aims to cultivate reliability and trustworthiness of the Chinese Government (Zhou, 2007). The new law contains two articles (Article 4 and Article 10) which are tailored for disaster situations: it is stated that in an unexpected event which concerns the general public, such as the earthquake, the Government has to give out information regarding its nature and threat. This formal commitment of the Chinese Government to openness was put into practice during the response to the quake. The newfound openness was visible when a rapid warning of the earthquake was broadcasted 18 minutes after the first shocks and comprehensive news coverage was available on a 24-hour basis (People’s Daily, 21 May 2008).

The openness demonstrated during the quake went beyond the legal requirements when foreign journalists were allowed to visit the quake area. During and after the quake, at least 545 foreign reporters from 30 countries were allowed access to the area (China Daily, 12 June 2008). This new level of transparency facilitated in some way the unanticipated foreign relief effort, which can be viewed in sharp contrast with the Myanmar hurricane disaster the very same month, when Myanmar’s military authority tried to downplay the extent of the damage. As a gesture of good will, Russia dispatched 10 large aircrafts to deliver emergency material and assist in the relief effort (Xinhuanet, 2008b).

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4. Nationalism and Old Reflexes Another result of the quake is a new nationalist discourse in China. Instead of perpetuating a sense of victimhood (Gries, 2004), which has long been a common Chinese cultural trait, the Chinese displayed a newfound kind of nationalism by helping the quake victims through an exceptional amount of voluntarism. The Chinese academia considered the Chinese civic consciousness to have been eroded by the uncertainty of the socio-economic transformation, but the relief effort proved them wrong (Wang, 2004). Examples are the queues outside blood donation centres. Some 160,000 showed up across the country before May 22 in response to the call from the Ministry of Health (WHO, 2008). Several blood banks even reported that their limit had been reached as a result of the enthusiasm of the Chinese population (Beijing Times, 28 May 2008). Other spontaneous programmes were organised to help quake victims, such a delivering food, water and blankets to areas which were difficult to access. These examples show a positive side of Chinese civil society, which assuaged the conventional fear of the Chinese authority towards the impact of a growing civil society on social stability. This reaction of the Chinese people is in line with the idea of modern citizenship (Helsloot and Ruitenberg, 2004).

Even though for Chinese standards the relief effort looked exceptionally well-managed, there still lies a painstaking road of long-term restoration ahead. On 12 August, the National Development and Reform Commission released the National Post-Earthquake Redevelopment Overall Plan of Wenchuan which details the objectives and policies in restoring the socioeconomic conditions of the affected region. The scope of this redevelopment plan is holistic, and covers historical, social, agricultural, psychological and economic aspects. The plan also established the objective to restore basic living conditions and a level of economic development prior to the quake within approximately 3 years (National Development and Reform Commission, 2008, p. 8). Given the large-scale of the redevelopment, it is foreseeable that the central government needs to adopt a governance approach, as contrasted with the top-down approach with functioned in the acute phase, towards local governments, local voluntary organisations and international development agencies in order to realise this objective. Thus, beyond the formal plan, the Chinese Authority’s valuation of accountability and transparency as a modern political standard will deeply influence the processes leading to recovery and the outcome of the recovery.

Articulating accountability will therefore prove to be a necessary part of the management of this crisis also system of appeal appears to be rather limited and is under-institutionalised. The family members of the students who lost their lives when the building collapsed expressed their disappointment about their grievances not being fairly and adequately addressed (RTHK, 2008). How the system will be reformed in the future will serve as an indicator of the effective handling of the earthquake, but also the Chinese Authority’s larger commitment towards an administration based on accountability and responsibility.

Together with the accountability issue it will be of crucial importance to see how the Chinese Authority consolidates its new pledge towards transparency. Transparency means not only disclosure of the number of causalities and the scale of the damages, but also and perhaps even more importantly allowing different stakeholders to monitor the progress of the redevelopment. For this purpose, the Chinese Authority should provide those stakeholders with adequate information (UNDP, 2004). However, it is discouraging to see that the openness immediately after the quake did not last very long.

Concerns were already expressed by foreign reporters when the government tightened restrictions on foreign press during the Olympics (Die Zeit Online, 2008). This return to conventional practice not only tarnished the earned credibility of the government as an institution, but also breeds uncertainty towards to allocation of foreign and domestic donations. Despite the stern warnings issued from the top officials (Xinhuanet, 2008d), potential embezzlement of donations and relief funds cannot be properly checked without adherence to substantive transparency.

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5–27.

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China Reports Student Toll for Quake Andrew Jacobs and Edward Wong From: The New York Times Article Published: 2009.05.09

BEIJING — After a year of obfuscation, the authorities on Thursday released the first official tally of student deaths from the earthquake last May, saying that 5,335 children either were dead or remained missing. An additional 546 were left disabled, they said.

Previous estimates placed the number of students who died in the collapse of school buildings during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province as high as 10,000.

During a news conference in Chengdu, Tu Wentao, head of the Sichuan provincial education department, said that the student death figures were accurate.

“These numbers were reached through legal methods,” he said. “We have wide agreement on these numbers.”

The issue of student deaths remains a contentious one here. The parents of children who perished in the rubble of classrooms say the buildings were poorly constructed; the government has largely quashed the issue by harassing or detaining those who insist on pushing the matter.

With the first anniversary of the quake fast approaching, the government has stepped up its campaign to silence those who have been calling for a full accounting of why so many schools failed while adjacent structures remained standing. In recent days, several parents whose children died — and who have refused to stay quiet — said they had been placed under heightened surveillance, and some foreign journalists who have tried to interview grieving parents have been detained.

The newly released numbers did little to quell critics. Ai Weiwei, an artist who is one of China’s best-known gadflies, said the figures were incomplete and “meaningless” because they lacked specifics, like names, ages and places of death. Mr. Ai, who is compiling his own detailed list of the dead, estimates the final figure at around 6,000. He said more precise information from the government might shed some light on the issue of substandard school construction or at least show that the government was truly willing to tackle that fundamental concern.

“The government is trying to escape from the accountability on this matter by postponing or rejecting the publication of details,” he said.

Government officials say that 68,712 people died during the earthquake. Another 17,921 are listed as missing but are presumed to be dead. According to the official media, 7,000 classrooms and dormitory rooms collapsed during the quake.

Over the past year, a number of other people who sought to draw attention to the questions over school construction have been punished or are awaiting trial, including Liu Shakun, a teacher who was charged with “disseminating rumors and disrupting social order” after he posted photographs of destroyed schools on the Internet.

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The parents of 126 children who died in Fuxin No. 2 Primary School in the town of Mianzhu have been among the most outspoken — and among those most watched by the government. Sang Jun, who lost his 11-year-old son last year, said in a telephone interview that since Monday, dozens of parents had been watched by about 200 security officers and minor officials sent by the Mianzhu government.

Mr. Sang said an official told him that the parents would be closely monitored until after the anniversary of the quake, and that any contact with foreign journalists was considered “unfavorable to China.”

He and his wife met with a reporter and photographer from The New York Times last week to discuss their grievances. At the time, several parents were willing to secretly meet with journalists in their homes.

Mr. Sang said a half-dozen people, mostly village officials, had been watching his home, but he drove them away after an argument on Wednesday morning. His house, on the edge of a wheat field, is close to the site of the Fuxin school, where new school buildings are being built with money from Taiwan. Mr. Sang said the local government was paying the minders $22 per day to keep an eye on the parents, the school site and roads leading into the village.

Foreign journalists trying to interview parents have been detained, and some had equipment broken by security officers in recent weeks, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Beijing, which advocates greater press freedoms in China. A reporter for The Financial Times was punched Tuesday by a thug, possibly a security officer in regular clothes, while conducting interviews around Mianzhu, the group said. After he and his colleagues retreated to their car, they were surrounded by a dozen hostile men, one of whom tried to hit a Chinese news assistant.

Liu Xiaoying, whose daughter died in the Fuxin school, said a French television crew was detained by security officers and led out of the temporary housing camp where Ms. Liu lives after the officers learned that the crew was interviewing her.

On Monday a group of parents from Mianzhu secretly traveled to Beijing and filed a petition at the central government’s petitioning center. It was the third time parents from Mianzhu had tried to file a complaint in the capital.

Employees at the petitioning center immediately notified officials in Mianzhu, who then had people in Beijing detain the parents and escort them back to Sichuan, Mr. Sang said. After the parents returned to Mianzhu on Wednesday morning, they were immediately forced into a hospital and told they would be checked for swine flu, Mr. Sang said.

When asked about the reports of harassment, the head of the publicity department in Mianzhu, a woman who gave her name as Ms. Xu, said, “As far as I know, this doesn’t happen.”

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AI WEIWEI HOSPITALIZED AFTER BEATING BY CHINESE POLICE Katherine Grube From: Asia Art Pacific Article Published: 2009.09.01

On September 21, Ai Weiwei left Munich University Hospital, where he had received treatment for a brain hemorrhage. He entered the hospital on September 14, and underwent emergency surgery that night after his condition rapidly deteriorated.

Photographic documentation of Ai’s hospitalization ensued, first posted on his Twitter feed and later circulated through online art-world news aggregators. Images of the surgeon, Jörg-Christian Tonn, a camel park near the hospital and an Oktoberfest beer maiden commingle with post-op shots of three thick braids of stitches on Ai’s shaved head—small amusements gesturing to an absurd and unpleasant reality.

A long chain of events led up to Ai’s hospitalization. On March 28, the prominent Chinese writer and activist Tan Zuoren was arrested in his home in Chengdu on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.” This came three days after the online publication of the concluding document from his and Xie Yuhui’s investigation into the deaths of more than 5,000 schoolchildren in collapsed classrooms during the May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Entitled “Independent Investigative Report by Citizens,” Tan and Xie’s document presented evidence of shoddy school construction and alluded to widespread government malfeasance at the local level. Tan’s arrest in March followed previous police incursions into his home and confiscation of computer disks, papers and materials related to the “5.12 Student Archive,” the working title for his investigation. Such intrusions caused the activist team to conclude the investigation two months prior to their originally proposed May 2009 end date.

Ai agreed to testify at the trial at the suggestion of Tan’s lawyer, who believed that the artist’s findings from the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project—instigated after government promises of an official investigation failed to materialize (reported in AAP 64 and 65)—would aid in Tan’s defense. The project, a coordinated effort involving more than 60 volunteer researchers to collect the names of the deceased children, closely paralleled Tan’s efforts. Collaborators on the project have reported repeated police harassment and detentions by local authorities. Witnesses for the defense, including Ai, were ultimately unable to testify at Tan’s trial at the Intermediate People’s Court in Chengdu on August 12; they were interrupted at their homes in the early hours before the trial by local police intent on preventing their testimony. At 3 am that day, Ai was reportedly beaten by police in his Chengdu hotel room. Six other scheduled witnesses and ten Chinese volunteers affiliated with the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project attending the trial were also temporarily detained. Local police held television reporters from Hong Kong’s Now TV for more than seven hours, searching their luggage and personal effects. Numerous members of Tan’s family were barred from the courtroom. At press time, a verdict had yet to be issued on Tan’s case, a full two months after the trial and seven months after his initial arrest.

Ai remained in Beijing for three weeks after the beating in Chengdu before flying to Munich on September 13. While in Beijing, he repeatedly complained of dizziness and headaches, but attributed these symptoms to exhaustion. The dizziness became acute after arrival in Munich, where Ai was to install his solo exhibition “So Sorry” at the city’s venerable Haus der Kunst, a show in which artworks related to the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project have a prominent place. Constructed for the exhibition, Remembering (2009) decorates the facade of the museum with 9,000 children’s school bags that form the sentence “She lived happily for seven years in this world.” Inside the museum, blog entries are mounted on panels above which hangs an image, taken by Ai on August 11, of uniformed police outside his hotel room in Chengdu. The grainy photograph depicts Ai smiling wryly as an officer looks on uncomfortably.

The political maelstrom surrounding Tan’s trial and reports of widespread police thuggery meant that rumors of Ai’s condition and the potential cause of the cranial trauma spread quickly over the Internet in the days following the artist’s hospitalization. Images of the bedridden artist, largely provided via Ai’s Twitter feed, incited rampant media speculation. A

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September 21 news conference following his discharge from the hospital did much to clarify inaccuracies and seemed to confirm the causal relationship between the August 12 beating, subsequent head trauma and September 14 surgery. In China, the case is still under review by the authorities, but formal resolution on the Mainland appears unlikely in the near future.

Ironically, the proliferation of images of Ai’s hospitalization may be linked to the collaborative blogging project he undertook with the Haus der Kunst in conjunction with “So Sorry.” For the project, the artist blogged for the first time in English, documenting the progress of the installation and his time in Munich. This gesture was an important historical nod to blogging’s centrality within Ai’s artistic practice, but also created an outlet through which images of the ailing artist proliferated.

By September 30, Ai had supplanted words for images on his Haus der Kunst blog. He posted these remarks in advance of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on October 1: “After 60 years of struggle, we come back to the ground zero. We still have to fight for essential values of life and live in dangerous conditions, which threaten citizens’ lives if you demand freedom. If one sentence can make a conclusion of these 60 years on the first of october that will be: 60 years of shame and ignorance.” Ai’s hospitalization falls against broader Sino-German cultural tensions. Quarrels between the Frankfurt Book Fair (the world’s largest, taking place October 14–18) and this year’s Guest of Honor country, China, have been ongoing since mid-September. The Chinese delegation walked out of a pre-fair panel discussion on September 12 because it included writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling, whose books are banned in China. In the spirit of “democracy in action,” according to a statement from fair director Juergen Boos, the fair has no plans to remove potentially controversial figures, including an emissary from the Dalai Lama, exiled Nobel Prize winner for Literature Gao Xingjian and Ai Weiwei, from its event schedule.

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An Artist’s Ordeal Ai Weiwei From: Newsweek Article Published: 2009.11.12

An artist explains why Barack Obama should be talking about human rights during his first visit to China this week .

In the early morning hours of Aug. 12, I was asleep in a hotel room in Sichuan when violent banging on my door abruptly awakened me. Roughly 30 policemen barged into my room and began pushing me. When I argued with them and asked for their ID, they beat me. They pinned my arms and someone punched me in the head. A month later I nearly died from a brain hemorrhage.

I had traveled to Sichuan province to be a witness in the trial of Tan Zuoren, who is accused of trying to overthrow China’s government by inciting subversion. Tan had been trying to ascertain the names of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. I wanted to be a witness in his trial because I too had been trying to look into this tragedy. In March, I asked on my blog for volunteers to join a citizens’ investigation, because the government has refused to give us any information about the children. From the beginning I said, “Life has its own dignity. You cannot give us just numbers. What are their names? Who are their parents?” The volunteers made 200 phone calls to Sichuan government departments. The officials there told us that this information was a national secret. Nonetheless, we were able to publish the names of more than 5,000 of the children on my blog before the censors shut it down.

In China, there is a long history of the government not revealing information, so it’s difficult for the Chinese people to ever know the truth. It is vital that we try to bring that truth to life. But like most oppressive societies, China doesn’t have an independent judicial system. When a witness is stopped from appearing in court by the police, it means our legal system is like the mafia. And there is no independent press to ask questions.

This week President Obama will make his first visit to China to focus on the global economy and climate change. I’m very supportive of Obama because I believe he represents great hope for America and the world—but it’s inconceivable to me that he would visit China and not put human rights on the agenda. What does it matter if China’s economy grows when there are no basic protections for its citizens? Obama must be clear about the West’s values of freedom and human dignity.

I never made it to Tan Zuoren’s trial—after the police beat me, they kept me in my hotel room until the trial was over. (Tan still awaits his verdict.) A month later I was in Munich for a solo art exhibition of my work. (I called it So Sorry, which are words favored by leaders who avoid responsibility for disasters. I created a frieze of schoolchildren’s backpacks covering the front of the exhibition center.) The headaches I had been experiencing since my beating had gotten worse and I couldn’t concentrate. When I checked into a hospital, I was told there was bleeding in my brain and I was near a fatal collapse. I was rushed into surgery. When I awoke, I felt almost like a normal person again. But I will not feel whole until I and my fellow Chinese can live freely.

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Controversial Chinese artist ordered to demolish studio Peter Foster From: The Telegraph Article Published: 2010.11.02

Ai Wei Wei, the controversial Chinese artist whose Sunflower Seeds is currently being shown at the Tate Modern’s turbine hall, has once again fallen foul of the Chinese authorities who have ordered the demolition of his new £750,000 studio in Shanghai.

Ai, who is also a larger-than-life bearded political activist who has embarrassed the Chinese authorities on several occasions in recent years, said the demolition order had come despite a personal invitation from the local mayor to build the studio two years ago.

“It’s all very strange,” Ai told The Daily Telegraph. “This guy [the mayor] flew to Beijing twice to personally invite me to build the studio and have one or two artists based there so they could build up the new art district. Now they say they want to knock it down. The local officials say the word has come from above and they’re ‘sorry, but they can’t do anything about it – you have to destroy it’, and no further explanation.” An official notice said the demolition had been ordered for failing to apply in advance to the local district office for a “project planning licence”.

However Ai suspects that the order may be linked to two high-profile campaigns that have embarrassed and angered the Shanghai government in recent years. In 2008, Ai was instrumental in turning the case of Yang Jia, a man who stabbed six policeman to death after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, into an internet cause-celebre. This year Ai made a documentary to highlight the plight of a Shanghai-based activist-lawyer called Feng Zhenghu, who spent more than 100 days marooned at Tokyo’s Narita airport after being refused entry to China eight times by Shanghai officials.

Last year Ai underwent cranial surgery after being beaten by police in Sichuan province when he went to give evidence in support of another activist, Tan Zuoren, who was jailed for investigating the collapse of thousands of schools in the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008.

Ai, who is a relentless user of the microblog Twitter, is best known for co designing Beijing’s Olympic stadium, the Birds Nest, which some hoped would herald a more open China. Ai has since renounced that work as a “fake smile”.

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Chinese Police Confine Artist and Activist to His Beijing Home Michael Wines From: The New York Times Article Published: 2010.11.06

BEIJING -- A phalanx of Beijing police officers confined the prominent artist and activist Ai Weiwei to his north Beijing home on Friday, a move he suggested came at the behest of unnamed but powerful political figures in Shanghai who feared that he was about to embarrass them.

If so, they were correct.

Mr. Ai had planned to fly to Shanghai on Friday to prepare a Sunday goodbye party at his million-dollar art studio meant to draw attention to its pending destruction. In telephone interviews this week, Mr. Ai said he built the studio only after Shanghai officials, on a campaign to burnish the city’s cultural credentials, implored him to. But in July, they ordered the finished building demolished at the command of anonymous higher-ups.

Mr. Ai’s response was the party, to be attended by eight rock bands and up to a thousand supporters from around China. But on Thursday night, he said, the officers came to his home and asked him not to go to Shanghai.

On Friday, after he said he was going anyway, the officers placed him under house arrest -- reluctantly, Mr. Ai said. ‘’They’re sorry, very sorry,’’ he said by telephone from his home. ‘’They say they understand me and really agree, but this is really beyond what they can do.’’

Mr. Ai said the officers told him that ‘’Shanghai is very nervous’’ about the party. Like Mr. Ai, however, they did not know precisely who in Shanghai was nervous, or how they managed to arrange his confinement in a city 650 miles away.

Mr. Ai said he did not even know why the unnamed Shanghai officials had ordered his studio demolished, although he had his theories.

This is not the first run-in with the authorities for Mr. Ai, an artistic polymath who seems to be alternately tolerated and hectored by higher-ups. An internationally known sculptor, filmmaker, architect and performance artist, he helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, then renounced his role after deciding that Chinese leaders had politicized the Games.

He was allowed to fly to Munich last year to stage a major exhibit that excoriated the government’s handling of children’s deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Yet months before, he was so severely beaten by the police in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, where he had gone to testify in the trial of a fellow activist, that he needed surgery to drain blood from his brain.

Mr. Ai’s latest run-in with Shanghai officials appears to exemplify that love-hate relationship.

As he tells it, he was approached more than two years ago in Beijing by the mayor of one of Shanghai’s districts -- a government unit not unlike an American city ward -- and beseeched to build a studio on an abandoned plot of farmland.

Initially suspicious -- ‘’I told my assistant we’re not going to deal with government anymore,’’ he said; ‘’there’s no honesty there’’ -- he relented when the mayor flew to Beijing for a personal appeal.

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Mr. Ai said he worked closely with the district to rehabilitate an abandoned warehouse on the site, spending about $1 million to create a vast working space fronting on a lake with a sawtoothed roof and sides laced with a concrete grid. Other artists began building their own adjacent studios.

Then last July, as work was wrapping up, there came a city order to tear down the warehouse. ‘’They said only we received the notice,’’ he said. ‘’The other artists did not. We said, ‘Why?’ and they said, ‘Well, you should know, because of Ai Weiwei’s activities.’ ‘’ Which activities offended someone is, of course, not known. But Mr. Ai said he suspected he rankled officials in 2008, when his blogging on the case of Yang Jia, who murdered six Shanghai policemen after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, created a national sensation. Mr. Yang was later executed. He said that officials also might resent his documentary this year on Feng Zhenghu, a lawyer and activist who spent more than three months in Tokyo’s Narita Airport after Shanghai officials denied him entry to the country.

Whatever the reason, Mr. Ai said, the district official who first recruited Mr. Ai returned to Beijing this week, apologizing profusely and promising to compensate him for the cost of the renovation if he would leave. ‘’I said, ‘Why? It took so much effort and energy, and you didn’t give us a clear reason,’ ‘’ he said. ‘’But they cannot really answer these questions. So I realize it’s inevitable. They’ll destroy the building.’’

At the planned goodbye party for the studio, in lieu of chips and dip, Mr. Ai planned to serve river crabs -- a sly reference to the Mandarin word hexie, which means both river crab and harmonious. Among critics of China’s censorship regime, hexie has become a buzzword for opposition to the government’s call to create a harmonious society, free from dissent.

In short order, 800 supporters from across China made plans to attend, and eight bands volunteered to play at the event. ‘’They already call it Woodstock,’’ he said Wednesday in an interview. ‘’I think it’s nice. It shows a kind of understanding and solidarity.’’

On Friday, Mr. Ai said he thought the unnamed Shanghai powers were taken aback by the attention to the demolition and the party and reacted in typical fashion. And by doing so, they created a piece of performance art that called more attention to the embarrassment they were seeking to suppress. ‘’They put you under house arrest, or they make you disappear,’’ he said. ‘’That’s all they can do. There’s no facing the issue and discussing it; it’s all a very simple treatment. ‘’Every dirty job has to be done by the police. Then you become a police state, because they have to deal with every problem. ‘’I think they hate me,’’ he said. ‘’But I never imagined they would destroy an entire building.’’

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Defiant supporters turn up for activist’s feast of river crabs Will Clem From: South China Morning Post Article Published: 2010.09.08

The crab feast was supposed to have been cancelled but the diners came anyway, and they were not denied the chance to crack some claws. Artist and activist Ai Weiwei may have been placed under house arrest, but the feast he threw to mock the authorities’ censorship rules went ahead regardless.About 600 of his online followers flocked to his soon-to-be-demolished studio in Shanghai.

Ai said from his Beijing home he was overwhelmed by the response, which he described as a “strong signal” that ordinary people were willing to stand up for their rights.

“We never expected that many,” he said. “After we announced it was cancelled, I thought maybe just 50 people would still come. But some people said it is not our building any more, it’s a building for the ‘grass mud horses’.

“Young people showed the world that they are not going to be intimidated. They showed they can still enjoy the sunshine and listen to music without being afraid.”

The term “grass mud horse” is used to refer to rights activists. It is a homophone in Putonghua for a strong swear word invented to counterbalance the “river crab” - itself a homophone for “harmony”, one of the government’s favourite terms used to discourage dissent. Those crabs were served yesterday in a symbolic defiance of government controls.

“Harmonious society, eat river crabs,” the diners chanted as the crabs were dished out - one of the few moments when the carnival atmosphere took on a more political feel. Organisers, who were worried about the prospect of police breaking up their “illegal gathering”, said they had earlier cancelled their plans, yet the 600 came.

“We are sure we have enough crabs for everyone,” one kitchen hand said as he loaded crabs on his wok.

Ai’s huge studio home, built of red brick and concrete in the traditional courtyard style, was overrun by supporters from across the country.

“As soon as I heard about this event I knew I had to come,” said one youth who flew in from Shenzhen. “I think this gathering is the most meaningful thing we can do.

“We don’t need slogans or labels. The fact so many people came will make others ask what inspired us. People in this country don’t ask enough questions, but I think this is a start.”

Ai announced on Twitter he planned to treat “mud grass horses” to a dinner of 10,000 river crabs to mark the demolition of the studio. He said he was told by officials to demolish the US$1.1 million building because it was an illegal structure, even though it was built at the district government’s invitation.

“They offered me compensation if I kept quiet, but I told them this is not about money,” he said.

Ai had planned to attend the function, but police placed him under house arrest in his Beijing home on Friday. He was expecting the restrictions to be lifted at midnight yesterday.

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Ai Weiwei supporters gather for party at condemned studio Tania Branigan From: The Telegraph Article Published: 201.11.07

Hundreds of supporters of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei gathered for a party at his condemned studio in Shanghai today, as he remained under house arrest 650 miles away in Beijing.

Police told him on Friday that he would not be able to leave his home until midnight tonight, after he refused to cancel the event.

Ai, who created Tate Modern’s “sunflower seeds” installation and whose activism has frequently angered Chinese authorities, told the Guardian: “Many had been warned by local police not to come, but they still made the effort and enjoyed music and wine and crabs. It is really amazing. Hopefully [the police] will learn from this that they cannot just use this old way to deal with new conditions. I think with the internet you don’t need to be there to communicate so well. I have spent all day talking to people there.”

He added: “I never encouraged them to go because I didn’t want them to get hurt. But they felt that was their responsibility.

It was very touching to see such solidarity. I’m also surprised police didn’t do anything … [I think] they didn’t want another incident because this is already bad enough for them. They regret they have had such bad press.”

Partygoers held up posters of Ai, sang songs and dined off river crabs - their name in Chinese being a homonym for the government’s buzzword, harmony. “In a harmonious society, we eat river crabs,” they chanted.

“It is very orderly,” said one young man, who gave only his surname, Zhang. “We came here just to show our support for Ai Weiwei. China currently lacks the rule of law and I hope that we can build a society that is ruled by law. This is what we need to do.”

Another supporter, Lai Hong, had travelled from Nanjing. “This is just what we call a form of performance art or a form of expression … One should not overreact to this event,” he said.

Ai has enjoyed far greater latitude than most Chinese dissidents, thanks to the respect awarded his father Ai Qing, a renowned poet, his own international fame and his role in helping to design Beijing’s Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium.

Although police stopped the artist from leaving his home, he was able to receive a group of guests from America yesterday.

Beijing police declined to comment.

The row began when Shanghai officials told Ai they would demolish his newly finished studio. He said they had invited him to build it because they wanted a new cultural zone, and believes the decision is politically motivated, while officials say the building did not have the necessary permits.

Ai added that authorities in Shanghai had now suggested he could donate the building to the government, possibly for use as an agricultural museum. He questioned how they could accept an illegal structure. “Of course I don’t want it to be knocked down, but they already announced it was illegal so I don’t see how they can take the sentence back,” he added.

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Chinese Authorities Raze an Artist’s Studio Edward Wong From: The New York Times Article Published: 2011.01.12

BEIJING — The studio would have stood at the heart of an embryonic arts cluster on the outskirts of Shanghai, a draw for luminaries from around the world.

It took two years to build, and one day to tear down.

An order to raze the studio — designed by Ai Weiwei, a protean artist who is one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party — was issued last July. Mr. Ai took the move to be retribution for rankling the authorities. He said officials told him that the demolition would not take place until after the first day of the Year of the Rabbit, which falls on Feb. 3.

So he was shocked to discover that workers had begun knocking it down early Tuesday, Mr. Ai said in a telephone interview from Shanghai on Wednesday. Mr. Ai said a neighboring studio he had designed for a friend had also been destroyed.

“Everything is gone,” he said. “It’s all black now. They finished the job at 9 o’clock last night.”

“I called the officials and said, ‘You promised us not to take it down until after New Year’s Day,’ ” Mr. Ai recounted. “They said, ‘If the studio is to be taken down, it doesn’t matter if it’s sooner or later.’ ” Mr. Ai said that the officials might have moved ahead with their plans so that the destruction would take place without a spotlight. Neighbors of the studio called Mr. Ai’s assistant on Tuesday morning when they heard heavy machinery next door.

Mr. Ai said he rushed onto an airplane in Beijing, where he lives, and arrived in time to see four machines and dozens of workers toiling away on the site. About 80 percent of the structures had been destroyed by the afternoon, he said.

Shanghai city officials could not be reached on Wednesday evening for comment.

Mr. Ai’s studio was to be used as an education center and a site for artists in residence. He had invited a group of university graduates from Oslo to come to the studio next month to study architecture with him.

Mr. Ai said he believed that his advocacy in two causes might have prompted Shanghai officials to order the razing. The first was that of Yang Jia, a Beijing resident who killed six policemen in a Shanghai police station after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle. Mr. Yang became a hero among many Chinese, and was later executed. The second was the Kafkaesque case of Feng Zhenghu, a lawyer and activist who spent more than three months in Tokyo’s Narita Airport after Shanghai officials denied him entry. Mr. Ai made a documentary about Mr. Feng’s predicament.

Mr. Ai has also demanded democracy for China, criticized government corruption for playing a role in the deaths of schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and stridently supported Liu Xiaobo, a political prisoner who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Mr. Ai said that Shanghai officials had originally supported his plan for a studio on the site, which is in a village known for its grape farms. He said he spent $1 million to transform a dilapidated warehouse into a vast working space. He began designing the building in summer 2008, and construction ended in July 2010.

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Mr. Ai has come to see his escalating conflict with government officials over the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule as performance art. In November, he spread the word that he was throwing a river crab feast at the studio to protest the destruction order. The word for river crab, hexie, sounds nearly identical to the word for harmony, which the Communist Party claims to promote; the party’s critics like to say censors are “harmonizing” the Internet and other forms of media.

Mr. Ai was put under house arrest in Beijing two days before the feast, but about 800 people showed up at the studio anyway.

“You can’t imagine that in Communist history, this would happen,” he said.

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Why Did Chinese Authorities Raze AN Artist’s Studio?

Rob Gifford and Steve Inskeep From: NPR Article Published: 2011.01.13

STEVE INSKEEP, host: This next story speaks to the complexities of living in China right now. It involves a prominent Chinese artist and architect. His work includes a role in the famous Bird’s Nest Stadium used in the 2008 Olympics.

More recently, he built a studio that was meant to be a cultural magnet for Shanghai. He did that with the government’s encouragement. And when it was all but done, the government tore it down this week.

NPR’s Rob Gifford is following the strange story of the artist Ai Weiwei.

Hi, Rob. ROB GIFFORD: Hi, Steve.

INSKEEP: What was this studio, exactly?

GIFFORD: Well, as you say, he was encouraged to build it. It was on the outskirts of Shanghai, and it was supposed to be a kind of artist village, the center of an artist village. He’s been part of those of kind of areas in Beijing, and I think Shanghai was looking to him for spicing up the artistic world here. In Shanghai, they always feel they’re lagging behind Beijing a little bit.

But then, yes, he fell foul of the authorities, and they came at very short notice on Tuesday and knocked the whole thing down.

INSKEEP: So we’re not talking about a room when we say a studio. We’re talking about a complex. Why would the government demolish it?

GIFFORD: Well, he says himself that it’s a retaliation for his support of democrats and dissidents and political causes that the Communist Party doesn’t like. Why, then, might they have asked him to build it in the first place? Well, because he walks a very fine line, as you suggested. He helped to design the Bird’s Nest Stadium that we all saw at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

And so he walks this fine line between knowing the authorities and having worked with them, and actually being a real thorn in their side. And it seems that things have tightened up here, and they decided that they didn’t want him anymore to be the center of this artist community.

INSKEEP: So there was a brief moment, perhaps, of things being a little more open. Now things would seem to be a little bit more closed. But why wouldn’t they just arrest him if they don’t like what he’s doing politically?

GIFFORD: Well, that’s a good question. A lot of the focus, as you know, has been on Liu Xiaobo, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who’s serving an 11-year jail sentence for being politically provocative.

I think there’s a few reasons that they haven’t touched Ai Weiwei. One of them is that his father was a very famous poet in the Communist era and apparently one of Chairman Mao’s favorite poets. And I think those connections have probably protected Ai Weiwei over the years.

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Also, he’s very savvy the way he plays things. He blogs a lot. He tweets a lot. He sails very close to the wind, but he knows when not to go too far. So I think his case is a classic Chinese case now: not much political freedom here, plenty of economic freedom, a lot of artistic freedom - but a very fine line and only a very small space for political activists to work in.

And I think he’s going to have to watch his step very carefully, indeed. Or he could end up in the same condition as Liu Xiaobo, being detained and being arrested.

INSKEEP: NPR’s Rob Gifford, helping to explain those complexities.

Rob, thanks very much.

GIFFORD: Thank you, Steve.

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Escalating Crackdown Following Call for “Jasmine Revolution” in China Shao Jiang From: Amnesty International Article Published: 2011.03.11

The Chinese government has criminally detained a total of 26 individuals, disappeared more than 30, and put more than 200 under soft detention since mid-February after anonymous calls for “Jasmine Revolution” protests first appeared online. As of today, three of the criminally detained have been formally arrested while five have been released on bail to await trial, a dozen of the disappeared remain missing including a number of prominent human rights lawyers; while almost all of the soft detentions have been lifted. Authorities also chose to hand a very harsh 10-year sentence to Liu Xianbin, a democracy activist, on March 25 for “inciting subversion of state power” to signal to those currently detained for similar crimes that they could be subjected to lengthy sentences. See the list below for a complete account of the arrests, detentions, and disappearances.

“After the international community rallied behind writer Liu Xiaobo, who was put behind bars for 11 years for his speech, or lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has disappeared, the Chinese government now pushes back by criminally detaining, disappearing and possibly torturing many more writers, netizens and lawyers for their peaceful expression,” says Renee Xia, CHRD’s International Director, “the scope of the crackdown and the seriousness of the crimes used to detain or indict individuals have made this one of harshest since 1998 when the government imprisoned a couple dozens pro-democracy activists for organizing the China Democracy Party.”

While five of the 26 criminally detained—Cheng Wanyun, Mo Jiangang, Lan Jingyuan, Weng Jie and Zheng Chuangtian — have been released on bail to await trial, the rest remain in detention. Those detained have been charged with crimes including “inciting subversion of state power” and “subversion of state power,” serious crimes that could lead up to life imprisonment if convicted. The decision this week to formally arrest Ran Yunfei, Ding Mao and Chen Wei, all based in Sichuan Province, has left many worried that others may soon face a similar fate.

While these detentions are arbitrary, and clearly politically-motivated, they at least have some basis in Chinese law. The same cannot be said for the enforced disappearances of lawyers and activists, some of which have now lasted more than one month. Given the experience of prominent lawyers such as Gao Zhisheng, who was repeatedly disappeared and tortured while held illegally by the police, it is likely that many of those who are missing may be facing similar mistreatment. Reports have surfaced that lawyer Tang Jitian, who was seized by police at the same time as Jiang Tianyong and Teng Biao, was tortured while he was being held incommunicado. Tang has since been sent back from Beijing to his hometown in Jilin Province, but is being held under soft detention, warned to keep quiet, and barred from contacting the outside world.

In addition to those criminally detained or disappeared, more than 200 activists and netizens were subjected to soft detention, which also has no legal basis in Chinese law, as part of the crackdown. At this time, these restrictions on activists’ movements have largely been lifted. Many more activists and netizens have been interrogated about their blogs and Tweets, which mentioned or commented on the “Jasmine revolution”, or they were questioned about their recent activities and whether they know anything about the organization of these protests.

The actions of the Chinese government lay bare once again its policy of zero intolerance of political dissent and its willingness to completely disregard Chinese law and international human rights standards for the sake of rooting out any potential threat to the communist party’s monopoly of power. In the context of the democratic uprisings taking place in the Middle East and North Africa, the Chinese government, fearful of its own people, is counting on getting away with staging one of the most repressive campaigns in more than a decade because of the international community’s preoccupation with events elsewhere.

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CHRD urges the international community, particularly the governments of the United States and members of the European Union, to take a public stand to condemn these detentions and disappearances. At a time when the international community is so vocal in its support of citizens seeking greater freedoms, it must not turn its back on China and its people. Given the severity of the current situation, CHRD believes that strong and concrete actions by world leaders, such as issuing public statements and suspension of some diplomatic activities and visits with the Chinese government, can make a difference.

CHRD calls once again on the U.N. Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearance, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to take urgent action and send communiquÊs to the Chinese government regarding these cases. These are important and meaningful actions and must be continued despite the Chinese government’s continued defiance, manifested most recently in its response to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s demand that Gao Zhisheng be released.

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Ai Wei Wei: ‘growing force behind Jasmine Revolution very strong’ Peter Foster From: The Telegraph Published: 2011.03.07

he controversial activist-artist, whose Sunflower Seeds is currently on display at Tate Modern, said he was now under constant surveillance, accusing the Chinese authorities of stifling all opinions “like Chinese parents from olden times”.

“In the past two weeks, over 100 people have been arrested. Some are long-time writers, scholars, lawyers; some are just onetime students saying ‘let’s meet on a certain corner, a certain street.’ It’s very strong,” Mr Ai said in an interview with Time Out Hong Kong to be published next week.

Calls for a Jasmine-style protests at appointed sites across China posted from dissident websites abroad have angered the Chinese authorities, sparking clashes with international media, a tightening of internet controls and a huge police presence on the ground.

With such draconian controls in place, it has been impossible to assess the true appetite of Chinese people for social and political reform of China’s one-party state, but Mr Ai said that the government had moved to intimidate universities, a traditional centre of dissent.

“Many universities will not allow students to come out, mainly because teachers have received a certain note ordering them to do their duty, otherwise they will be in trouble, or their school will be in trouble. So the country is very tight right now,” he added.

“The true result is that China is controlling universities more than ever before over these past 18 days. The government cannot afford to lose this battle. But another factor is that the people who have strong beliefs for change have become ever more necessary.”

China’s leaders have appeared rattled by calls for “jasmine” protests from overseas dissidents, veering between acknowledging the potential for social unrest caused by China’s uneven development and dismissing the notion of a jasmine protest as a fantasy of the western media.

On Saturday at the opening of the annual sitting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, acknowledged the “great resentment” felt by some people over corruption, land grabs and rising prices.

However on Monday the country’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi, dismissed any talk of “jasmine” protests and denied Chinese police had beaten foreign journalists despite well-documented assaults and complaints from the US and EU ambassadors.

Ai Wei Wei has become an increasingly vocal critic of the Chinese government since the 2008 when he refused to attend the Olympic Games opening ceremony despite being the creative consultant on the iconic Bird’s Nest Stadium.

As the son of Ai Qing, China’s best known modern poet whose work is studied by children across China in state-authorised text books, Mr Ai has enjoyed a measure of protection, although in the last year the state has shown increasing impatience with his public criticism and social activism.

Last year he was put under house arrest for the first time after his new Shanghai studio was slated for demolition and this year

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his first major retrospective exhibition in China was cancelled for being too politically sensitive.

However he shows no sign of backing down, admitting in a wide-ranging interview with Time Out that while the idea of going jail frightens him – his father spent a total of 26 years in jail and political exile – he feels a responsibility to use his position to speak out.

“It’s such a pitiful thing that you don’t even want to say it,” he said of his house arrest and the ongoing surveillance, “their lacking of confidence, their lacking of skill of communication, their refusal to discuss intellectually any matter.

“They [China’s ruling Communist Party] have to have an enemy. They have to create you as their enemy in order for them to continue their existence.”

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POSTS FROM AI WEIWEI’S TWITTER ACCOUNT Ai Weiwei English-based translations at http://aiwwenglish.tumblr.com/ 2011.03.31 - 2011.04.03

THURSDAY MARCH 31, 2011 11;47 PM: It’s a check on fire and safety, yet they need to register our identities. //zhi_fei: If there’re too many fire hazards, then you’ll be ordered to shut down the studio? They really care about you very much. RT //aiww Yesterday even the fire department came, also a group of policemen. RT //kunlunfeng: This is such a novel excuse. RT //aiww 14 policemen and a cameraman. The reason is to carry out a spot check on the identities of the foreign assistants here.

FRIDAY APRIL 1, 2011 12:00 AM: I saw http://t.co/pYnIJs3 12:03 AM: I’ll trickle //MZ_sharui: //aiww I hope you’d go and I hope you’d stay. Contradicted. Whatever can keep you safe and healthy is fine.

12:04 AM: It’s better to change than to plan. RT //365hope: “Die Presse”, Austria, March 29: Artist Ai Weiwei (//aiww) plans a partial move to Berlin.（Künstler Ai Weiwei plant Teil-Umzug nach Berlin）http://goo.gl/OUnf8 12:05 AM: It’s not impossible RT //365hope: German “Berliner Zeitung” 3/29: Ai Weiwei//aiww will become a Berliner Ai Weiwei wird Berliner http://goo.gl/8HC2p 12:05 AM: Step, step. //lopakaka: //aiww Many 50 Cent eggs.

12:07 AM: Which head? RT //jmszl: You’re finally going? Pat his head for me RT //mobaobao: //aiww God, we’re just talking about you. Tomorrow around 8 or 9 I’m coming. I’m in Heicun.

12:10 AM: Have I been busted already? RT //Valerie_Guo: Sending my greetings as well. Giving you a comforting caress.

RT //wufake: //aiww After so many years of Teacher Ai’s concern for the motherland, the police paid a visit to the studio for the first time, menacing and appearing perfectly justifiable. This is a landmark incident. Greetings and peace to Teacher Ai and all studio staff.

12:35 AM: They brought two female officers, as if they were coming for you //duyanpili: The people from the Chaoyang District Bureau are in such a leisurely mood, carrying cameras to check on identities late at night. //aiww Chaoyang District Branch Bureau. //pearlher: This is strange, entering other people’s houses to check ID’s. //mreggpain: The police forcibly registered ID cards - http://moby.to/y18o2l 11:51 PM: A quick action. RT //feifei0621: Inspection is done, they’re preparing to leave. //aiww said: “I have a proposal.

Why don’t you leave one person to stay with us for a day?” They replied: “No need, no need. You’re also busy.” http://ww4. sinaimg.cn/large/701db4eejw1dfsubxuilsj.jpg Don’t worry, I’m not pregnant. //mozhixu: God Ai was startled RT //langzichn: RT //aiww: Right now the Chaoyang subbureau has come again to register ID. This is already the third time. Seems they need a big action.

They’re still very polite. On official business.

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At a basic level the police are tired, and without choice. They’re working in the midst of a great machine. No ethics or rules.

No virtue and legal boundaries SUNDAY APRIL 3, 2011 One hour ago a bunch of police came to Ai Weiwei Studios at Caochangdi FAKE 258 with a search warrant and 8 staff members were taken away to Bejiing Chaoyang District Nangao police station for questioning: Xuye, Qian Feifei, Dongjie, Xiaowei, Xiaoxie, XingruiJiangli, Xiaopang Zhizi. Lu Qing is with the police at home. There are now police in front of the studio and no one is allowed to enter. Ai Weiwei was detained at Beijing Capital Airport 3 hours ago and [we] have been unable to contact him. (This is an assistant tweeting).

Liu Xiaoyuan: He might be detained.

Ai Weiwei was detained by two customs officers while crossing customs in Beijing Capital Airport. Just separated Ai Weiwei and his assistant. By the two customs officers taken to a separate location. Ai Weiwei’s phone has been shut off, and he’s already been out of contact for 50 minutes. The situation is unclear. Please everyone pay attention. (Note: This is an assistant tweeting.)

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Ai Weiwei: Victim of China’s ‘Jasmine’ Paranoia Melinda Liu From: The Daily Beast Published: 2011.04.06

The famous artist and dissident once seen as a protected “princeling” has been detained by a Beijing regime increasingly fearful that the revolutionary fervor gripping the Mideast will spread to China. Melinda Liu reports. Plus, Ai Weiwei reflects on his 2009 arrest and beating.

China’s widening net of repression seems to have netted its biggest fish yet. Authorities detained Ai Weiwei, a high-profile and outspoken figure in the world of avant-garde art and architecture, as he attempted to board a flight to Hong Kong on Sunday. Ai’s whereabouts remained unknown as of early Thursday Beijing time.

For nearly four days, the government didn’t even confirm that Ai had been detained. But as worry and outrage mounted in the West over his disappearance, an editorial in the state-run newspaper Global Times on Wednesday indirectly acknowledged his detention and painted a portrait of Ai as a “maverick of Chinese society” who likes nothing more than “to do something ‘others dare not do.’” In its English and Chinese editions, the publication contended that the West “ignored” China’s complex judicial environment to perceive Ai as a simple case of “human-rights suppression.” The paper, which often provides a platform for nationalistic voices, declared that Ai “chooses to have a different attitude from ordinary people toward law.

However the law will not concede before ‘mavericks’ just because of the Western media’s criticism.”

By describing Ai as an oddity prone to “surprising “ speech and behavior, the Global Times tried to make him out as a unique case with little bearing on “China’s great economic and social progress.” Yet Ai is unique precisely because everyone once thought of him as untouchable. His father, Ai Qing, had been one of modern China’s most famous poets. The younger Ai was therefore a “princeling,” which in Chinese political parlance refers to a child seen to have inherited sterling “revolutionary” credentials from a parent or parents. That Ai fell out of favor for his activism proves that politics can trump even the perks of the privileged.

Ai is also a visionary artist and architect. He helped design Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest Stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics, and the government promoted him as a cultural ambassador in the run-up to the Games. But that year turned out to be a pivotal one for Ai. He was profoundly affected by the death toll of the massive May 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which huge numbers of children died because their schools (many reportedly of shoddy construction) collapsed. Ai became increasingly critical of the government for alleged corruption in the building of schools in Sichuan. (One of his subsequent works featured 9,000 children’s backpacks, evoking the terrible post-quake scenes.)

In August 2009, Ai was beaten by police while attempting to attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, another Chinese who tried to investigate substandard building practices in the Sichuan quake zone. The following month, Ai was diagnosed as suffering from a subdural hematoma—bleeding on the brain—at a German hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery. A few months later, Ai wrote about his beating in Newsweek, appealing to President Barack Obama (who was about to visit China for the first time) to consider, “What does it matter if China’s economy grows when there are no basic protections for its citizens?”

If Beijing hoped to preempt grassroots discontent, its treatment of Ai is proving to be counterproductive.

Although Ai had been detained previously, his disappearance this week appeared to have more strategic planning behind it. His detention was preceded and followed by police sweeps of his studio in Beijing and questioning of those close to him. It took place after dozens of political activists, writers, lawyers, bloggers, artists, and other critics of the regime had

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been detained in an escalating crackdown. Since mid-February, scenes of unrest in the Mideast—and anonymous online exhortations for like-minded protests in China—have made the Beijing government jittery about the possibility of a Jasmine Revolution erupting in the Middle Kingdom.

But if Beijing hoped to preempt grassroots discontent, its treatment of Ai is proving to be counterproductive. Ai’s supporters have circulated tens of thousands of online messages calling for his release, despite the fact that his name is blocked on Sina Weibo, China’s extremely popular Twitter-like microblogging service. To get around that obstacle, Netizens started referring to Ai Weiwei as Ai Weilai—which means “Love the future” but is also nearly homophonous with the artist’s name—but then that phrase was blocked as well.

Britain’s foreign secretary and his German counterpart urged Beijing to clarify Ai’s situation and to free him. The U.S. government will get its chance to press home its “deep concern” when Kurt Campbell, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, arrives in Beijing on Thursday. He was supposed to help both governments prepare for an upcoming session of the Sino-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue—but now Ai’s disappearance threatens to intrude on that agenda.

U.S. ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr., in a farewell speech ahead of his departure from China to launch a presidential bid in the U.S., directly criticized Beijing’s human rights record, singling out the detentions and imprisonment of prominent Chinese such as 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, American citizen Xue Feng, a geologist imprisoned on charges of stealing state secrets, and Ai. “The United States will never stop supporting human rights because we believe in the fundamental struggle for human dignity and justice wherever it may occur,” Huntsman said in a lecture that was unusually sharp for a foreign diplomat. A commentary in the Wall Street Journal suggested that Campbell’s trip be postponed “until Beijing tells the world in which dungeon it has dumped Ai Weiwei.”

It would be too simple to attribute Ai’s detention solely to the government’s fear of an Arab Spring infecting China. In fact, the artist’s confrontations with officialdom seemed to escalate last year. In November he was placed under house arrest; at the end of the year he was barred from leaving China, apparently to prevent him from trying to attend the Nobel award ceremony for Liu Xiaobo. On Jan. 11, Ai was startled to learn authorities were razing his studio in Shanghai, weeks before the slated demolition date.

In February, Ai started adding up the numbers of Chinese detained in relation to rumored “Jasmine” protests; he kept his tally on Twitter. (Even though the Great Firewall of China blocks Twitter, many Net-savvy Chinese nonetheless access it using commercially available VPNs and proxy servers.) On Feb. 24, Ai tweeted: “I didn’t care about jasmine at first, but people who are scared by jasmine sent out information about how harmful jasmine is… which makes me realize that jasmine is what scares them the most.”

Ai’s focus on “Jasmine”-related detentions also coincided with an especially sensitive period. Every year, the traditional Tomb-Sweeping Festival, which takes place in early April, signals the beginning of China’s political season, when protests are more likely to ignite—remember 1989?—as spring fever erupts and citizens shake off the dead hand of winter. In fact, the first “Tiananmen Incident” wasn’t in 1989 but rather on April 5, 1976, during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival when Chinese youth gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn the January death of Premier Zhou Enlai. Their emotion morphed into anger against the radical Gang of Four, who ordered a heavy-handed crackdown on the unrest. Now Ai himself has become a statistic in the “Jasmine” tally he’d been keeping—and the balmy days of spring are just beginning to permeate Beijing.

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China sheds little light on detained activist Ai Weiwei Barbara Demick From: The Los Angeles Times Written: 2011.04.21

Was it the semi-nude photographs of himself he posted on the Internet? Was it the current exhibit at London’s Tate Modern in which he uses millions of sunflower seeds to make a playful commentary about how the Communist Party treated the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung as the sun, his subjects as sunflowers fawning toward the light?

Or maybe the Twitter postings he’d make on the birthdays of the more than 5,000 children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, commemorations that served to remind the public that shoddy school construction led to so many deaths among the young? Or the blog in which he rambled on about modernism, animal rights, historic preservation and freedom of speech?

The list goes on. No doubt the artist Ai Weiwei did plenty get in the face of the Chinese authorities. But why he was seized April 3 at Beijing International Airport as he passed through immigration to board a flight to Hong Kong is anybody’s guess.

Chinese authorities have refused to say, and have failed to notify his family of his whereabouts or disclose the charges against him, despite a law requiring they do so within 24 hours.

Reports in the official press suggest they’re still trying to come up with the charges to justify his seizure, with pornography, tax evasion, plagiarism, bigamy and failure to obtain travel permits all mentioned as possibilities.

“It is a mystery. They haven’t notified us of anything. They shouldn’t be doing this. He really is just an artist trying to express his individuality through his art,” his mother, Gao Ying, said in a telephone interview.

But for Ai, art and activism came to be indistinguishable, putting him in frequent conflict with the powers that be.

The 53-year-old Ai defies easy definition. He is at once an architect, photographer, blogger and activist (he shuns the word “dissident”) whose presence in Beijing is disproportionate to his (considerable) standing in the art world.

He has 70,000 followers on Twitter. He designed many of the studios in Caochangdi, a Beijing district he dubbed the East Village that is increasingly supplanting the more commercialized 798 warehouse district as the hub of the contemporary art scene. His own brick-walled studio functioned as an open house for intellectuals and activists, not to mention dozens of stray cats.

And the fact that he remained free served to embolden a younger generation of artists, writers and activists.

“We saw the freedom he enjoyed and figured if we imitate what he does, we can get away with expressing ourselves without getting in trouble,” said Su Yutong, a 30-year-old activist now living in Berlin who worked with Ai on the Sichuan earthquake project.

Until recent months, Ai seemed to enjoy a Teflon-like immunity. His critical success abroad made him something of a national treasure. His work as an architectural consultant on the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics allowed him to teeter on the edge of the mainstream, although he later came to deplore the Olympics as a joyless monument to authoritarianism.

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His lineage also conferred privilege: His father, Ai Qing, despite years in exile during the Cultural Revolution, is revered today as one of China’s most influential poets.

Ai’s early works were more provocative than subversive. He painted Han dynasty vases with Coca-Cola logos and then broke them. His wife, Lu Qing, posed a la Marilyn Monroe, lifting a billowing skirt in front of Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square.

His activism was confined to relatively noncontroversial causes; he joined a group of animal rights activists in 2007 in a commando-style raid to rescue hundreds of cats headed to southern China, where cat meat is a delicacy.

But friends say the 2008 earthquake changed him. Ai, outraged by the arrests of bereaved parents protesting low-quality school construction, felt obliged to use his prestige to speak up for those without a voice.

“He got more serious about the content of his message after the earthquake,” said Lee Ambrozy, a translator who this month published the first major English-language collection of Ai’s writings, “Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009.” “With the Internet, he was reaching out not so much to the art worlds as an audience of disinterested and disaffected youth in the provinces.”

Ai traveled to Sichuan in 2009 to attend the trial of an activist, Tan Zuoren, who was investigating the earthquake. Police burst into his hotel room at 3 a.m., and in a scuffle, he suffered bleeding on the brain, requiring lifesaving surgery four weeks later.

At that point, his art and activism merged.

At Munich’s Haus der Kunst gallery, Ai displayed children’s backpacks that spelled out in Chinese a quote from one of the mothers: “She lived happily on this Earth for seven years.”

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Internet Users Invent Ways to Outwit Beijing’s Censors Jeremy Page and Loretta Chao From: The Wall Street Journal Published: 2011.04.22

BEIJING--Chinese Internet users are finding inventive ways to bypass Internet controls, as Beijing intensifies its efforts to stifle political dissent online, especially on popular microblogging sites.

Web censors have worked hard to delete almost every reference to dozens of dissidents, including artist-activist Ai Weiwei, who have been detained since appeals for a “Jasmine Revolution” in China began circulating in mid-February. They also have stepped up efforts to prevent access to virtual private networks and proxy servers that wealthier, more tech-savvy urbanites use to access Twitter, YouTube and other sites blocked in China.

But as fast as the government blocks words, phrases, websites and servers, Chinese Internet users figure out how to share information and opinions in ways unthinkable before the Internet took off in the country.

To confound Beijing’s bowdlerizers, users have been known to post images of text rather than text itself, to jumble Chinese characters so they appear vertically, or to substitute sensitive terms with similar-sounding characters.

Soon after Mr. Ai’s name was blocked, for example, supporters began sending messages referring to him using the Chinese characters for “love the future,” pronounced ai weilai in Mandarin--until that, too, was blocked. Since then, people have been using the Roman letters AVV or the Chinese characters for “fatty” as code for the portly artist. Mr. Ai was detained April 3 by Beijing authorities as he tried to leave for Hong Kong, and is under investigation for “economic crimes.”

When Chinese censors blocked the name of Egypt’s former president, Hosni Mubarak, during the height of that country’s turmoil earlier this year, users substituted different characters for his name, too.

The censors’ dilemma was highlighted in February when online appeals for Jasmine Revolution protests in China suggested people refer to them using the code lianghui, or “the two meetings.” Lianghui is the term given to the simultaneous meetings of China’s legislature and its advisory body in March, so censors would have had to block all discussion of those meetings or wade through reams of official material online to weed out the protest appeals.

On China’s own Twitter-like microblogging sites, such as Sina Corp.’s Sina Weibo, Internet activists can work together to make politically sensitive material go viral before censors can act. Another problem for Chinese authorities : The more restrictions they impose, the more users become aware of them,.

Although China operates one of the world’s most active online censorship regimes, it has to pick its battles. Online discussion of local government corruption and other topics not deemed a direct threat to Communist Party rule often is allowed. Other subjects are targeted with the full force of the regime, such as allegations of corruption against the families of top leaders.

The constant cat-and-mouse between censors and users has bred an online culture in China in which sarcastic wordplay thrives. When censors delete sensitive posts on websites, users ridicule the action by saying the posts have been “harmonized”--a reference to President Hu Jintao’s trademark campaign for a “harmonious society.” But they use a homonym for the Chinese characters for harmony, which are Romanized as “hexie,” that instead means “river crab.”

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Guilty by Association Rachel Beitaire From: Foreign Policy Article Published: 2011.05.17

BEIJING — On a quiet block in western Beijing where otherwise only a few retirees can be seen walking their dogs or trimming their bushes, one building is under constant and conspicuous surveillance. A plainclothes policeman stands guard before an entranceway, while another keeps watch sitting inside a small cabin.

The unlikely object of the Chinese state’s attention in this instance is Liu Xia, a painter, poet, and photographer -- and the wife of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Guilty by association, she has been under house arrest, with almost no contact with the outside world, since November 2010, when her husband’s award was announced. No one has heard from Liu since February, and her friends are increasingly worried about her health. Still, there is no sign that the authorities are planning to relent.

Related Cultural Revolutionaries Ai Weiwei isn’t the only contemporary Chinese artist making Beijing nervous.

Liu’s arrest underscores a peculiar aspect to the recent Chinese crackdown on political dissidents that has seen the detention of dozens of prominent activists, intellectuals, and artists. Authorities are increasingly targeting not just critics of the ruling party, but their family members, including spouses, parents, and even young children. While the dissidents gain the headlines, their relatives are punished out of the spotlight. Though the wife of jailed artist Ai Weiwei was recently allowed a visit her husband, she could be next in line to lose her freedom.

It’s a punitive strategy that seeks to exploit Chinese traditions of filial piety. For China’s dissidents, family is often both a source of strength and weakness: Chinese families tend to be close and highly involved in each other lives, and they take seriously the promise to stick together through thick and thin. The government, aware of these close ties, is using them to put more pressure on activists.

It also bears echoes of the Cultural Revolution-era, when many Chinese families were torn apart as spouses and children were forced to denounce loved ones labeled by the authorities as capitalist traitors and were sometimes forced to take part in their public humiliation. Today’s China is again making a policy of manipulating familial love and devotion to suppress any political challenges.

“One of the more troubling trends we see in recent years has been for the government to more directly involve family members,” observes Joshua Rosenzweig, a senior researcher at the Dui Hua Foundation, a U.S.-based organization dedicated to improving human rights in China. “We see surveillance, constant harassment, even extended house arrests. These all happened before, but now they have become routine” -- as in the case of Liu Xia. Rosenzweig adds, “Legal procedure has become irrelevant” in the Communist Party’s quest to maintain stability. Under Chinese law, there is no procedure that allows for a person to be held indefinitely under house arrest without charges or a police investigation. “To put it simply, families are being held hostage,” says Rosenzweig.

Zeng Jinyan would concur. She has been under constant surveillance and subject to frequent house arrests ever since 2001, when she met her husband, AIDS activist Hu Jia, who is now serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence for “subversion of state power.” Zeng was a student when they met, and she says she never imagined her life turning out the way it did. “I thought I’ll graduate, find a job, and marry. I planned on a simple life and was hoping I could have enough time and money to travel the world,” she tells me in a telephone interview. But she has since become an acclaimed activist in her own right, detailing her everyday life under the party’s watchful eye on her blog and Twitter account. In 2007, Time magazine included

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her on its list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Clearly, the regime’s strategy backfired in this case.

Most families, however, don’t have nearly that kind of wherewithal. Take, for example, the family of Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-taught lawyer from Shandong province who was imprisoned for four years for his work with disenfranchised villagers and woman forced to have abortions. After his release, he was forced to live in isolation in a Shandong village, together with his wife, Yuan Weijing, and their 6-year-old daughter. Yuan is denied almost all contact to the outside world, including to her son, who she sent away to be raised by relatives so that he can attend school. In February, the couple managed to smuggle a video out of the country in which they described their plight. They were reportedly beaten and denied medical treatment after the video was posted online.

On the phone, Zeng describes the successive levels of pressure that the government applies to her: “First of all, there is worrying about [Hu’s] safety. For some time, we didn’t even know where he was and what kind of abuse he was suffering. I worry about his health, about his mental situation.”

“Then there is the question of making a living and sustaining some income as a de facto single mother,” she continues.

(Zeng’s daughter is three-and-a-half years old. Her father was imprisoned shortly after she was born). “Because of constant police harassment, I could not get a good job or start a business. For a time, I couldn’t even get a nanny for my child because when I hired one, the police would threaten her and scare her away.”

Zeng says the psychological warfare she faces is brutal. Between threats and detentions, she repeatedly has to deal with the innuendo from her surveillance teams and government-sponsored neighborhood committees, which suggest there were “high-positioned” men “interested” in her and imply that she could improve her situation greatly if only she would leave her partner.

“All this is meant to isolate me from society and to break me down,” Zeng concludes. “Sometimes it works. They planted deep trauma in my heart.”

Although Zeng has chosen to join her husband in dissenting against the government, picking up where Hu was forced to leave off when he was arrested for his activism, some relatives of dissidents prefer to keep quiet. Still others try to actively distance themselves from activism, sometimes going so far as to move to an entirely new city or even to file for divorce.

That’s what happened in the case of Yang Zili, a social commentator who was imprisoned for eight years in 2001 for organizing a discussion group on political issues. His wife at the time, Lu Kun, petitioned several times on his behalf, took care of his defense and finances, and visited prison when allowed, but eventually moved to the United States. The couple divorced after Yang was released in 2009. Yang says he understood her decision. “It is just too much pressure, being the wife of a dissident in China; it’s a fate many prefer to avoid,” he says. Still, Lu’s choice also made Yang’s life more difficult: the last couple of years of his prison term he was held in almost complete isolation, with no family visits at all.

“Tactics are definitely designed to put pressure on those who contemplate political activism,” Rosenzweig explains. “It is one thing to be willing to confront authorities or even go to jail, and another thing to know your family will suffer. This doesn’t always deter everyone from speaking up, but it is a factor dissidents take into account.” Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate, referred to this factor in addressing his wife in a speech before the court that sentenced him -- after a speedy trial that Liu Xia was not allowed to attend -- to 11 years in prison: “Throughout all these years ... our love was full of bitterness imposed by outside circumstances, but as I savor its aftertaste, it remains boundless. I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin.... My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight,” Liu said.

Wives (and in some cases husbands) are not the only ones who earn the attention of the state: Zeng’s parents, who live in Fujian province, receive frequent police visits, while her in-laws in Beijing were put under house arrest several times. In another case, the elderly parents of an activist were threatened by the local police in their small town and were then rushed to Beijing so that they could pressure their son to stop his involvement in human rights organizations. A Shanghai lawyer,

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Li Tiantian, reported in February that her boyfriend was threatened that he’ll be dismissed from his job on account of her activism. Li has since been taken into police custody.

Although some of the dissidents were arrested for their involvement with social media, those outlets also have served as a balm, as families facing repression from the government try to contact the outside world. When human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong was arrested in February, his wife, Jin Bianling, opened a Twitter account to record her efforts to get information as to his whereabouts, counting the days of his detention online to a crowd of several thousand followers. (Jiang returned home two weeks ago, but is under surveillance, and the couple declined requests for press interviews to keep a low profile.)

Twitter isn’t a medium known for its depth of emotion, but it was undeniably heart-rending when Jin described a conversation with her 8-year-old daughter one evening not long after Jiang’s arrest. “Mommy,” Jin recorded the child saying.

“We shouldn’t think about daddy much. You told me when I sneeze, it is a sign that someone is thinking about me. If we make daddy sneeze where he is now, he might be in even more pain.”

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AI WEIWEI’S “HOUSE ARREST”– IN THEIR HOUSE, NOT HIS! Jerome A. Cohen From: NYU US-Asia Law Institute Blog Article Published: 2011.05.25

Recent developments in the investigation of the famous artist-activist Ai Weiwei have again laid bare the extent to which China’s police have warped the country’s Criminal Procedure Law. On May 16, Ai’s family announced that his wife had just been allowed to see him for about twenty minutes of monitored conversation in an unknown place. It might have seemed that the police, perhaps to take the sting out of widespread foreign condemnation of their conduct in the case, were softening their attitude after keeping Ai in unexplained incommunicado detention for six weeks. Yet, as the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, confirmed on May 20, instead of demonstrating uncharacteristic police leniency, this visit revealed a new stage in Ai’s prolonged detention, one that constitutes a stark violation of Chinese law.

That law requires the police to make one of three choices if, within thirty-seven days after detaining a suspect, they do not have enough evidence to convince the prosecutor’s office to approve a formal arrest. First, they can unconditionally release the suspect. Second, if the investigation is to continue, under an arrangement similar to bail in many countries, they can release him for up to a year under a guarantee that allows him freedom of the city. Finally, if the suspect has a local residence, they can strictly confine him to his home for up to six months.. This last sanction, called “residential surveillance”, is designed to allow the police to keep close tabs on a suspect without his continuing to suffer the total deprivation of personal freedom imposed by detention. Only suspects who do not maintain a local residence but are deemed to require “residential surveillance” can be kept at a location designated by the police..

Nevertheless, in practice, the police frequently use “residential surveillance” as a pretext for continuing to hold someone in the detention-like custody of their designated location, even though his home is in the area. They pretend that the local suspect is under “house arrest”, but keep him not at his house but at theirs! This is in direct violation of not only the law but also the Ministry of Public Security’s own interpretations of the law, which prohibit what they accurately call “disguised detention”. Yet this is precisely what the police in China’s capital — not in some remote hamlet — have brazenly done to one of Beijing’s most famous residents.

Having apparently failed to come up with enough evidence to persuade prosecutors to approve Ai’s arrest, despite over a month’s intensive investigation and multiple interrogations of Ai, his colleagues and family, the police at some point placed him in their twisted version of “residential surveillance”. This gives them five more months to continue their investigation and incommunicado interrogations, without the time pressures of any other legal deadlines, before deciding whether to renew their prosecution efforts, release the suspect unconditionally or restrict him to the city under guarantee for another year. Of course, if further frustrated in their hope of formally convicting Ai of crime, they can always resort to another major weapon in their arsenal — “reeducation through labor”, which would allow them to impose up to three years of “administrative punishment” in a labor camp without having to tolerate the inconvenience of submitting evidence to prosecutors and judges.

For now, at least Xinhua has concluded that one of Ai’s companies, managed by his wife, committed crimes by not only failing to report a “huge” amount of taxes but also destroying accounting documents. Of course, if the police do not yet have sufficient proof even to obtain an arrest warrant, not to mention an indictment, how can Xinhua be so confident? The news agency tries to give the impression that the police are following the law, and even being lenient, by allowing Ai’s wife to visit him. Yet the Beijing police did the same in the Liu Xiaobo case, when the Nobel Peace Prize winner, a Beijing resident, was being illegally held under “residential surveillance” at an unknown location before his formal arrest, and Liu ended up with an eleven-year prison sentence. Moreover, in sentencing Liu, the courts refused to count the time served by Liu in residential surveillance as detention time to be subtracted from his sentence, even though it had been “disguised detention”.

Liu’s lawyers were denied the right to visit him while he was in “residential surveillance”, despite the fact that relevant regulations permit such visits without police permission. Thus far, police have discouraged Ai’s family from retaining counsel,

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but their friend, lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan, has bravely volunteered to take the case, if asked. He certainly knows that there is little even the best Chinese lawyer can do to challenge unlawful police custody, as Liu’s case showed. Although prosecutors have the theoretical power to review the case, in practice they do not. Courts can review a claim of illegal “residential surveillance”, at least when deciding upon the punishment, but, as in Liu’s case, they treat the matter as if the defendant has been confined at home. And, to be sure, no police official is prosecuted for keeping the accused in “disguised detention”, even if it runs overtime.

There is broad agreement in Chinese legal circles that the expected revision of the Criminal Procedure Law by the National People’s Congress should deal with “residential surveillance”. No consensus exists, however, about what the NPC should do. In China’s current repressive political climate, one cannot be optimistic that revision will end this abusive police fiction, despite the exposure Ai Weiwei’s plight has given it.

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Ai Weiwei Arrest: Why no One IS Safe From THose in Power Wia Jiangsheng From: The Christian Science Monitor Written: 2011.04.06

On April 3, the Chinese Communist authorities secretly detained the well-known artist Ai Weiwei. Neither his family nor friends were notified of what happened to him, why he was seized, or where he was. Like everyone else, they have now learned from the Xinhua News Agency that he is under investigation for “economic crimes.”

Since this happened to one of China’s most well-known cultural figures, it has prompted many to remember the opening shots of the Cultural Revolution, when the Maoist regime removed ideologically inconvenient artists, writers, and intellectuals from the scene at will without even any pretense to legal procedures.

After the long march toward the rule of law China has been tentatively treading since the end of the Mao era, this return to outright lawlessness is shocking even to a hardened dissident like me. If the authorities can detain a figure of such stature arbitrarily and hold him incommunicado as long as they want with no access to family or legal counsel, then no one in China is safe from the whims and anxieties of those in power.

This episode reveals not only the essence of a system where the individual has no rights, but also the evolution of a new brand of repression: the perverted “rule by law” instead of the “rule of law.” In other words, the application of legal loopholes to violate human rights instead of protect them.

“Residence under surveillance” – where one is detained with no habeas corpus rights – is one of those legal loopholes.

A little background on the evolution of this tool of “rule by law.” In the spring of 1994, the Chinese Communist Party was facing sanctions from the USA. At that time the Clinton administration was preparing to ease the sanctions by delinking trade and human rights, which encountered strong resistance in the US Congress. The opinions of the Chinese dissidents became the key bargaining chip.

Thus, President Jiang Zemin sent his police to detain me for negotiations. They even initiated a few conditions to improve human rights and the rule of law in exchange for me not to speak out against the delinking of trade and human rights. I did not agree at first. But, eventually, the compromise reached was that in exchange for releasing dissidents and also opening freedom of expression and loosening up on some trade union activities, I would keep silent on the issue of human rights and trade.

This agreement encountered great resistance within the Communist Party factions that opposed Mr. Jiang’s initiative. As a result, I was seized again, with a certificate of summons for interrogation. Held incommunicado for two days, I protested the continuously served summons with no recourse.

I said: “First, in accordance with the Criminal Procedure Law, a summons for interrogation is just to talk to me. You have violated the law by interrogating me for more than 24 hours. Second, the continued interrogations should not be more than three times, and today is the last time. If you cannot produce a document that meets legal procedures to arrest or detain me, then I am sorry but I must be free to leave.”

Concerned about the impact if I bolted and exposed the deal, they assured me: “Do not worry, we will go get the right document from the Procuratorate now and give it to you tomorrow.”

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Why Ai Weiwei’s case matters for the future of China on the world stage Peter Foster From: The Teleraph Written: 2011.05.17

There’s a perception in Britain that human rights issues in China are really just a hobby-horse of the liberal left, an issue that only bothers people who pay an annual subscription to Amnesty International.

That’s a big mistake, because human rights – or more broadly, political reforms and good governance – are the fundamental key to China emerging this century as a developed and stable nation. Everyone has an interest in making that happen.

A recent report from France’s INSEAD business school picked up by the Wall Street Journal traces the clear correlation between good governance (rule of law, property rights etc) and prosperity.

Economically oligarchies and authoritarian states stall when they hit per-capital income levels of about USD$15,000 a per head. China is predicted to reach USD$8,300 this year, which means the time when these issues are starting to press is fast approaching.

“Without reform, growth is not sustainable,” says Antonio Fatas, an economist at INSEAD and co-author of the study, “This has clear implications for China and other countries.”

That’s why Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, on a visit to China last week, said that his biggest worry for China was not nearterm inflation, or asset bubbles or bad debts but the Communist Party’s long-term ability to adapt politically to a new world.

Asked about risks to the ongoing China story, Mr O’Neill (the man who coined the BRICs acronym) cited inflation and rising protectionism in Washington as “small” risks, before sounding his note of real caution.

“The third thing [risk to China], that’s much longer term; as Chinese people get wealthier, the Chinese central party machine has to adapt more and more to keep in synch with what Chinese people want, and that might be a real challenge,” he warned.

That’s why Ai Weiwei’s case matters – not just as an individual human being (though he does) but also because his case is symptomatic of the failure of China’s ruling Communist Party to create credible political institutions in which the rest of the world can have faith.

As Markus Loning, Germany’s human rights commissioner, said this week in Beijing. “It is not about a single case, but the rule of law. If we want to have development, it is important for people to claim that they are protected [by the law].”

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China Closes Festival That Alluded to Jailed Artist Andrew Jacobs From: The New York Times Written: 2011.02.02

BEIJING — As an act of subversion, the empty wall unveiled Wednesday afternoon inside the CCD300 gallery was rather tame. The apparent defiance came in appending the name Ai Weiwei below the blank space.

Lin Bing, one of the show’s organizers, described the void as a melancholy reference to the plight of Mr. Ai, who has now spent two months in police custody for suspected economic crimes. “We feel regret because his voice can’t be heard,” Mr. Lin told Reuters on Wednesday.

The void’s symbolism, it seems, was apparently too much for the authorities.

On Thursday morning, the curators of the show, the Incidental Art Festival, were forced to close their doors and scupper the exhibit, which included photographs, video and conceptual pieces by 19 participants, many of them performance artists.

“The whole thing has been canceled and everything has already been taken down” Yang Xiaoyan a gallery employee said Thursday afternoon.

What’s more, three organizers of the festival, including Mr. Lin, seem to have disappeared, she and others said. Wen Jie, one of the festival participants, said he believed the three organizers were being questioned by police — Mr. Lin, in fact, had told friends he had received an invitation from the Public Security Bureau Wednesday afternoon to “discuss” the exhibition.

“Judging from my own experience, they will be let out after 24 hours with a warning,” said Mr. Wen. His own experience includes a brief detention in late April after he staged a piece of performance art — “a sunbathing event” — that involved standing silently in front of the capital’s 798 arts district to protest Mr. Ai’s detention. “This is rogue behavior,” he said of the authorities. “They are just being totally unreasonable.”

A man who answered the phone at the Caochangdi police station Thursday afternoon asked a reporter to fax over questions but later declined to discuss the case of the three men or their festival. In the meantime, Mr. Ai’s own predicament remains something of a mystery. His whereabouts have been unknown since April 3, when he was led away from Beijing International Airport as he prepared to board a flight for Hong Kong. According to the state media, Mr. Ai, through his company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd, is accused of evading a “huge amount” of taxes and intentionally destroyed financial documents. Beyond that, there have been no details and no formal charges.

His family, friends and allies in the art world contend that Mr. Ai’s prosecution is a naked attempt to silence one of the country’s most notoriously fearless, in-your-face critics. His prolonged detention has prompted an international outcry that has yet to subside. On Wednesday, the Royal Academy of Art in London made Mr. Ai an honorary member, citing his role as “one of the most significant cultural figures of his generation.”

That news, however, did not make it into the Chinese media.

The timing of the Incidental Art Festival, just days before the 22nd anniversary of the crackdown on the protests at Tiananmen Square, was not terribly auspicious. Ms.Yang, the gallery employee, said the exhibit only lasted a few hours before the “pressure” was applied, although she declined to elaborate. “Only about 30 people came,” she said with regret in her voice.

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Told to Keep Low Profile, Chinese Artist Takes a Stand Andrew Jacobs From: The New York Times Written: 2011.02.02

BEIJING — After 10 hours of questioning and 7 more locked up alone in an interrogation room, Wang Jun was shown the door of a police station on Thursday night and given some parting instructions: Keep your name off the Internet, move to another part of town and do not talk to anyone but yourself.

But just a few hours later, Mr. Wang, a 28-year-old artist and curator, was sitting at a cafe in the capital’s 798 Arts District and spilling the beans to friends and a foreign journalist. “They’re trying to turn me from a normal, useful person into a nonentity,” he said with a sigh. “I can’t let that happen.”

Mr. Wang’s best-known work consists of self-portraits that show him weighed down by bricks, buried in snow or draped in bills of China’s currency, the renminbi. He was detained this week because an arts festival that he helped organize included a cryptic reference to Ai Weiwei, the artist, architect and social critic who has been in police custody for two months on suspicion of tax evasion.

Although Mr. Wang’s role in the Incidental Art Festival was limited to poetry and music, the authorities said he bore responsibility for the festival’s visual arts component, which included a vacant white wall graced with Mr. Ai’s name. The festival, which opened on Thursday afternoon, was shut down the next morning.

Two other organizers were also questioned and released on Thursday, but domestic security agents seem to have singled out Mr. Wang for punishment.

After his release, he arrived home to find an eviction notice from his landlord. Later, when he went to his favorite restaurant for dinner, the owner asked him to leave before he could finish his meal. “He told me I had to leave immediately and never come back because I had become politically sensitive,” Mr. Wang said.

His predicament highlights just how toxic the name Ai Weiwei has become here — and the extent to which the authorities will go to punish anyone remotely associated with a man who was once chosen to help design Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

Four of the artist’s friends and associates, including his driver, accountant and an assistant, are still missing, and news about Mr. Ai and the international outcry over his detention has been effectively scrubbed from the Internet in China.

“There is so much fear right now in Chinese society that even the police are terrified, which is why they are behaving this way,” said Wu Qifei, an events planner who was not involved in the banned festival.

One of the 19 artists who did take part, Wen Jie, said he found the turn of events preposterous, given that the content — save for Mr. Ai’s phantom presence — was so strenuously apolitical. “China is becoming a surreal place,” said Mr. Wen, 30, who stopped by the cafe to comfort his friend — and advise him to leave town.

Mr. Wang, a soft-spoken man, was not entirely able to articulate why he was so wantonly defying the authorities. “I know nothing good can come of this,” he said quietly.

But he suggested that the police had thrust him over the edge by orchestrating his eviction and making sure he was unemployed. “I no longer have any means to support myself,” he said.

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Last year, after the photograph of him swaddled in 100-yuan notes went viral, the police warned him that he was courting trouble. In April, he was detained for the first time after sending out an invitation to a “public sunbathing” event that he acknowledged was meant to commemorate the disappearance of Mr. Ai. A few days later he lost his job as the editor of a monthly arts magazine, he said.

As he sipped a cup of tea, Mr. Wang said Mr. Ai’s detention and the continuing crackdown on dissent that began in February had accentuated a growing chasm between established artists unwilling to upset the government and young upstarts unwilling to compromise their ideals.

“Everything you see out there,” he said, nodding to a row of galleries, “is just an illusion.”

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AI and I Rahul Jacob From: The Financial Times Written: 2011.06.04

For the American documentary film-maker Alison Klayman, the first 24 hours after Ai Weiwei was arrested on April 3 at Beijing airport were a bewildering time. She had been in touch with him almost daily since she began working on a film about him in late 2008 while she was living in Beijing; in the days after the arrest, even when she went to sleep, she did so with Skype on next to her head.

“If I didn’t see him, we would be in touch on Twitter,” she says, still sounding disbelieving, although we are speaking a month after his arrest. “Twenty-four hours was a long time not to have heard from him.” Even though Ai had posted more than 60,000 entries on Twitter before he was detained, a message from him never came.

Instead, over a month went by before his wife was finally allowed to see him. Then, on May 20, Chinese police alleged that a company controlled by the artist had evaded “large amounts of taxes”.

An article in the state-controlled Global Times within days of his arrest stated the case against Ai more pithily: “Ai Weiwei does as he pleases and often does what others dare not. He himself . . . realised he was never far away from the red line of Chinese law.” Like many young American journalists, Klayman moved to China straight after graduation. After finishing her degree at Brown University in Rhode Island in 2006 she worked as a freelancer in China until 2010, doing work for the wellrespected US public radio programme All Things Considered and other outlets.

The irony is that the documentary Klayman set out to make about Ai - Never Sorry, to be released this autumn - was also about the freedoms Chinese citizens enjoy today.

There is, she says, a “multitude of realities in China” - hence the dichotomy of a communist state that also allowed its most famous artist and activist to criticise the leadership. “The film is about this police state and the lack of freedom but it is also about an artist who lives his life to the fullest and travels to the west and says what he wants to on Twitter,” she says.

Offering an elegant teaser of the material she has collected for Never Sorry, Klayman’s 18-minute video Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei? was aired on the US’s Public Broadcasting Service channel just days before Ai’s detention. (The title has become a rallying cry in Hong Kong, where it has featured as graffiti and on T-shirts given away at last week’s art fair.) Watching the short video, one feels as if Klayman’s camera followed the artist everywhere.

She trailed after him to the areas recovering from the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, where he started a project to gather the names of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died in poorly constructed government schools.

(The roll call of victims forms a deceptively attractive wallpaper in his studio in Beijing.) In doing so, Ai infuriated the local government because he and other activists wanted the officials involved to be held responsible. She was witness to a scene in April 2010 at a police station in Chengdu, Sichuan’s provincial capital, where Ai demanded an explanation of why, the previous August, he had been attacked in his hotel room by the police. The beating had led to Ai being rushed to hospital with cerebral bleeding in September 2009, when he was in Munich - with Klayman - for the opening of his first major exhibition.

It is a testament to her precocious skill as a documentary-maker that Klayman, 26, manages to come up with material that is fresh and often moving despite the fact that her subject was so often followed by other cameras, not least his own. At the Chengdu police station, Ai was filming his complaint to the police while the New Yorker’s China correspondent, Evan Osnos,

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then working on a long profile of the artist, and other journalists were also in attendance.

Ai’s reputation for self-publicity and his adept use of social media made Klayman sceptical. “I went in every day [thinking] ‘Is he for real? Is he manipulating the camera?’” she recalls. “I was won over. He believes what he says. He doesn’t have to do what he does to be a famous artist.” She came away with the impression that Ai did not see himself as an activist, but rather that he felt that “if you are not taking the mantle of being an artist and therefore communicating with the larger society, you aren’t doing your job.” This was brought home to her when she asked Ai what represented the big turning point in his life.

Ai could have spoken about growing up in the desolately beautiful western province of Xinjiang, where his father, a revered poet, was banished to a labour camp. Or he could have spoken about the killing of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, or even his years in New York in the early 1980s. (A collage of wonderfully carefree, even sophomoric photographs of the artist as a young man in New York, posing nude one moment and photographing Allen Ginsberg the next, has recently been published in one of Hong Kong’s newspapers as one of many celebrations of the artist in the past few weeks.) Instead, Ai replied that getting on the internet had been the defining moment of his life.

“At the time I thought it was glib, such a technology-boostery answer,” she says.

“Later, I thought that the internet years of Ai Weiwei are a transformative period. It was a platform that led to so many things.” A vivid example of this is a very public dinner party Ai organised last year in Chengdu by declaring on Twitter that he was going to a restaurant renowned for its pig’s trotter in broth. The incident was a distillation both of Ai’s genius for political

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theatre and his wacky sense of humour. Not only did he pick a speciality that would resonate in a city of foodies, but he told the policemen who urged him to move the gathering inside the restaurant that al fresco dining was the best way to savour the local delicacy. He was joined by people from all walks of society in a moving show of support, even as the police cameras rolled.

Ai’s bravado founders when his mother, Gao Ying, is interviewed in his presence.

“I’m proud of him because he speaks out for the average person,” Gao, 78, says.

Then she says she wishes he were a more conventional artist because she wouldn’t have to worry about him. “If he was wrong, I could tell him he was wrong but he’s not wrong, so what can I tell him?” Gao chokes up and turns away from the camera; Ai, the performance artist who roguishly revels in provoking the police, is momentarily undone and unable to speak before he gently tells her not to upset herself unduly.

Klayman had intended to end her documentary at the opening of Ai’s Sunflower Seeds installation at Tate Modern last October, but that was before the film was overtaken by events. A multitude of events, in fact - the demolition of Ai’s studio in Shanghai late last year, the disappearance of activists and lawyers in China in the crackdown over the past few months and finally Ai’s arrest.

Klayman, who was in post-production on her documentary, has had to keep adding to it. “We are in a different situation now [in China] than we were six months ago,” Klayman says, worrying aloud about whether she will be allowed to return.

“This film wasn’t about a person in jail. My work hasn’t changed. The context has.”

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Translating AI Weiwei Andrew Stout From: The Economist Article Published: 2011.04.28

AFTER Lee Ambrozy moved to Beijing in 2004, she quickly grew accustomed to the spectacle that trailed Ai Weiwei wherever he went. The first time she saw the artist and activist in person, he was accompanied by five video cameras. Some passersby cried out for “Teacher Ai”; others stopped to bow. But Ms Ambrozy, an art-history student with a social science background, could only laugh. The scene was like something from a Eugéne Delacroix painting—and Mr Ai, detained by Chinese officials earlier this month, was still a couple years from earning his musket and flag.

Then in 2008 she received a call from Mr Ai’s office. The artist was looking for a translator, someone who could turn his controversial blog into a book. “The caller immediately offered me the job,” Ms Ambrozy said over the phone. “Anyone who knew what they were doing would have asked for a sample translation or tried to set up a meeting. But she didn’t. She just sent me the text.”

Mr Ai’s office had good reason to seek her out. Since graduating from Oberlin college and coming to Beijing, Ms Ambrozy has immersed herself in contemporary Chinese culture. She has translated Chinese for MoMA in New York and the China pavilion at the Venice Biennial, and she now oversees Artforum’s Chinese language website and maintains her own blog, Sinopop.org, which reports on Beijing’s art world for English and Chinese readers. In conversation, her enthusiasm for the more subtle aspects of Chinese culture is infectious. She is a natural teacher.

But she was initially sceptical of Mr Ai’s overtures. Finally, after several additional calls, she requested a meeting with the artist, who invited her to his famous self-designed studio on the outskirts of Beijing. In a 2010 profile in the New Yorker, Evan Osnos described the property as “a hive of eccentric creativity” with “airy buildings of brick and concrete” surrounding “a courtyard planted with grass and bamboo.” Others have compared it to Andy Warhol’s first New York studio, the silver Factory—a model that was surely not lost on Mr Ai, who has written reverently about the Pop artist. “It’s a very comfortable complex,” Ms Ambrozy said. “It’s like a little oasis in a village and very calm inside with lots of animals, lots of people working and recording things. He even had this little farmer family in the back raising chickens. It’s like its own little world.”

After Lee Ambrozy moved to Beijing in 2004, she quickly grew accustomed to the spectacle that trailed Ai Weiwei wherever he went. The first time she saw the artist and activist in person, he was accompanied by five video cameras. Some passersby cried out for “Teacher Ai”; others stopped to bow. But Ms Ambrozy, an art-history student with a social science background, could only laugh. The scene was like something from a Eugéne Delacroix painting—and Mr Ai, detained by Chinese officials earlier this month, was still a couple years from earning his musket and flag.

Then in 2008 she received a call from Mr Ai’s office. The artist was looking for a translator, someone who could turn his controversial blog into a book. “The caller immediately offered me the job,” Ms Ambrozy said over the phone. “Anyone who knew what they were doing would have asked for a sample translation or tried to set up a meeting. But she didn’t. She just sent me the text.”

Mr Ai’s office had good reason to seek her out. Since graduating from Oberlin college and coming to Beijing, Ms Ambrozy has immersed herself in contemporary Chinese culture. She has translated Chinese for MoMA in New York and the China pavilion at the Venice Biennial, and she now oversees Artforum’s Chinese language website and maintains her own blog, Sinopop.org, which reports on Beijing’s art world for English and Chinese readers. In conversation, her enthusiasm for the more subtle aspects of Chinese culture is infectious. She is a natural teacher.

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But she was initially sceptical of Mr Ai’s overtures. Finally, after several additional calls, she requested a meeting with the artist, who invited her to his famous self-designed studio on the outskirts of Beijing. In a 2010 profile in the New Yorker, Evan Osnos described the property as “a hive of eccentric creativity” with “airy buildings of brick and concrete” surrounding “a courtyard planted with grass and bamboo.” Others have compared it to Andy Warhol’s first New York studio, the silver Factory—a model that was surely not lost on Mr Ai, who has written reverently about the Pop artist. “It’s a very comfortable complex,” Ms Ambrozy said. “It’s like a little oasis in a village and very calm inside with lots of animals, lots of people working and recording things. He even had this little farmer family in the back raising chickens. It’s like its own little world.”

Before their first meeting, Ms Ambrozy braced herself for the arrogance of a global art superstar. But as they settled into an easy rapport, she discovered a good listener with a surprising lack of ego. As for what the artist saw in his would-be translator, she suspects it was her fidelity to his writing, which touched on a variety subjects within art and politics, but was increasingly critical of the Chinese government. After years of puckish exhibitions, Mr Ai’s blog, started in 2005, seemed to provide a platform for his activist tendencies. It allowed him to turn whims into agitprop for his admirers. As his commitment to human rights deepened, his audience grew. The zealous scenes he inspired on the street now had as much to do with his political voice as they did his artistic celebrity. Ms Ambrozy agreed to work with him, and they started searching for a publisher.

The two immediately established a work pattern. They would meet in Mr Ai’s living room and pour over his texts. The scope of the project seemed to grow each day. When the government shut down the blog in 2009, Ms Ambrozy said she felt a strange relief, as if their book had finally found closure.

When I called Ms Ambrozy, s he was finishing a translation of a speech given in the 1950s by Mr Ai’s father, the celebrated poet Ai Qing, to a cultural worker’s union. She delighted in explaining the speech’s faded influence on Chinese intellectual circles. The speech is now hard to find in any language, its message of modernisation and reform evidently snuffed out by the Cultural Revolution that began in the 1960s. As Ms Ambrozy spoke of the elder Mr Ai, the parallel with his son’s struggle seemed plain. “Ai doesn’t like to talk about his father, but it’s clear his father is a very big influence on his life,” she said.

Three years after the artist first reached out to his translator, MIT Press recently published “Ai Weiwei’s Blog” (which we write about here). Ms Ambrozy was at home in Beijing when she learned via Twitter that Mr Weiwei had been detained by Chinese officials. Four days passed before the government announced he was being held for an investigation into his “economic crimes”, a catch-all charge often used by Chinese officials to publicly discredit dissidents. The detainment was the latest in a series of government reprisals against Mr Ai in recent years. In 2009 he was beaten by the police in a Chengdu hotel room, and suffered a cerebral haemorrhage thought to be related to the attack. In late 2010 Chinese officials put him under house arrest while city authorities demolished a studio he’d recently built in Shanghai. When Ms Ambrozy learned of this latest imbroglio, she was prepared for it to blow over like the others. Now, weeks later, she finds that the avenues once strolled by the artist and his many fans remain too quiet for comfort.

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Now Free, a Chinese Dissident Muzzles Himself Andrew Jacobs From: The New York Times Article Published: 2011.06.23

BEIJING — After 80 days held without charge, China’s most voluble government critic, the artist Ai Weiwei, emerged from detention late on Wednesday night, thanked reporters for their concern and then did something almost unimaginable — he refused to say anything more.

“I can’t talk about the case,” he said Thursday afternoon, speaking outside his home, his generous girth visibly diminished by the months in custody. “I can’t say anything.” He then politely asked the nearly two dozen journalists to leave him in peace.

Although Mr. Ai was released on a form of bail that imposes a yearlong restriction on his movement and prohibits him from interfering with what the authorities described as an investigation into tax evasion, Chinese law does not explicitly prevent him from speaking about his ordeal — or any other matter.

But Mr. Ai, 54, who in recent years had become a persistent and freewheeling critic of Communist Party rule, has most certainly been instructed that his freedom depends in part on his ability to censor himself. Until April 3, when the police whisked him away from Beijing International Airport as he sought to board a plane for Hong Kong, Mr. Ai was an avid user of Twitter and a readily accessible source for foreign journalists seeking a barbed anti-establishment quote. His artwork, showcased in New York, London and Berlin, also provided searing critiques of government neglect and malfeasance.

The question many of his friends and admirers were asking on Thursday was whether Mr. Ai’s seemingly genetic predisposition to thumb his nose had been beaten into submission. “He has a Damocles sword hanging over his head,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “That means any time he opens his mouth, he puts himself in danger.”

The government, which reportedly gained a confession from him about his “crimes,” has not publicly acknowledged any restrictions on Mr. Ai’s ability to express himself. Responding to questions from reporters on Thursday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said the conditions of his release applied only to his freedom of movement — he needs permission to leave Beijing — and any potential inference with the continuing investigation. “China is a country under the rule of law,” Mr. Hong said. Yet the contours of the Chinese legal system, as rights lawyers here know well, tend to be fuzzy. Petitioners are often thrown into extralegal holding cells known as black jails; dissidents are frequently cooped up in their homes for months on end; and domestic security agents have a variety of means to keep troublemakers in line.

Gao Zhisheng , a self-taught legal rights defender, has been missing since April of last year, disappearing soon after he defied the authorities by telling a reporter about the torture he endured during an earlier detention. Liu Xia, the wife of the jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been held incommunicado since October. And this month, a United States rights group released a letter by the wife of a lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, who is blind, that described the beatings the couple suffered during months of forced confinement in their rural village.

For those who have grown accustomed to speaking their mind, the restrictions can be hard to swallow. Zhao Lianhai, a Beijing activist who sought greater compensation for the victims of a tainted milk scandal, gained early release from a twoand-a-half-year prison term after he reportedly pledged to stop his public protests. “I support and thank the government, and I feel deeply sorry for the remarks I made against the government in the past,” Mr. Zhao wrote in an online message to supporters after his parole last December.

But three months later, prompted by the detention of Mr. Ai, he broke his silence with a torrent of Twitter comments that

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have become increasingly impassioned and frequent. “I’m ashamed of myself for not speaking up until now,” he wrote in one of his first dispatches. “I cannot stay silent anymore. I’m ready to go back to prison. I would rather die than give in.”

Wu Lihong, a Jiangsu Province environmentalist who served three years in prison after exposing local officials whose machinations allowed a lake to become fouled with industrial pollution, was told he would be jailed again if he publicly revealed the details of his mistreatment in custody, which he says included whippings and cigarette burns.

Speaking by telephone on Thursday, Mr. Wu described the web of other restrictions that he said were imposed by the police since his release last year: No Internet access and no interviews with the media — and under no circumstances was he to photograph the lake. Although he remains free, Mr. Wu, a machine salesman by trade, says he has paid a steep price for his intransigence. Each time he finds a job, he said, the police arrange for his prompt dismissal. In recent months, he has survived by growing vegetables on the small plot of land next to his house, he said.

It is too soon to tell what kind of restrictions Mr. Ai may face on his ability to work, socialize or communicate with the outside world. Any impulse to speak out may be tempered by the knowledge that three of his associates remain in detention as part of a financial inquiry that his family says is groundless.

Some human rights advocates, even as they celebrated his release on Thursday, said they feared the government might have successfully muzzled one of the nation’s most renowned voices of conscience.

“A political power can easily silence an individual,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a rights lawyer in Beijing. “But in doing so, it also shows its fear and lack of confidence. And it also shows to the world the failings of China’s legal system.” .

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Ai Weiwei: Artist, Dissident and ... Tax Evader?

Elizabeth Lynch From: Huffington Post and China Law & Policy Article Published: 2011.06.30

Taxes are a tricky business in any country, let alone China. Tax codes are usually overly complicated and let’s face it, if you are making money, you can afford to hire accountants who think “creatively.” American country singer Willie Nelson owed close to $32 million dollars in back taxes when the IRS declared one of the tax shelters his accountant was using to be in violation of the U.S. tax code (he later settled for $16 million, raising the majority of that money through the sale of his album entitled “The IRS Tapes: Who Will Buy My Memories?”);Leona Helmsey the billionaire New York City hotel operator, served four years in prison for tax fraud (Helmsey allegedly enlightened her staff on a regular basis that “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”); and Al Capone, mafia hitman, bootlegger and perhaps the most famous tax evader of all time, served his longest sentence, seven years, for tax evasion.

When Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei was freed from police custody last Wednesday, the question was raised, most notably by Brian Lehrer in his interesting interview with Human Rights Watch’s Phelim Kine: “Are you sure his detention was for being a critic of the government and not for evading taxes?”

Since his release, the Chinese government has vaguely issued more information about the investigation that landed Ai in criminal detention for the past two and a half months. Although neither formally charged, arrested nor indicted, Chinese officials stated that Ai was held for “failure to pay a ‘huge amount’ of taxes and for willfully destroying financial documents.”

In particular, officials alleged that Ai’s company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. failed to pay 5 million RMB (USD 770,000) and owed an additional 7.3 million RMB (USD 1.1 million) in penalties.

But the question remains: what is Ai’s individual liability for a corporation’s tax evasion? Is he financially liable? Can he be criminally prosecuted?

The answer is ... you betcha, if it is determined that Ai had some form of “direct responsibility” over Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. Article 201 of China’s Criminal Law criminalizes tax evasion (Amendment VII to the Criminal Law Amends Article 201).

Like many laws in China, the actual law is not the end all and be all. Because China is a civil law country, often the generalities of the national law are fleshed out in various agencies’ “interpretations.” Here, Article 201, is further defined through the “Interpretation of the Supreme People’s Court on Some Issues concerning the Specific Application of Laws in the Trial of Criminal Cases for Tax Evasion and Refusal to Pay Tax” (“SPC Interpretation”).

The SPC Interpretation further defines tax evasion as: (a) forging, altering, concealing or destroying without authorization accounting books or supporting vouchers for the accounts; (b) overstating expenses or not stating or understating income in accounting books; (c) being notified by the tax authority to file tax returns but refusing to do so; (d) filing false tax returns; and(e) after paying the tax, fraudulently regaining the tax paid through the adoption of deceptive means such as fraudulently declaring the commodities it produces or operates as export goods.

But while Article 201 and the corresponding SPC Interpretation only uses the term “taxpayer,” Article 211 of the Criminal Law clarifies liability when the taxpayer is a corporation or business unit: “Units committing offenses under Articles 201, 203, 204, 207, 208, and 209 of this section shall be punished with fines, with personnel directly in charge and other directly responsible personnel being punished according to these articles, respectively.”

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Thus if Ai Weiwei is determined to be a “personnel directly in charge” of the Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. he could potentially be criminally and economically liable. Ai’s family has maintained that Ai cannot be on the hook because he is not the company’s “chief executive or legal representative.” However, the Chinese for “personnel directly in charge” is not limited to just the chief executive or legal representative; rather it is anyone in the company with management responsibility is better translated as executive officer).

Furthermore, the second category “other directly responsible personnel,” contemplates a much broader group of people that could potentially be anyone affiliated with the company that has some type of vaguely-defined “direct responsibility” over the company.

Potentially, there could be some validity to the alleged charges against Ai for Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. if the company did in fact evade taxes. The Chinese government has yet to offer any evidence of the company’s tax evasion. The company’s attorneys have appealed the charges of tax evasion and have requested a hearing before the Beijing Tax Bureau.

But if there is tax evasion, Ai’s liability will ultimately be determined by defining what his precise role is within the company.

According to friends and family members, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. merely dabbled in small design projects; the company was not involved in selling Ai’s work. In fact, according to Ai’s family, it is his wife who is registered as the company’s legal representative not Ai; Ai was a mere consultant.

And while the Chinese government could potentially have a legitimate claim against Ai for the company’s tax evasion, it’s illegal detention of Ai, the fact that there is still no official indictment, the fact that the government continues to hold incommunicado the company’s accountant, the one person who could explain the company’s actual tax filings, and that the government went after Ai instead of his wife, the legal representative of the Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., makes one suspect that the potential charges against Ai are a legal long-shot. Instead, political considerations -- the need to silence one of Beijing’s most vocal and well-known critics -- are the real reasons behind the prosecution of Ai. Again, the rule of law in China takes a back seat to politics and Party supremacy.

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Ai Weiwei release ‘not linked’ to Chinese PM’s visit to Europe Peter Walker From: The Guardian Article Published: 2011.06.22

A very minor ripple from the release of artist and activist Ai Weiwei will be felt in Downing Street: it will be one less tricky subject for David Cameron to raise as he settles down for talks with the visiting Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao.

The 68-year-old Wen, who officially ranks third in China’s leadership hierarchy, flies into Birmingham on Saturday and will tour the city’s Longbridge car plant, run by the Chinese-owned MG Motor, the next day, before heading to London to meet Cameron and others.

The trip will probably be dominated by trade issues, although Cameron will almost certainly raise China’s recent severe crackdown on dissidents and wider human rights issues.

While the timing of Ai’s release will be welcome – the Foreign Office has repeatedly pressed Beijing over the issue – it seems very unlikely that it was a sop to Britain, or to Germany and Hungary, the other countries Wen is visiting.

“I think the timing is one of coincidence rather than a deliberate signal,” said Roderic Wye, a China analyst from the Chatham House thinktank. “In the post-Tiananmen days, there was the occasional high-profile person released, but usually before a US presidential visit rather than a trip to Europe, with all due respect to our leaders. The whole point for China is: we don’t give in to pressure these days, China is big enough to make its own decisions without taking foreign pressure into account.”

In a briefing to reporters last week, China’s junior foreign minister, Fu Ying, stressed the commercial and economic focus, even drawing a parallel between the coalition’s deficit reduction efforts and the Communist party’s latest five-year plan.

A summary of Fu’s briefing said: “Because of different national conditions, China and Britain may see the same problem from different angles. It is one of the major tasks for both sides to increase understanding and reduce misunderstanding.”

Nonetheless, Wen will face protests. The Free Tibet organisation plans to demonstrate outside his central London hotel on Sunday afternoon and then at Downing Street on Monday.

Cameron must press Wen on human rights, a spokeswoman for the group said, particularly now Tibet has been closed to foreigners ahead of the 90th anniversary of the Communist party on 1 July.

“The Arab uprising brought Britain’s complicity with one repressive regime – Libya – to light, shaming the government and leading the prime minister to pledge that Britain need no longer choose between our ‘interests and our values’,” a spokeswoman said. “It is time to put human rights in Tibet and China on at least an equal footing with trade considerations.”

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FAKE_VILLAGE / ART CENTER / CITY: CAOCHANGDI, 798 AND BEIJING

A New Frontier for Chinese Art Aric Chen From: The New York Times Book Published: 2007.04.01

SEVEN years ago, the pre-eminent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made a bold move to the outskirts of Beijing. In an area called Caochangdi Village, by the Fifth Ring Road in the city’s northeast, he designed a compound for himself, some friends and a gallery called China Art Archives and Warehouse. For a while, they were left alone.

“We all thought they were cuckoo,” said Meg Maggio, a prominent contemporary art dealer in Beijing. “It was basically the countryside — really far away.”

But this spring, Ms. Maggio is moving there herself, joining an influx of high-profile galleries that are turning this quiet, birchand pine-lined enclave into an artistic hotbed. Indeed, as the 798 District, the epicenter of Beijing’s lively contemporary art scene, becomes increasingly crowded with boutiques and tourists, some of China’s leading gallery owners are bypassing the district altogether, and heading directly to Caochangdi Village.

Or maybe they should call it Ai Weiwei Village.

Ms. Maggio’s gallery, Pekin Fine Arts (www.pekinfinearts.com), will be housed in a new complex designed by Mr. Ai — a cluster of low, minimalist buildings clad in weathered gray bricks that suggests the hutongs, or traditional alleyways, of old Beijing.

Nearby, Mr. Ai designed similar compounds for the leading Swiss gallery Urs Meile (104 Caochangdi; 86-10-6433-3393; www. galerieursmeile.com) and the soon-to-open Three Shadows Photography Art Center (155 Caochangdi; 86-10-8456-6147), a

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14,000-square-foot space founded by the vanguard photographer Rong Rong to showcase Chinese and international works.

“Now there is a nice density here, like a community,” said Mr. Ai, who still serves as artistic director of China Art Archives and Warehouse (200 Caochangdi; 86-10-8456-5152; www.archivesandwarehouse.com).

If Mr. Ai is the area’s star artist, then its social hub is the hip warehouse gallery Universal Studios (A-8 Caochangdi; 86-106432-2600; www.universalstudios.org.cn) with its bohemian cafe and bar serving no-nonsense fare like beef noodle soup.

Nearby is the spectacular new National Film Museum (9 Nanying Road; 86-10-6431-9548; www.bjrt.gov.cn/museum) and the art space Platform China (319-1 East End Art Zone A, Caochangdi; 86-10-6432-0091; www.platformchina.org), which helped set off the area’s gallery boom.

Besides being remote (at least a 30-minute drive from central Beijing), Caochangdi’s mazelike warrens make it easy to get lost.

And addresses are basically useless. So the best strategy is to hire a taxi for the day, take a cellphone, call the galleries and pass the phone to the driver. A full afternoon on the meter, including round-trip fare and generous tip, should run less than 300 yuan, about $38 at 7.9 yuan to the dollar.

It might sound like a hassle, but you’ll be rewarded with an early look at more than a dozen galleries that represent the Chinese art world’s next frontier.

Other noteworthy spots include F2 Gallery (319 Caochangdi; 86-10-6432-8831; www.f2gallery.com) and the gargantuan PKM Gallery (46-C Caochangdi; 86-10-8456-6245; www.pkmgallery.com). Meanwhile, ShanghART, the trailblazing Shanghai-based gallery, is expected to open this fall, while Korea’s Gallery Hyundai is on its way, too.

“Things are developing really fast,” said Pi Li, the co-director of Universal Studios. “I think you’ll see restaurants and shops here in maybe two years. After 20 years in China’s art world, nothing would shock me.”

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda Francesco Bonami From: The New York Times Book Published: 2007.02.25

Recently I received an e-mail message from a curator friend inquiring about a painter and sculptor named Liu Wei. I had included his work in a show I organized in Turin called “AllLookSame?” that featured pieces by young Korean, Chinese and Japanese artists. “Do you believe that Liu Wei is just a good artist or a very good artist that will be famous in the future like Zhang Xiaogang?” my friend asked. (Zhang Xiaogang is a Chinese art star whose paintings fetch six figures.)

I am a curator, but I am not a clairvoyant. The word on Chinese art right now is “Buy!” but I’m not convinced that we Westerners really understand what’s going on there. Ten years ago, a few Chinese artists, like Chen Zen or Huang Yong Ping, appeared on the West’s radar screen, satisfying a certain outdated “Orientalist” craving among some collectors. People like Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China, who counts some 1,500 pieces of Chinese and Asian art in his collection, and another Swiss citizen, Lorenz Helbling, who opened his gallery, ShanghART, in China more than a decade ago, are reaping the profits of their foresight. But now Western collectors and dealers are descending on China like a swarm of annoying and aimless flies. Actually, today’s burgeoning Chinese art world depends very marginally, if at all, on the gallery establishment in New York and London. Huge crowds may jam the Miami Basel and Frieze art fairs, but those numbers are nothing compared with the potential size of the art market within China itself.

All of these things make it hard for me to answer my friend’s question about Liu Wei. But the real difficulty has less to do with the dangers of market speculation than with the fact that I haven’t quite figured out how a Chinese artist thinks, creates and produces a work of art.

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A studio visit to an artist in Beijing is often like 10 studio visits in Brooklyn. In China, you don’t find a painter, and a sculptor, and a video artist, but rather one artist who is working on painting, sculpture, photography, video and (why not?) performance all at the same time. When I visited Liu Wei in Beijing to select works for my show in Turin, he offered me not only beautiful cityscape paintings but also architectural models of famous buildings, like St. Peter’s Cathedral and the Empire State Building, made from the same rubber used to make fake dog bones. (I chose a painting.) In Europe, an artist that looks for inspiration in both a pet shop and the early work of Gerhard Richter would most likely be dismissed as lacking a consistent point of view. But in China the same criteria do not apply.

European artists often develop different bodies of work. Many Chinese artists seem to develop different bodies for each work. A great chaos under the sky was supposedly an excellent sign for Chairman Mao Zedong, and the same may be true for today’s Chinese artists. Complexity and change is part of Chinese philosophy. To favor one medium over the others would be to impose a silly constraint. If all is possible in contemporary art, why limit yourself ?

Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts currently receives applications from some 17,000 aspiring artists annually. Maybe a third of these will be accepted. But even if only 10 percent of those succeed in some way, there will be plenty of Chinese art to collect. What and by which ones has yet to be determined. But there is less and less doubt that the future, in some form or shape, will belong to the Chinese — not only as producers of art but also as consumers of it. Their capacity to devour and digest global ideas in order to create their own new aesthetic is simply astonishing. It’s happening already with architecture.

After overcoming their initial inferiority complex, the Chinese are realizing that they don’t need to buy into the Western star system. For every Koolhaas the West produces, they can produce 10 very good young Chinese architects able to deliver the same project, at the same level of quality, for about a third of the price. This doesn’t mean, of course, that China is immune from nouveau riche posturing. Louis Vuitton and Prada bags are as avidly consumed there as they are everywhere else on the planet. But a new, more sophisticated generation of creative people and style makers seems to be taking control.

Today, even government censorship has become a sort of performance art. During my visit to Shanghai last year, the government closed down a weeklong exhibition of ambitious installations in a newly renovated factory — some of the art was said to contain pornographic content — and a mild protest followed. But it all seemed to be part of a continuing game of cat and mouse, if not even a weird new form of art marketing.

They say that if you show a video of a tiger running in the jungle, a person from the West will focus on the tiger while a person from China will take in the whole image. There’s no question that while Americans and Europeans are looking at individual artists or individual works of art, the Chinese are seeing a cultural transformation of enormous proportions. Some Chinese artists will no doubt get eaten by the tiger. But perhaps it’s the dealers and the collectors in the West who are missing the big picture.

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Caochangdi Going Down? Galleries Issued Demolition Notices Dan Edwards From: The Beijinger Book Published: 2010.05.10

Rumors have been circulating for months about the impending demolition of Caochangdi, the suburb northeast of the 798 Art Zone that is home to many famous galleries such as the Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Platform China, Pékin Fine Arts and White Space – not to mention Ai Weiwei’s home. Now the fears of local residents and business owners have been realized, with everyone in the area issued notices that they will be evicted and the suburb demolished.

Yesterday the Global Times reported: “On April 16, one day before the second annual launch of Beijing’s biggest photography festival – the Caochangdi PhotoSpring – village authorities notified all resident enterprises that the area was set for evictions and demolition, but no specific time was mentioned.”

Artists and galleries in the area had hoped the PhotoSpring festival, which included may high profile exhibitions and events like the Sound Kapital book launch, would help save the area by drawing crowds and international attention. However, the Global Times article quotes photographer and Three Shadows founder and director Rong Rong as saying: “The notification [for demolition] came a few hours before official approval of the photography festival… It was a bitter-sweet and confusing day for me.”

When theBeijinger.com contacted Stephanie Tung, the International Affairs officer at Three Shadows, to confirm the content of the Global Times piece, she replied, “The article is true, unfortunately.”

She also noted, however, that there is some confusion about who authorized the impending demolition: “We received the notice from the village government, but after the PhotoSpring festival a reporter asked the higher-up town government and they deny the whole thing. It’s a very confusing situation for all the artists and art organizations involved.”

Three Shadows and others in the area are not resting on their laurels while they seek clarification. An online petition has been launched which Tung claims has already attracted over 500 signatures. You can add your name by clicking here.

Meanwhile the PhotoSpring continues until June 3 (demolition permitting), so get up to Caochangdi and enjoy what may be the last months of the area in its present form. Full festival details here.

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Unhappy picture for Beijing’s art hotbed Mitch Moxley From: Asia Times Book Published: 2010.05.20

BEIJING - Ten years ago, Ai Weiwei, one of China’s best-known artists, designers and activists, moved into a dusty village in the city’s far northeast corner, where he designed a compound for himself and friends, along with a gallery called China Art Archives and Warehouse.

Back then, the village, called Caochangdi, was little more than a collection of warehouses, a few homes and restaurants, and workers’ barracks. Today, defined by the low, grey-brick galleries that honor Ai’s original designs, Caochangdi has become Beijing’s creative epicenter and a hotbed of Chinese art.

Although often overshadowed by its better-known and increasingly commercialized neighbor, 798 Art District - also known as Dashanzi - Caochangdi today is home to some of China’s most prominent artists and galleries, including Pekin Fine Arts, Three Shadows Photography Art Center and Boers-Li Gallery.

But like other artist communities that have come before it, Caochangdi is in jeopardy. In mid-April, residents were given notices of eviction and told that the suburb would be demolished to make way for government projects, business development and, ironically, a “Cultural District”.

The notice, vague on timing and similar to one received last summer, originated from the village government office. “Following the progression of urbanization, our village has been listed for demolition and eviction, but the time has not been specified,” it read.

The threat of demolition arrives as the bohemian art zone has started coming into its own. Last month, Three Shadows spearheaded the PhotoSpring photography festival, modeled after the Arles festival in France. PhotoSpring, which involves 27 galleries and over 200 artists, drew more than 5,000 people on opening weekend and will run until June 30.

With the threat of bulldozers looming, PhotoSpring is in many ways seen as Caochangdi’s coming out party. Last month, the New York Times called Caochangdi “a new frontier for Chinese art”, while the People’s Daily recently dubbed the area “one of the nation’s artistic hotbeds”.

“It would be a real pity to lose this place,” said Song Jie, owner of Fodder Cafe, which participated in PhotoSpring. “I love this village.”

Nobody is sure when the wrecking ball will hit, and what, exactly, will be slated for demolition if it does. Some say the plan will spare some of the better-known buildings and galleries, while others are convinced the whole village will be torn down.

Villagers, including many whose families have lived here for generations, are taking a wait-and-see attitude. Some villagers interviewed for this article were skeptical that the village would be demolished, while others believed it was inevitable.

“Some people say ‘no’, some people say ‘yes’,” said the owner of a laundry shop, who declined to give her name.

“They have a plan, but it won’t happen this year,” Sun Qi Xiang, a 60-year-old retiree, told Inter Press Service. “This will all become high-rise buildings one day. It’s inconvenient ... For young people it’s okay, but for older people, we’re familiar with this place.”

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Artists and gallery owners have moved quickly in an attempt to save the village, but their strategies differ. Ai Weiwei has called for public protests. The artist Huang Rui, a Caochangdi resident and one of the founders of 798, has tried to raise international support by talking with foreign embassies. Three Shadows’ founders, the husband-and-wife team known as Rong Rong and Inri, drew up a petition in Chinese and English and circulated it at PhotoSpring and later online.

“We all have the same goal. Some might run, some might walk, but we all want to save the village,” said the 42-year-old photographer Rong Rong, who has been forced to move from several artist communities during his career. He hopes that prominent exhibitions like PhotoSpring will demonstrate Caochangdi’s potential to authorities. “I believe there is a future here.”

Complicating matters is the confusing ownership structure that, in many ways, has allowed the community to flourish. The land at Caochangdi is owned by the city government and leased to landlords. Many properties are then subletted several times over. Despite the eviction notice from village authorities, the district government is staying mum on whether the village will be torn down or not, said Stephanie Tung, Three Shadows international affairs director.

“Everybody’s very confused,” Tung said.

Art zones have been spared in the past. In 2004, the Dashanzi International Art Festival, held months before 798 was slated for demolition, helped save the area, which is today recognized by the municipal government as “a creative district and cultural park”.

But just a few kilometers away are indications of what could be in store for Caochangdi. In Beigao village, also a hub of artistic activity, several studios and artist homes have been turned to rubble, with others slated for demolition.

At Black Bridge International Arts Garden, a sprawling studio, artist commune and kung fu school, several dozen supporters have gathered outside to demonstrate against the pending demolition. In black robes and hard hats, carrying Styrofoam spears, axes and swords, they pose for photos behind a barbed wire fence.

Last month, Black Bridge’s water and electricity were cut, and then authorities spray-painted the character chai - which means “demolish” - on the walls surrounding the compound. The compound’s residents, a floating population of people ranging from their early 20s to middle age, have refused to budge.

Feng Zhong Yun, 43, an artist and kung fu master who founded the compound in 2007, has been through this before: He was forced to relocate when Beijing’s original artist village, Yuan Ming Yuan, was torn down, and again when rent at 798 became too high.

This time, though, he said he was not going anywhere: “I have to protect my rights.”

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The evolving canvas of Caochangdi Steve Hubrecht From: China Daily Book Published: 2009.09.03

An urban village on the outskirts of Beijing is emerging as one of the nation’s artistic hotbeds.

Less then a decade ago, Caochangdi had virtually no arts presence but now 20 galleries and another 20 cultural enterprises, including arts organizations, studios, museums and art schools, operate within or near the village. And the galleries are topnotch.

Art Basel, among the world’s most prominent contemporary art exhibitions, selects 200 to 300 galleries from around the globe to participate in its main fair. This year, at the 40th Art Basel, only four Chinese galleries made the cut, three of them from Caochangdi - Boers-Li Gallery, ShanghART and Galerie Urs Meile. The fourth Chinese gallery chosen was Long March Space from 798 Art Zone.

“There’s quite a bit of concentration of people in the creative industries, from architecture, modern dance, documentary filmmaking and art galleries to artist studio spaces, antique dealers and, of course, the National Film Museum,” says Meg Maggio, director of Caochangdi’s Pekin Fine Arts gallery.

Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, authors of Caochangdi, Beijing, Inside Out, list 46 arts and cultural enterprises around the village.

The evolving canvas of Caochangdi Artist Ai Weiwei has turned Caochangdi into one of China’s artistic hotbeds.

Ai Weiwei, the first prominent artist to move to the village, was a catalyst in turning the area into an arts haven, says Mangurian and Ray, who also operate BASE (Beijing Architecture Studio Enterprise), an experimental architecture center in Caochangdi.

Ai built his first studio in the village - located near the Fifth Ring Road, 20km north of the city center - in 1999, attracted by the space needed for contemporary art and the relatively affordable rent in such an outlying area. Ai has since designed or built many of other galleries and studios in the area.

Maggio sees the village’s growth as part of a larger trend of artists moving to the northeastern part of Beijing, spurred by the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ (CAFA) relocation from the downtown Wangfujing area to the Wangjing area.

The village was a grazing land centuries ago, then an imperial hunting ground and later a royal graveyard complete with extensive, reputedly beautiful gardens.

In the 1960s the imperial gardens and the villagers who tended them were converted into an agricultural commune during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76).

The southern part of the village became an office park in the early years of China’s reform and opening up.

Many of the different industrial-style buildings from those days are still occupied by foreign and domestic companies.

The unused ones provide the kind of space that attracts Ai and other contemporary artists.

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The Boers-Li Gallery, for instance, was once a fishpond, which was later covered. It now resembles a huge, empty ice rink.

“One of the things I think about what makes Caochangdi unique is that we have very interesting and unorthodox space with enough room to breathe. The spaces are interesting and innovative and more sort of quiet and thoughtful,” says Maggio.

Caochangdi’s experimental gallery spaces and lack of noise have combined to make a good environment for contemporary art, according to Pi Li, a co-founder of Boers-Li. “The main thing here is that it’s not so touristy,” says Pi. “This is a place where people do things,” says Robert Bernell, publisher of Caochangdi, Beijing, Inside Out. “A lot of galleries here are project-based. They do projects. And yes, they do sell them but primarily everything is about doing, thinking and a lot less about selling. I think for people in the art world, curators, that’s a lot more interesting than seeing paintings hung on walls with price tags underneath.”

Affordable rent and longer-term 20-year leases are another draw.

The village’s diverse population - locals, migrant Chinese and foreigners - creates an atmosphere that encourages innovative thinking, says Ray. “It has a vibe, an energy that is full of life and creative production,” she says. Local villagers, for instance, inspired by Ai’s designs, are building their own shanzhai, or cottage industry-style imitations.

Caochangdi’s colorful mix of people and architecture evolved of its own accord and can’t be replicated elsewhere, says Mangurian. It’s impossible to plan, build and designate a spot for creativity, he says. “But a place like Caochangdi is naturally spawning it.”

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Urban Rural Conundrums: Off-Center in Caochangdi, Beijing Mary-Ann Ray, Robert Mangurian From: Scholarly Publishing Office Book Published: Fall 2008

In a pocket defined by the intersection of the massive state-planned Fifth Ring Road and Airport Expressway, which took visitors into the city of Beijing and to the “One World, One Dream” Olympic venues this August, sits the urban village of Caochangdi. Screened from view by swaths of some of the three billion trees now being planted in Beijing as part of a Central Party urban afforestation mandate, Caochangdi is a thriving early twenty-first-century urban space of mostly illegal structures being built by entrepreneurial farmers and contemporary art dealers and artists.

Change has been inscribed upon the village since its origins as a wild grassland. (Caochangdi translates from Mandarin as “grassland.”) The area underwent extreme changes during the Imperial and Cultural Revolution and Deng Reform periods and is home to a mix of farmers, taxi drivers, and other industry people, as well as the international contemporary art mob.

Caochangdi tells a story specific to itself and its 4,000 to 7,000 mostly illegal residents, but it also has embedded within it the problems and possibilities of urban space as it occurs in this most unique and pivotal point in human history. Increasing rural-urban migrations have produced, for the first time ever, a fifty-fifty split in urban and rural inhabitants. Watching Caochangdi over the course of the past two years has been like looking at a mad fast-forward video revealing not only the mechanisms of urban change as they are occurring in early twenty-first-century Asia but also the human and spatial consequences of this change. Caochangdi’s recent development is spontaneous and seemingly “under the radar” of the planning authorities. This spontaneous behavior is, in fact, experimental urban development and can be seen as extremely healthy for the larger city and perhaps the larger project of the New Socialist Village.

Village in the City Caochangdi is one of more than 300 urban villages or “villages in the city,” to translate more directly from Mandarin, in Beijing. An estimated 1.5 million people, or one in every 10 Beijingers, live in these villages. Caochangdi is now in the midst of the encroaching city of Beijing. The village is in the Chaoyang District, the largest revenue-producing district in all of China, accounting for 2.5 percent of the entire gross domestic product of the country. It is minutes from the Central Business District and not far from the Olympic sites. And yet, the economy and atmosphere of the village itself operate much like a rural Chinese community. The only exception to this, and what produces a kind of strange urban conundrum that sets Caochangdi apart from the 300 or so other urban villages in Beijing, is that since the beginning of the twenty-first century it has become a locus of art production and international art galleries.

In human memory, this land began as unoccupied grazing land and was used by the Imperial Court as a hunting ground. The first inhabitants were the dead. Once the site was determined to have excellent feng shui, the Imperial family began to use it as a grave site and planted elaborate gardens. A zi ran cun or “natural village” sprang up, built and occupied by two extended families, the Sun and the Zhang. These villagers serviced the tombs and assisted the Imperial family members during visits to their ancestors’ graves.

During the Cultural Revolution, under Chairman Mao’s orders, the Imperial Gardens were demolished, and the village became an agricultural people’s commune. The villagers’ work ranged from manicuring gardens to planting and harvesting crops. At this time, as a part of the Shangshan Xiaxiang campaign, when young people were sent “up to the mountains and down to the countryside,” Caochangdi was considered much too far outside the city to be habitable for some people.

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When Deng Xiao Ping opened the economy of China to the global market, some private companies moved into the village and set up their headquarters and factories in large compounds or da yuan. Because of the need for more real estate to build such compounds, the farmlands diminished. The land—whether farm or private compound, as is the case with all the land of China—is not privatized but rather belongs to the government, that is, to the People’s Republic of China. This produces a kind of space under the influence of a hybrid experiment that is part capitalist, communist, and socialist. If we jump ahead in time, we will see that the remaining large sheds and compounds are now being transformed into galleries and studios for the operation of the new entrepreneurial contemporary art scene that has emerged in recent years.

The New Chinese Middle Class The farmland still remaining after the large compounds were built was subleased to the city’s new immigrants as the farmers became more entrepreneurial. Freed from farming by passing the work on to the more recent rural-urban migrants, the farmers now had time on their hands and cash in their pockets. To enhance their entrepreneurship, they became landlords by renting out parts of their own houses or by building larger (illegal) buildings where their one-story houses once stood. This phenomenon of new self-built, illegal multistoried structures has taken place over the past two to three years, giving rise to a middle class. While few options for investment exist in China, one of the most successful is for people to acquire, enhance, and profit from interior real estate by becoming landlords. The term interior real estate is used to distinguish traditional western forms of real estate that involve land ownership from the Chinese version where all land is held by the government (with land leases possible for a maximum of 70 years), but where architectural space can be owned, sold, traded, leased, and so on.

Many middle-class families are purchasing multiple apartments or flats in high-rises across China and profiting from the rental income. These are often rented by members of the floating population or bei piao, rural farmers turned urban construction workers. The floaters fill the flats with bunk beds, and the beds are filled 24 hours a day as they rotate between work shifts and sleep shifts.

Floating Populations and Chain Migrations Xiao Liu is a builder who runs his own business and a workforce of about 35 men near Caochangdi. He is from Lin Quan Village in Anhui Province, as are many of his men. He and his workers are what is called in China the nong min gong or “farmer workers.” They are also sometimes called bei piao, which means “Beijing floaters” or just “floaters” (the floating population). They are migrants to the city whose move from rural to urban was made during the first time in history that 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities.

In the city, the floaters are everywhere, but they are invisible. The floaters and their sites of production are screened from view by huge green mesh polypropylene nets. Every once in a while, they leak into the street and into public view, especially at Chinese New Year when they pack a bag of belongings and the year’s earnings and head home to their village for one month with their families.

Architects building in China do not seem to pay much attention to these producers of architecture who work 12-hour shifts, night or day.

Contemporary artists have paid attention to them and have found ways of making the floaters and their conditions visible.

Xiao Liu works for many artists in Beijing, especially in the 798 Arts District. He builds out their spaces and helps them construct large sculptures and installations. He began this work in the year 2002, and at first he had just seven or eight workers.

Xiao Liu is described by his clients as having “three heads and six arms,” which is a Chinese saying for a very capable person. He has also been nicknamed XL because he is considered an extra “large” man in spite of his short stature and slight build.

Xiao Liu has been very successful. He is now a landowner and is soon to become a landlord. It is even rumored by some that he has become a “millionaire.”

Art Chain Migration Early in the twenty-first century, artist Ai Weiwei moved to Caochangdi and built a compound of illegal structures to serve as a house and studio. He provoked a chain migration that produced an influx of other artists and galleries. As of fall 2008, of

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the total 65 registered companies in the village, 40 are cultural industries. Many of the galleries have been opened by Europeans. This action has brought with it sleek Mercedes and Audis, designer-clad art patrons, and exhibitions of truly stunning art that coexist with the rough-and-tumble village, producing a simultaneity without a collapse of differences among the people there.

In an attempt to capitalize upon the “natural” growth of the arts in Caochangdi, the Chinese Central Party has given village leaders the mandate to increase the art and cultural enterprises to 70 percent of the local economy by 2009. [1] As part of the Chinese Communist Party’s most recent Five Year Plan, President Hu Jintao has called for the national development of the Socialist New Countryside, and Caochangdi has been slated as a model Socialist New Village, even though it is smack-dab in the middle of the city. While anything is possible, it appears that the mostly illegal structures of the village are not slated for demolition. In fact, as part of the initiative of building the Socialist New Countryside, many improvements were made during the summer of 2007. All new gas lines and storm and sanitary sewers were installed, and new roads, parks, and landscaping were added. In the aerial view of the village, the asymmetrical freeway ramp system reveals that an on-ramp to the Fifth Ring Road was omitted, thereby sparing the demolition of most of the village.

It is impossible for us to know if the village is slated to be saved, and if so, why. The mechanisms of the echelons of power and responsibility are just too opaque and impenetrable (as they might be in any place under strong governance). The reason that the village still exists might be that both the village and its inhabitants are thriving and prospering without any effort being expended by the government. We know that the most internationally recognized (and now locally recognized) artist, Ai Weiwei, has rooted himself in the village and has provoked the prestigious chain migration described earlier. We also know that creative enterprises are regarded by the government as the most dangerous but also the most productive activities in China today.

The Dangers (and Benefits) of Creativity This combination of danger and productivity arising from creativity is so strong that recently, in the better-known adjacent Arts District in Beijing—the 798 Dashanzi area—6,000 meters of space was taken back from an independent cultural and educational enterprise leaseholder. This occurred after high-level and lengthy meetings that included the cultural affairs minister of Chaoyang District and Wu Yi, who is one of the four vice premiers of China and was ranked by Forbes as the secondmost powerful woman in the world in 2004, 2005, and 2007. The lease was revoked, and the space was taken over by the Cultural Affairs Ministry of Beijing in order to hold public exhibitions to showcase “appropriate” kinds of Chinese creativity.

It is also said by some—namely, by 798 artists and gallery owners who found their exhibitions and publicity suddenly censored—that the Chaoyang District’s occupation of the space was a way to keep an eye on this very high profile arts district.

The high profile of the 798 Arts District was evident during the August 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The district was flooded with visitors, including an anticipated 50 to 60 world leaders. Previous visitors have included former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The Arts District has been added to official guides of things to see that include the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Summer Palace. As a recent edition to this list, it is clear that 798 has become a huge asset for China’s public “coming out” associated with the 2008 Olympics, showing it to be a formidable player in the contemporary art world and scene and, even more so, as an upcoming creative source to be reckoned with. It was a bold move for the establishment to appoint filmmaker Zhang Yimou, whose work was once censored and banned in China, and artist Cai Guo Qiang, who uses fireworks, gunpowder, and fire as his media, to design the opening ceremony that heralded in the 08/08/2008, 08:08:08 p.m. opening of China to the world consciousness. Showcasing 798, Caochangdi, and other art enclaves in Beijing was a way to demonstrate China’s move away from being the widget maker of the world and, quite forcefully, toward design and creative output.

Inside out - Li Wai Bu Fen There is a saying in China—“Li wai bu fen.” This is a way of describing a lack of clarity about what is inside and what is outside.

It can refer to your clothes being inside out, not knowing a friend from an enemy, or not being able to discern the difference between your home affairs and external affairs.

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“Before 1992, in China, we did not have a notion of private space, or at least such a definition between public space and private space.

Every space was public. You go to 798 [the Arts District in the former military danwei], and you can still see this kind of format of collective buildings. It’s like a hotel—you didn’t have a toilet; you didn’t have a kitchen. Everybody had one bedroom, and we shared the kitchen; we shared the bathroom.

“This kind of new real estate thing really changed lives. People started to have their own private spaces. That’s the main thing. In the 1990s, it was a fantastic dream for a Chinese family to have their own apartment, with one kitchen, a toilet, and two bedrooms. For Westerners, it is very hard to understand how this change can inform and transform daily life for Chinese people. People started to have public space and privacy, their own space to act in.”

Pi Li, May 2007, Public Lecture/Talking Head at B.A.S.E. Urban Afforestation as Green Screen Also as a part of the Socialist New Village campaign, but more directly related to the Central Party mandate for urban afforestation, between three to four billion trees have recently been planted in Beijing. Afforestation is the word that the Chinese Official Press has adopted when speaking of the movement to counteract the massive deforestation that began with Chairman Mao’s agricultural campaigns. Deforestation has caused the Gobi Desert to advance toward the city at the rate of one kilometer per year, producing dunes as high as 30 meters and spring sandstorms that have become known throughout Asia and beyond as the dreaded “fifth season.”

The village has benefited from some of the urban afforestation in Beijing. Yet in Caochangdi, a mapping of the green space shows that 90 percent of the new trees and landscaping occur at the periphery of the village. This suggests an agenda less geared toward providing villagers with parks or street greenery, and more toward the production of a “green screen” that masks the village’s mixed bag of architecture, including a shantytown look, from the Airport Expressway and the Fifth Ring Road. These two arteries are, respectively, visitors’ first entry into the city, and the “powers that be” desire to make an impression as visitors take in scenes through the taxi or limo window. In fact, what the powers that be do not fully grasp is that tourists and visitors who make it to the village, which has been touted by Condé Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times as one of the world’s coolest art hot spots, leave having had one of their most memorable experiences in the city.

Mary-Ann Ray was appointed the Taubman Centennial Professor of Practice at the University of Michigan in 2007 where she is currently teaching. Ms. Ray also practices in her architectural firm of Studio Works in Los Angeles.

Robert Mangurian is a Principal of Studio Works, a Los Angeles-based architecture, planning, and design group he cofounded in 1969. Mr. Mangurian has participated as a design critic for graduate theses and studio work in schools of architecture throughout the country.

1. As one of the primary agendas, the Eleventh Five Year Plan of the Chinese Communist Party has the goal of fostering invention in China through the development of cultural and creative industries.

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The Village that Art Built David Spalding From: ART INFO Book Published: 2010.01.01

Caochangdi, a thriving arts district on the outskirts of beijing, continues to grow despite rumors of its imminent destruction.

“When a silkworm produces silk, it would never dream there is a Silk Road,” the artist, architect and provocateur Ai Weiwei said in an interview last year. Quoting a verse written by his father, the poet Ai Qing, he was reflecting on the surprising growth of Caochangdi, the burgeoning urban village and arts community perched on the northeastern outskirts of Beijing.

Not even someone as shrewd as Ai Weiwei could have imagined the chain of events he would help to set into motion when he moved to Caochangdi in 2000, ultimately transforming the quiet neighborhood into one of the city’s creative hubs. And in Beijing, where a top-down approach to urban planning and economic reform sometimes leaves people guessing about their future, the image of an unwitting silkworm seems particularly apt.

Drawn to the area because of its undeveloped land, Ai came to Caochangdi (which means “grasslands”) to build his studio and the China Art Archives & Warehouse, one of Beijing’s first artist-run exhibition spaces. Since then, the development of the dusty hamlet has been nothing short of stunning. Not long ago, taxi drivers hesitated to venture into this uncharted territory just beyond the Fifth Ring Road, and a visit to one of the few art spaces here required multiple phone calls for directions. Today, a barrage of dual-language signs welcomes visitors to Caochangdi Cultural Industry and Art District, pointing the way to the more than 20 galleries that have set up shop alongside the artists’ studios, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and produce stands that dot the village’s narrow lanes.

Caochangdi’s expansion is directly linked to the meteoric rise of the Chinese contemporary-art market that took place from 2005 to 2008. Artists suddenly had more money to build large and sometimes lavish studios in the area, while galleries from China and abroad — priced out of or turned off by the city’s other art districts — began to open up with increasing frequency, hopeful that these new spaces would pay for themselves in sales. The Chinese art market was among the most speculative and inflated until the downturn of 2008, and confidence in Chinese contemporary art as a quick, high-return investment has fallen, though many people feel that the market has simply undergone a natural correction.

Unlike the more self-contained, sanitized and tourist friendly 798 Art District, which is located in a former factory site about 10 minutes away by cab, Caochangdi is still a loose sprawl of unnamed and sometimes unpaved roads, crisscrossed by clotheslines and studded with the mounds of gravel that accompany the area’s many construction sites. Yet it is precisely this unique patchwork, plus a mix of residents that includes foreign and Chinese art dealers, primarily but not exclusively handling Chinese art, as well as villagers, artists, day laborers and taxi drivers, that has fostered a sense of community in Caochangdi. It’s a place where artists stop by each other’s studios for a beer and end up playing cards all night, where you can buy a pancake on the street for a quarter and then see some of the most daring and innovative exhibitions in China. In the past several years, many of the city’s most important art spaces have set up operations here, including Boers-Li Gallery, Chambers Fine Art, Galerie Urs Meile, Platform China, Pékin Fine Arts, ShanghART and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, making the village a mandatory destination for arts professionals visiting the city and for local collectors and enthusiasts. Some European artists have arrived, including Not Vital, who just completed a lavish new studio compound. China’s People’s Daily recently called the district “one of the nation’s artistic hotbeds.”

But despite its local prominence and international visibility, rumors have been circulating in recent months that much of Caochangdi (along with other artist villages and studio compounds in northeast Beijing) are being considered for demolition to make way for new government projects and business development — including, oddly enough, a “cultural district.” Last fall, when I asked artists and dealers living and working in the area abut these rumors, I heard conflicting predictions about

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what the future holds. According to speakers, plans may or may not include the leveling of architecturally significant buildings designed by Ai — low, rectilinear structures in gray brick that have become the area’s signature — including galleries and the studios of such well-known artists as He Yunchang (also called A Chang), Li Songsong and Wang Qingsong. The demolition could happen immediately, since a land assessor had already come to measure some of the spaces and determine the exact size of the lots. Then again, it might start within the next few years, or not at all. In other words, many people either were not privy to information that would directly affect them or wondered if a decision made today might be reversed tomorrow.

Change is nothing new in Caochangdi, a neighborhood which has been redefined continually over the past 50 years by a series of political agendas and economic shifts. Once the site of imperial graves and gardens, it was transformed into a farming village sometime during the 1960s — changes outlined in Caochangdi: Beijing Inside Out, a fascinating new book by the architects Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray. During Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the late 1970s, farmers realized they could make more money as landlords and began leasing their tracts to private companies and, in the past decade, to artists and galleries. The buildings that now stand on these leased properties, however, may not be legal, because they were built without proper permits and authorizations, and the farmers can always sell the land to developers who have other plans for its use.

Amid the rising tide of hearsay and innuendo within the art community, I found one person who spoke definitively about the situation. “First you need to understand that the general policy announcement from which the rumors started is a prohousing policy,” explained Meg Maggio, the founder of Pékin Fine Arts and a longtime Beijing resident. The idea, she said, is “to get people living on the city outskirts out of makeshift ping fang [literally “flat houses,” often one-story shanties] and into newly constructed lou fang [multistory] buildings. That is a great housing program of the Beijing city government and will improve many people’s lives. We are told by our developer and Ai Weiwei that while there was initial concern that this new prohousing policy would affect us, it is now clear that it will not.”

Meanwhile, just north of Cao-changdi in the Beigao studio complex, the mood this past fall was less optimistic. The artist Liu Ding told me that because of plans to build a theater and other construction projects, his studio and others there, which have been leased on a long-term basis and renovated, are likely to be torn down within the next two years. In nearby Changdian village, the Taiwanese artist Peng Hung-Chih finished construction on his studio recently only to learn that he might not get to use it for long. “There are still a lot of rumors,” said Peng. “I heard that the farmers want reasonable compensation [from the government for the land]. If they get that, the destruction will go on. I think my problem is not over yet.”

Peng, it turns out, was right. By mid-November, the plan to destroy the studios was proceeding rapidly. Residents were given three days to move out, but they hired a lawyer and were trying to negotiate with the landlord for more time and for compensation. At press time it was uncertain how much respite they had been granted — the first eviction deadline had passed and a new one had not yet been set. Although there was already snow on the ground, heat had been cut and running water was intermittent. Artists may be reimbursed the rent they paid in advance, but it will be much harder to recoup the money they spent on renovation. For their part, the artists knew that sinking money into property they didn’t own was a gamble, especially considering that if land is deemed desirable for other uses, even long-term leases can be broken.

Because of the lack of clearly established legal guidelines, chaos can arise when disputes between tenants and landlords escalate. In an extreme incident a few months ago, the Caochangdi branch of Seoul’s reputable PKM Gallery was caught up in a bizarre chain of events including the gallery’s landlord, whose divorce proceedings led to a dispute over the income generated by the property. Twenty thugs, allegedly hired by the landlord’s wife, took the gallery by force, stabbing a security guard and occupying the space for several days. When I stopped by shortly afterward, the police had cleared out the gang, but a notice had been posted on the door informing pkm that it must remove its belongings immediately. Although the paper looked official, the gallery director was questioning its validity and the situation was far from being resolved.

The recent confusion about who has the right to rent, to build and to destroy in Caochangdi demonstrates how uneven and minimally regulated development, coupled with shifting or conflicting national, municipal and village agendas, have allowed such districts to thrive but have also made their long-term survival uncertain. At the same time, rumors or no rumors, Caochangdi shows no sign of slowing down. Studios are still being built, and new galleries are launching, including Taikang Top Space (formerly located in the 798 Art District) and C-Space. While silkworms may not dream of the Silk Road or even of an

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Hermès scarf, they may find that spinning even the most beautiful cocoon may not always insulate them from forces beyond their control.

“The Village that Art Built” originally appeared in the January 2010 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction’s January 2010 Table of Contents.

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THE ECONOMY OF DEMOLITION AND FLAG-SHIP PROJECTS: THE CASE OF CAOCHANGDI Ruddy Doom Unpublished Written: 2010

Wherever god erects his church, the devil builds his chapel.

On 18 July 2009, at the Urbanization Land Reserve Motivation Conference, the commissioner of Beijing Chaoyang District announced: ‘this year, Jinzhan, Cuigezhuang and a total of seven regions are included in the land reserve project. The work to vacate and demolish the areas for relocation housing and land reserve is to be completed by 30 June of next year’ (Petition 16 April 2010, appendix 1). These large-scale reallocations are by no way exceptional in current China, and are somehow even unavoidable. On the other hand, those who object to these regulations are not without grounds, especially as the highest instances underlie the importance of the rule of law. Since 2009, residents of Beijing Chaoyang District, Caochangdi have been trying to protect their village. As we will see, this grappling is by no means a usual conflict, due to the special characteristics of the area. However, before looking into this case, some general clarifications are necessary.

Of course we cannot go into details when it comes to the growth of the urban population in the PRC. Let me however provide some stepping stones, which will make it easier to understand the specific case of Caochangdi. During the Mao era, one could without hesitation speak of anti-urban policies due to assumptions proper to Chinese communism. Rooted in the rural culture, the leadership looked upon the cities with distrust, not only because of the – well-founded – conviction that peasants have been the beast of burden of civilization, but also because they further believed that the townspeople were but a capricious mass, always inclined to produce ‘luan’ – chaos – the nightmare of each and every ruler in all-under heaven. The communist state controlled the urban-rural relationship through the hukou system: each person was ascribed a residence, which he or she could not leave without permission. Everyone was also connected to the danwei – the work-unit – which provided housing, food, medical care, etc. And, on top of it, there were the jumin weiyuanhei – neighbourhood-committees – controlling one’s daily activities and state of mind. The Chinese city air made nobody free. The modernization and open door policies altered the land- and mindscape dramatically as the ‘Special Economic Zones‘ and the coastal cities in general were now seen as driving wheels of rapid development. A tremendous wave of internal migration resulted: more than one hundred and fifty million people moved to the cities to work and live there, although they are still considered to be illegal residents without any legal protection. Some cities, e.g. Shenzhen, count more illegal then legal residents. In 30 years (1978 -2007) the urban population grew from 172 million to 594 million (including the migrants). The number of cities counting more than one million residents rose from 29 to 119 and 20 cities have a population exceeding 5 million. For the moment we have 5 megacities (of 10+ million) and more than 50% of China’s population live in cities. Estimates assume that Beijing’s population (greater Beijing) now exceeds 22 million.

According to some estimations, we will witness in the near future the growth of regional urban agglomerations, for example Hongzhen (Hong Kong + Shenzhen) or Shannking (Shanghai + Nanjing), with 45 and 66 million residents respectively (Doulet, 2008 :11). The growth of a megapolis leads to urban embolism and a lot of new problems: ‘…almost overnight, China changed from a vertically organized system to one that is increasingly territorialized with cities exercising a great deal of power‘ (Currier; 2008, 239). Indeed, due to decentralization processes, city governments are much more independent and behave much more entrepreneurially than ever before, following the global trend (Deuters et al., 2005). The expansion of the cities is both a source of a gap with the countryside (and the West) and of internal fragmentation and even near-exclusion.

On the one hand we see the emergence of the first exclusive gated communities, while on the other hand we detect the appearance of migrant ghettos (Ma, Wu, 2005b; Zhang, 2005). And even as the rate of conversion of land to urban uses is even exceeding the rate of population growth, prices are mounting quickly. Both state and society are going through a white

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water trajectory usually described as a ‘transition period‘ (in fact it is a hollow word). Approaches to the relationship can be roughly divided into two categories. The first assumes that ‘…civil society could develop in isolation from the state in China with the introduction of market economy …The crux of the criticism is that most social associations in China have been organized under the strict control of the state’ (Cho, 2009:115). As we will later argue, state-society relations do not necessarily develop along antagonistic lines. The concrete case of Caochangdi will thus be analyzed against this background of globalization and commodification, of evolving demarcation lines between local and central authorities, and of changing relations between civil society and state. Our focus will be on how an art village can eventually play a specific roll in this global picture. And, are we talking about ‘Bobos in paradise’ or about underground artists? Do we have to do with regeneration and cultural development or do we speak about a disguised real estate project? (Bobo is bourgeois bohemian , as used by Brooks, 2000).

Social movements and China The Nobel prize awarded to Liu Xiaobo once again activated the discussion whether the PRC was moving towards more openness and some form of democracy or was still ruled by a one-party system crushing all dissident voices. As if there was no rational position between the raving China-bashers and the cooing of the panda-huggers. Taking into account both the current economic position held by the republic and the sediments of past prejudices, any point of view from the West has to express some biases. One of the age-old conceptions concerning the Middle Kingdom is that the State grew fat and the population remained meagre. There is of course a lot of truth in the vision of a highly centralized State trying to dash all grassroots-movements, but this view, whether embodied by the mandarins or the CCP never covered the whole of reality.

Although revolutions were scarce, rebellion was always around the corner. This was very clear in the twentieth century, with the firm denouncing of the label of the Chinese as a people of eternal standstill. I will not go into the details of the nature of the Chinese revolution, but, as far as I am concerned, I endorse the vision of Lucian Bianco that this was as much the result of the autonomous actions of the peasantry – civil society – as it was the result of the strategic leadership of the party (Bianco, 2001).The Chinese revolution positioned itself in the middle of a worldwide struggle, thus cutting itself of from an age-long tradition of hailing the uniqueness of the country. Due to its extreme weakness, the Party even accepted looking into the Soviet mirror in order to delineate its own future. Soon after the ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign’, the tone once again changed: although Mao stressed the reality of one single world, the ‘the East is red’ strategy reconfirmed the unique position of the Chung Hua (the flower in the centre) in spearheading the socialist world revolution.

If we look at social movements, worldwide and from a historical perspective, two landmarks characterize the second half of the 20th century: 1968 and 1989. Alain Touraine was one of the first sociologists to define 68 as a new type of social movement (Touraine, 1968). The protesters were breaking away from the established and institutionalized movements (both their strength and weakness) and were not directed towards conquering State-power: it was in many ways an anti-systemic revolt. And, it was a convulsive set of events on a global scale, touching the US, Europe, Mexico, Argentina, etc. In a very twisted form, it also shook up China. If you look at the Cultural Revolution through the deforming ideological spectre offered by Mao himself, it looks as if society was revolting against the oppressive state, and that the Red Guards acted as a vanguard autonomous movement, freeing society from the shackles of bureaucracy, class oppression and so on. Strange as it may seem now, this vision was echoed by many Western fellow travellers in Europe. In fact, it came down to a nearly religious cult of the great helmsman and a ferocious inner-party struggle axing and killing thousands of officials. What was presented as a spontaneous movement - ‘it is right to rebel‘ – was orchestrated by a ruthless clique and plunged the country into anarchy, traumatizing the next generations of political leaders.

1989 was the second landslide bringing an end to the so-called real existing socialism of Soviet-styled regimes. ‘Wir sind das Volk’ probably illustrated best the undercurrent of this movement, which brought an end to State-centred commandeconomy and one-party-systems (as usual, the dawn of a new democracy is often postponed). Somehow, 1989 also affected China, but once again under very specific conditions. We have to keep some features in the back of our minds. Deng initiated the four modernizations and gave his blessing to a further radicalization of the former command-economy and of a transformation of the country, but he was firmly opposed to any move that could destabilize the country politically. Most of the leaders – especially Deng himself – have extremely bad memories of the period of the Cultural Revolution and mass demonstrations and chanting as ‘revolutionaries are the monkey kings’ only revitalized this sour past. The pictures – nearly

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in real time – of the execution of the Ceaucescu couple left the Politburo in shock. ‘Luan’ – chaos: the concept mesmerized the philosophers, emperors and current rulers as well. In the view of Deng, any movement from the street was a threat to the sacrosanct stability and any claim for more openness would weaken the Party, the country and finally put the economic reforms at risk. A grim contradiction was once again in the open: how could the system change without too much change?

The way the gremium crushed the ‘paper spring’ movement and bitterly condemned the ‘wall of democracy‘ left no doubt about their intentions. What was officially labelled ‘the events of Tiananmen’ was a strange mixture of spontaneous revolt, a ceremonial mix with things from the past – both of the imperial time (kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People in order to present a petition) and of the Cultural Revolution (slogans on the banners) – and clues to Western popular culture (pop music, dress codes). Much less univocal as sometimes depicted in the Western media, it nevertheless alarmed the top and was condemned by Deng as ‘counterrevolutionary‘ and ‘anti-patriotic’ and finally tanks silenced the voices of those challenging certain aspects of the power-elite (see, Perry, 2002, pp. 309-330). But, those in command were not totally blind to the fact that changes were somehow in the air, and that the best solution to the pressure was to go for a gradual, State-controlled top-down reform. As Tilly and Wood say: ‘The rise of regime-threatening social movements almost always stimulate attempts to repress them. But on average and over the long run, authorities, police and social movement organizers negotiated routines that provided broad opportunities for non-violent campaigns‘ (Tilly, Wood, 2009:89). Deng and his companions saw economic development and the growth of a prosperous class as the key to controlled change, because they firmly believed that if you want the people to be more conservative, you must give them something to conserve. *** Social protest and movements did not come to a standstill in the 21st century in China, but their nature changed. The old foolish man who tried to remove the mountain is out of date. Even human rights activists like Liu Xiabo, who are still fanning the fire of an overall transformation, are notably moderate in their pronouncements (but still irritating the diehards of the regime). At least three central themes have changed since the previous century. One is the nature of the regime itself.

Personalization of power in the hands of one single leader or a gerontocratic committee of immortals is no longer under discussion. The new generation is deeply convinced of the wisdom once expressed by Edmund Burke: ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’. Some democratic innovations with Chinese characteristics are on the agenda, but sudden and large-scale breakthroughs are still considered highly inconvenient. The second is that as long as the economic boom endures and people have at least the hope of a better future, protests in the beginning will be channelled to concrete and local items and not so much to the more abstract goals. Of course, all big turnovers start with small complaints, and even one rat can cause a dyke to burst (if the dyke is already weak), but the system is strong and selfconfident enough to discourage an assault . Thirdly: technological breakthroughs have resulted in a complete new setting.

Mobile telephones, blogging, the internet and networks have created a national and international surrounding attracting great enthusiasm from the grassroots movements and the deep concern of those in power.

The rise in social activism has not escaped the attention of leading circles, both within the State and the Party. Sometimes the protesters are much in line with the official aims, in fact the local authorities are lawbreakers. On the one hand, the central authorities use the protesters to counterbalance local strongholds to prevent them from becoming too independent, while on the other hand they want to have control over the protesters. This is what Li Lianjing and Kevin O’Brien labelled ‘resistance by law’ or ‘policy-based resistance’. This is the dynamic translation of the age-old and rather universal phenomenon: the firm belief that the emperor is good, but that he is unaware of the misdeeds of his courtiers (O’Brien, Lianjing, 2006).

And, of course, part of the leadership is always willing to muzzle the movements ‘in the public interest’. Nobody has any illusion when it comes to the liberal character of Li Changchun, the powerful number one of the propaganda department.

Through the process of registration, in giving official country, but he was firmly opposed to any move that could destabilize the country politically. Most of the leaders – especially Deng himself – have extremely bad memories of the period of the Cultural Revolution and mass demonstrations and chanting as ‘revolutionaries are the monkey kings’ only revitalized this sour past. The pictures – nearly in real time – of the execution of the Ceaucescu couple left the Politburo in shock. ‘Luan’ – chaos: the concept mesmerized the philosophers, emperors and current rulers as well. In the view of Deng, any movement from the street was a threat to the sacrosanct stability and any claim for more openness would weaken the Party, the country and finally put the economic reforms at risk. A grim contradiction was once again in the open: how could the system change without too much change? The way the gremium crushed the ‘paper spring’ movement and bitterly condemned the ‘wall of

267

democracy‘ left no doubt about their intentions. What was officially labelled ‘the events of Tiananmen’ was a strange mixture of spontaneous revolt, a ceremonial mix with things from the past – both of the imperial time (kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People in order to present a petition) and of the Cultural Revolution (slogans on the banners) – and clues to Western popular culture (pop music, dress codes). Much less univocal as sometimes depicted in the Western media, it nevertheless alarmed the top and was condemned by Deng as ‘counterrevolutionary‘ and ‘anti-patriotic’ and finally tanks silenced the voices of those challenging certain aspects of the power-elite (see, Perry, 2002, pp. 309-330).

But, those in command were not totally blind to the fact that changes were somehow in the air, and that the best solution to the pressure was to go for a gradual, State-controlled top-down reform. As Tilly and Wood say: ‘The rise of regimethreatening social movements almost always stimulate attempts to repress them. But on average and over the long run, authorities, police and social movement organizers negotiated routines that provided broad opportunities for non-violent campaigns‘ (Tilly, Wood, 2009:89). Deng and his companions saw economic development and the growth of a prosperous class as the key to controlled change, because they firmly believed that if you want the people to be more conservative, you must give them something to conserve. *** Social protest and movements did not come to a standstill in the 21st century in China, but their nature changed. The old foolish man who tried to remove the mountain is out of date. Even human rights activists like Liu Xiabo, who are still fanning the fire of an overall transformation, are notably moderate in their pronouncements (but still irritating the diehards of the regime). At least three central themes have changed since the previous century. One is the nature of the regime itself.

Personalization of power in the hands of one single leader or a gerontocratic committee of immortals is no longer under discussion. The new generation is deeply convinced of the wisdom once expressed by Edmund Burke: ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’. Some democratic innovations with Chinese characteristics are on the agenda, but sudden and large-scale breakthroughs are still considered highly inconvenient. The second is that as long as the economic boom endures and people have at least the hope of a better future, protests in the beginning will be channelled to concrete and local items and not so much to the more abstract goals. Of course, all big turnovers start with small complaints, and even one rat can cause a dyke to burst (if the dyke is already weak), but the system is strong and selfconfident enough to discourage an assault . Thirdly: technological breakthroughs have resulted in a complete new setting.

Mobile telephones, blogging, the internet and networks have created a national and international surrounding attracting great enthusiasm from the grassroots movements and the deep concern of those in power.

The rise in social activism has not escaped the attention of leading circles, both within the State and the Party. Sometimes the protesters are much in line with the official aims, in fact the local authorities are lawbreakers. On the one hand, the central authorities use the protesters to counterbalance local strongholds to prevent them from becoming too independent, while on the other hand they want to have control over the protesters. This is what Li Lianjing and Kevin O’Brien labelled ‘resistance by law’ or ‘policy-based resistance’. This is the dynamic translation of the age-old and rather universal phenomenon: the firm belief that the emperor is good, but that he is unaware of the misdeeds of his courtiers (O’Brien, Lianjing, 2006). And, of course, part of the leadership is always willing to muzzle the movements ‘in the public interest’. Nobody has any illusion when it comes to the liberal character of Li Changchun, the powerful number one of the propaganda department. Through the process of registration, in giving official owners remained full of resentment as this rent only equalled less than one tenth of the market rates. On top of this it was impossible to sell either land or building to the highest bidder. ‘By the end of 2004, a total of 13,095 percent of biaozhunzu homes in Beijing were returned to their pre-revolution owners’ (Hsing, 2010:23).

The mobilization of biaozhunzu home-owners resulted in a series of successful collective actions, whereby the municipal authorities spent a lot of money in housing subsidies in order to persuade tenants to move out and make the restitution effective. Paying the historical debt was easier as the Beijing authorities saw this project as one of their own key tasks and did not give the impression of having twisted their arm. Jingzufang stands for socialization through national campaigns, endorsed by the central authorities. Handing over these properties and depositing a fair compensation to the pre-1949 owners proceeded strictly and protests were far less successful as the top-down approach was lacking here.

‘Chiqianhu’ means those evicted households whose houses were demolished. Between 1990 and 2000 more than 0.5 million

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households were affected and the big clean-up in preparation for the Olympic Games was another blow for this category of residents. The reasons for discontent were many and most of the grievances were due to the fact that the authorities branded the protesters as obstacles to radical modernization (and private accumulation) and not as victims expelled from their life-world. As the top was very reluctant to give in or consider their claims seriously, the complainers became bitter, and sometimes – pushed over the edge – violence was in the air. The main grievances can be summarized into three clusters: compensation, relocation and fraudulent practices. As there was no generally accepted standard, there were always flaming discussions on what was – often rightfully – seen as a hugely unfair price because the gap between the compensation amount and the commercial value was simply dazzling. The relocation was also the subject of an intense divergence of opinions: in some cases the new settlement was considered to be too far and sometimes the housing conditions were substandard. In the more remote areas, local authorities sometimes illegally converted land for agricultural use into new building sites. The newcomers – often unaware of the construction ban – were once again confronted with the destruction of their houses.

As time meant money, the Demolition and Relocation Office did not always show much consideration towards those who were defending their life-world. Cutting of gas, water or electricity were common practices to intimidate residents. Ultimately, both private and public contractors resorted to ‘yeman chaiquan‘: the violent expulsion of the occupiers. Teams of so-called ‘migrant workers units’ were hired to do the dirty job, as the chance for impunity was very high if unknown stooges were used. As the better endowed had already moved out of dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods, those left behind were mostly poor and without protection. The floating illegal migrant workers were not even supposed to be there. In the newspapers they were often depicted as ‘lanluhu‘, ’tigers that block the road’ and were presented as ‘uncooperative and opportunistic negotiators for higher compensation’ (Huaxi City News, 1 Nov. 2004) (De TV – China Central TV for example – was much more critical and made a comparison with the violence used by the Red Guards)(Hsing, op.cit. :31). Their strategies of resistance were mostly quite unsuccessful. An open confrontation with the authorities, at least if you are on the breadline and powerless, is poorly rewarded: bombarding the headquarters is out of date. However divergent as the outcome may look, one thing is clear: there is room for civil society to organize protests against the authorities, i.e. the State or Party. The outcome is uncertain and influenced by the nature of the protest, i.e. whether it is lawful or not (a label issued by the authorities), and whether it is in line with the general political setting as defined by the power centres, the nature of the contesting group, etc.

All these characteristics have been shaped by the nature of the counter-elites taking the lead in the coping strategies, which refers to both form and content of the counter-movement. As we saw during previous research (Doom, Hongping, 20..) on peasant reactions to expropriation, those opposing certain aspects of the project as such are by no means a homogeneous group. The so-called voice of the mainstream protesters has not come out of the blue. Discontent, grumbling and pontaneous reactions are reformulated by a certain group on a more sophisticated level and repeated by the echoers, who recognize the creed of the spokesmen as their own. If of course, interests and visions are antagonistic or if the perception is such, then bitter inside struggle may occur. As we will see, our case is an example of a greatly divergent point of view.

Intellectuals as trackers?

Before moving to the case study we must dwell on the shifting roles of the intellectuals in the process of social struggle.

China – to the admiration of the Philosophers of the Enlightenment - was administered through a social stratum of literati, the mandarins. Intellectuals – at least those who passed the higher exams – were looking for ways - through draconic punishments or moral examples offered by the emperor - to shape society along their prescriptions based on the laws of harmony. But there always was a counterpoint: those wise men (mostly men) who knew that real freedom of thinking could only flourish far away from the forbidden city. A lot of Taoists were extremely sceptical about the vision that the ruler could modulate society through regulations and laws by sticking to the wu-wei approach, The chan-Buddhists distrusted armchair philosophy as such. This counter tradition is all too often forgotten as the credo of the mandarins that no sparrow could fall of the roof without their permission is taken for granted. During the Maoist period, the official vision concerning intellectuals was variable, although always with overtones of distrust. The chairman was convinced that even reading too much Marxist literature could seriously damage one’s health. During certain periods (Hundred Flowers), intellectuals were condemned as rightists or cowards, they were relegated to the background as a result of the ‘universal law for the laymen to lead the experts‘ (Great Leap Forward), or brutally tortured and killed as ‘the stinking ninth category‘ which was a pet name used by the Gang of Four (Cultural Revolution). But, such politically engaged intellectuals remained somehow convinced that one could change the system from within and of course, the come-back-kid who has been so many times out of grace, Deng

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himself, was a firm adherent to this belief. Paradoxically, as it may look, this changed under Deng’s rule. Precisely because there were some forms of relaxation towards divergent opinions, frustration was greater when the results were meagre or when the big stick was used again. Inner-circle discussions were no longer brutally suppressed, but it was still impossible to bring alternative messages to the streets. Wei Jingsheng’s actions and the experiment of the ‘Democracy Wall’ were, as said before, granted only a short life. And it was a sign: killing the chicken to scare the monkey. The television series ‘River Elegy’ with an audience of millions criticizing all forms of autocracy was pulled off the air. Outer-establishment criticism was silenced, but how about those who were part of the inner-circles such as Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang? In the past, even Zhou en-Lai was not immune to the curses of the Great Helmsman. As long as the personal position of Deng himself remained untouched, there was much more openness and he never tried to call in a personal cult. But, during stormy weather, all’s fair in politics. Although very close to the leader, and praised on many occasions, both Hu and Zhao were mercilessly shuffled aside in the late 1980s. This was a clear signal that even those in power could not offer effective protection when the wind of change was raging. ‘Despite the fact that the campaigns of the Deng era were shorter and gentler than those during the Mao-period, their continuation into the 1980’s finally broke the bounds between the political engaged establishment intellectuals and the party-state’ (Goldman, 2002 : 512 ). Especially after the June 4 crackdown, the majority no longer believed that they could induce drastic swifts or at least clip the extremists, from inside the establishment. They were breaking from the high tradition of intellectuals as critical advisers of those in power, but linking up with the low tradition of intellectual dissipation. Directly or indirectly they can provide civil society with wound ammo (or remain absent and go for consumerism). It looks like ‘la trahison des clercs’ with Chinese characteristics.

Art and artists have always played an important role in distributing and socializing ideologies. Of course, there was a huge gap between folk art, and the formalized and highly sophisticated guidelines governing high art. The most striking example is offered of course by the classical literary canon, both prose and poetry, which were written in Mandarin, a language which was not spoken and barely understood by commoners. As often described, Maoism represented both a line of break and continuity vis-à-vis the past. Of course, the CCP wanted a literature for the people and as Mao had explained already in the 40s in Yunan, socialist art can only flourish through serving the people, there is a fundamental unity between the revolutionary content, and the artistic form and so-called art-pour-l’art is but a bourgeois deviation. Taking both the spoken and written word seriously as tools to bring the message of the top, of course meshes with the imperial views. From the beginning, the relationship between artists and the Party was not strewn with roses. Lu Hsun, in many aspects a literary giant and devoted to the people’s cause, clashed with the Party over the list of demands presented to writers. He – and those who were members of the ‘League of Left-Wing Writers‘ – did not question the class nature of literature: ‘would a poor starving peasant have enough leisure time to plant flowers for their beauty?‘ (cited by Ou-Fan Lou, 2002 :207). But they were alarmed by the occupation of art by party officials and the suffocation of the creative spirit. In fact, one could see the growth of a cultural bureaucracy, a group of devoted busybodies at the service of those in power, claiming to be the new protectors of the arts.

During the Cultural Revolution – cultural destruction would be a far better designation – the grip on the sector was almost complete and creativity was reaching rock bottom. Rectification and thought-reform campaigns, criticism and self-criticism sessions were not new, but the brutality of the assault, mainly due to the absence of self-reflection among the young Red Guards, was a new phenomenon. Self-restraint and meekness were everywhere as fortune favours the bold. As far as painting was concerned, Mao or his spiritual presence was omnipresent. ‘…his face , painted usually in red, in such a way that it seemed to radiate, illuminating the faces of the people…’ (Landsberger, 2003 :16). These iconoclastic features were even more pronounced in literature, opera and theatre. Most of the texts were banned as being ‘unhealthy bourgeois and reactionary plays’. It was the moment de gloire of Mao’s wife Chiang Ch’ing and the sinister bad genius behind the scenes: K’ang Sheng. Only a few ‘model revolutionary operas (the ‘geming yangbanxi’) could find favor in the eyes of the communist primadona (Witke, 1977). Once the curtain fell over the Cultural Revolution, it took a while before artists left their safe trenches.

Chinese visual art made a fresh start after the period of social-realism and the strictly guided one dimensional production.

As Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi stated, the modern art movement wanted to free itself from the former political straitjacket, as “… direct questioning, resistance, alienation, boredom, absurdity, cynicism… are aspects of culture as well as features of existence” (Weiwei & Boyi, 2000, p. 2). This critical stance and their ‘wildlife’ cannot be detached however from their

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existence in current China and its links with the recent past. Their art mirrors the vast change “… within twenty years from showing the nearly uniform religious soberness of the Mao era to the present abundant consumerism and from a strictly defined social structure and the connected mores to its remaining and scattered fragments of today” (Van Dijk, 1999, p. 14).

But, all along the general lines of the open door policies, the new wave was connected with the global world and with the world-wide network of galleries, both for the sake of exhibition and commerce. It may sound like a platitude, but Chinese art is “at the crossroads: between past and future, between East and West” (Hung, 2001). Let me point out two examples.

One is the sculpture of Sin Jiangu - referring to the Mao-suit. The Zhifer was an icon of the Mao-cult. Sui Jianguo’s ‘legacy mantle’ is not just an easy parody of a political symbol of the past: “He chose instead to re-employ the characteristic traits of political art” (Qi, 2001, p. 50). Cai Guo Qiang’s ‘Rent Collection Courtyard’ won one of the international awards of the 48th Venice Biennale. It is an enormous installation of grey clay labourers and bosses - an over-the-top expression of exploitation.

Simultaneously, it is the recreation of one of the most important mass-scale sculpture projects (114 figures) of the Mao era: a 26-scene 100 metre installation depicting exploitation in feudal times, produced by a team from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts (Erickson, 2001, p. 52 e.v.). Does this make Cai Guo Qiang a banana: somebody who is yellow on the outside, but white on the inside? Or is it a dialogue between China and Europe, and a reflection – not simply denial or refusal – of the Communist past?

The so-called ‘Avant-Garde’ knew its first moment de gloire at the February 1989 exhibition in the National Gallery in Beijing under the title “China/Avant Garde”. This was a ‘tolerated’ exhibition, showing the world that the relationship between politics and arts was moving in the direction of liberal standards. At least two remarks have to be made. One: grinding of teeth in leading circles was still very prominent. Two: the authorities – at least those at the centre – were aware that avant-garde was not really an issue for the overwhelming majority of the people. The next landmark was ‘Fuck off ’, running along the Third Shanghai Biennale (2000) and was explicitly announced as an ‘uncooperative approach’ (Bu hezuo fangshi). It was a gathering of activities which was openly launched to revise and criticize vested interests. The performance ‘eating people’ by Zhu Yu, consuming what is alleged to be a human foetus – no religion forbids cannibalism – was the most shocking example of the spirit of these angry young men (and women), operating “… between radical individualism… and the radical collectivity”, as symbolized by Marcel Duchamp and Mao (Merewether, 2009, p. 2). Although the authorities were not amused, no reaction comparable to the old days was noted. There was now a kind of no man’s land, where the protesting voices of artists were no longer brutally silenced; although tolerated by the leaders, protest was still seen as morally and politically inappropriate, and thus there was potential violence in the guardroom. Artists, for many reasons, were always willing to provoke the authorities, for the sake of art, or just as a favourite waste of time. The struggle to obtain an independent place under the sun was not only battled out on the ideological field, but also in the very material sense: the occupation of space and the concept of urbanism. Beijing was a perfect example: “… the methods of governance during Imperial China, mirrored the hierarchical layout of the city, as the emperor, who was positioned in the center, ruled over those of lesser stature, who ruled over those of even less power” (Tan, 2010, p. 111). During the Mao era, Tiananmen became the shining centre, with Zhongnanhai as a metonym for the leadership. Space was controlled and even occupied by official planners and technocrats, leaving no room for initiatives from the civil society of individuals. Henry Lefèbvre would have qualified this process as the production of ‘abstract space’: the creation of homogenization, hierarchization and social fragmentation. But: “… abstract space carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space. I shall call that new space ‘differential space’ because, in as much as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences” (Lefèbvre, 1991, p.

52). These emerging differential spaces serve as resistance to the forces of ‘Gleichschaltung’ in abstract space; they are both symbolic signs and physical constructions of a counterculture.

Caochangdi, the basics: who decides?

At first sight and in many aspects, the Dashanzi-district can serve as an example of the reclamation of space by parts of civil society. In the year 2000, Chinese artists started the resettlement of factories in Dashanzi, attracted by the Bauhaus style and the extremely low rents. The qualification ‘Bauhaus’ “may be a little bit hasty and the motivation behind the hard branding remains questionable…” (Wang, 2009, p. 879). The area – in the north-eastern segment of the capital – was originally a collection of electronic production warehouses, build by Soviet and East-German teams during the 50s. Looking from the angle of the dominant ideology of spatial planning, the Dashanzi complex was perfectly apt to be transformed into a new

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urban space: “… urban high-tech and financial districts and the construction of global image enhancing projects” (Ma, 2005, p. 4). In fact, a joint committee of the Caoyang District government and ‘Seven Stars’ (The Danshanzi Development Group) advised on this demolition of the site. The main reason why the advice was not put into practice, was that international negative feedback was feared if the bulldozing of the buildings went ahead. In fact, international galleries – ‘White Space’, ‘Tokyo Art Projects’, ‘Chinese Contemporary’ – were already present, and through the internet the area was known worldwide as a symbol of the new openness of the regime. And, let’s be down-to-earth: one should not forget the awareness of the economic advantages connected with cultural districts. As Beijing claims to be a ‘global city’, urban beautification and cultural promotion are important in the overall urban political economy strategy. (A global city in Sassen’s words is seen as a city deemed to be an important node point in the global economic system (Sassen, 1991).) Florida’s creative city ideology, high on most development agendas, is leaning heavily towards the promotion of a positive cultural image (Florida, 2002). In this respect, 798 was a perfect instrument in the branding of Beijing, but is also placing footnotes on Lefèbvre’s ‘new spaces’ concept. In a semi-official publication, 798 is labeled as ‘the wind vane of China’s contemporary visual art’, ‘the third biggest scenic spot in China’ but also ‘… a most luxurious art yacht” (Xiaowei, 2007; p. 61).

Instead of using the big stick, authorities finally chose to call upon the velvet fist, rather than destruction control centred on stage. The utopian underground, with its utopian visions evolved into a chic commercialized space and the counterculture changed into art-led gentrification: the expression of Lloyd’s ‘neo-bohemian’ (Lloyd, 2006). “Many fear that officials will meddle with everything, from exhibitions to advertising and that artistic freedom will be restricted” (Currier, 2008, p. 247).

798 is the Beijing version of Montparnasse, or using one of Mao’s favourites, the power of the artists was mainly but a paper tiger. 798 ended as a nostalgic non-place “which is primarily manifested in the shift from the sign’s use value to its exchange value (Zhuang, 2009, p. 1). Those who started did not want to end up as a 798-cultural petting zoo, as Yi Jinan remarked bitterly in a photographic journey through the former factory (Jinan, 2004). Far from seeing Caochangdi as a duplicate of the famous cultural theme park, they wanted to conserve the fighting spirit of the early avant-garde years. The question remains, however, whether a battle against art remaining a product outside global commodity production and against an art-led urban change into gentrification is a feasible proposition (Smith & Williams, 1986). Can the community resist ‘the revanchist city’ and its policies of suffocating tolerance (Smith, 1996)? Or, citing Klunzman: “… does it begin with poetry and end with real estate?”

(Klunzman, 2004, 259). One of the conclusions of the study setup by Puyn Xiong seems to point in this direction: “… there is a trend that the 798 art zone developed into an art business center… It is largely due to the rapid commercialization of the art zone. More and more fashion brands started to set up shops, promote launches and hold fashion shows in 798. The skyrocketing rent is driving artists and small art galleries out” (Xiong, 2009, pp. 105-106). It is the Chinese version of Monty Python’s Robin Hood: he stole from the poor and he gave to the rich.

Caochangdi is an old village; its history goes back for at least two to three centuries. Of course, in this period it was outside the capital and actually the translation of the word stands for grassland. In imperial times it was used as a hunting ground by the court. Both the explosive growth and administrative reshuffling ‘promoted’ it to being a part of greater Beijing. It is one of the more than 300 urban villages, or ‘villages in the city’. This means that, although integrated into the territory of an urban district, the village remains property of the villagers. Strange as it may look from a European point of view, the village kept much of its aspects of a small town, or even of a bigger village. In Caochangdi there are no skyscrapers; on the contrary, most of the houses are rather ramshackle constructions, aisles are filled with hanging clothes, restaurants are dusty with no reference to ‘ Kentucky fried chicken’ and the shops look like everywhere in the countryside: a lumber of outdated products.

There is no point in looking for the glamour and luxury products which are so abundant in the Ginza Mall or the Hualian Department Store. But one should not always judge by outward appearances: the ultimate goal of many Chinese households is not to see their frontage figuring on the glossy centre fold of a lifestyle magazine. The old rules of the ‘culture of poverty‘, so eloquently described by Stover, are still valid (Stover,….). If a man needs face like a tree needs bark, then bark both hides and protects inner life. For centuries ‘keeping up with the Jonenses’ meant: don’t show your wealth to the outside world, because heartburn is just around the corner. During the Cultural Revolution, Coachangdi became an Agricultural People’s Commune, and the villagers were farmers. But, after Deng took over, the farmers became villagers again as most of the farmlands disappeared.

Caochangdi village’s residential area is just short of one square kilometre, with total land of 1,400 acres.

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There are about 1100 permanent residents, 4000 temporary residents and some 2000 people who work but do not live there. The reason for there being a great margin of error is mainly due to the number of illegal residents and those having temporary accommodation. The village is situated just outside the 5th ring road, close to the Academy of Fine Arts in the Wangjing District. It is situated in the Chaoyang District one of the largest revenue producing districts of the country. Since 2000 Caochangdi has gone through a very interesting transformation as part of its development into an art village. Some of the most famous artists, jubilated worldwide, have moved into the quarter: Ai Weiwei, Li Songsong, Wang Qinsong, He Yungchang, Wang Xingwei, Xia Xiao, Mao Ran, Nie Mu and many others. It boasts more than 20 high quality galleries (Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Li Space, Urs Meile Gallery) and various artists’ studios (appendix 2). This inaugurated a drastic architectural transformation and upgrade, as some of the buildings became landmarks in Beijing’s urban development.

Renovation took place and new estates were designed by architects such as Ai Weiwei and Antonio Ochoa, and these buildings have been cited and applauded in multiple art magazines. Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, renowned architects from Los Angeles, together with Ping Li, published a book about the uniqueness of the site, entitled ‘Caochangdi : Beijing inside out’. The People’s Daily online burst out in superlatives speaking about ‘the spiritual promised land for Chinese contemporary art’ and ‘fictitious land of peace and happiness hidden in the city’ (29 April, 2009). But, this stormy transformation has - at least – one aspect which is totally unfamiliar to the West: it was mostly an illegal operation!

Of course, as long as the term ‘rule of law’ has to be read as ‘the rule of law with Chinese characteristics’, the term ‘illegal’ also has its particularities. Chinese use a specific term ‘ziran cun’, meaning natural village as opposed to administrative village.

‘Watching Caochangdi over the course of the past two years has been like looking at a mad fast-forward video revealing not only the mechanisms of urban change as they are occurring in early twenty-first century Asia but also the human and spatial consequences of this change. Caochangdi’s recent development is spontaneous behaviour and seemingly ‘under the radar’ of the planning authorities.

This spontaneous behavior is, in fact, experimental urban development and can be seen as extremely healthy for the larger city and perhaps the larger project of the New Socialist Village’ (Ray & Berdish, 2010, p. 2). The old advice ‘ruling the country is like cooking small fishes’ is still valid: don’t mess around too much with regulations or things will fall apart. This is one of the many riddles which make it so hard to crack the Chinese puzzle: although there is overregulation and a tendency to be overrun by bureaucratic practices, in reality personal cleverness and sophisticated evasion strategies have developed into a royal art. In his ‘The three principles of the people’ Sun Yat-Sen had already advocated the need to break down the individualism of the Chinese which damages the nation. Looking for loopholes still is one the most popular sports, from the bottom to the top of society. In China, ‘illegal’ does not always mean ‘not according to the will of the people’. “For Western people, the city is public space, but in China, what does public space mean?” says Pi Li and he continues: “In China, it is very hard to say that we have public space, or private space. Every space in China is a kind of hybrid. Everyone has a kind of small freedom… I think that this hybrid situation is a very funny condition in China” (Li, 2007, p. 416). This ‘funny’ situation can of course also be translated into “a space of illegality and irregularity are setting the tone” (Smart & Tang, 2005).

*** Notice On 16 April, 2010, the residents received a one-page notice, a government-stamped paper originating from a village officer.

Ironically, this was one day before the second annual launch of the Beijing biggest photography festival, the Caochangdi Photospring with an international aura. ‘Arles in Beijing’ is indeed already a moment of calibration for the whole of the Chinese scene when it comes to photography. It remained unclear who had taken this step, and, whether it was a final conclusion or something which was still open for discussion. Of course, there were very divergent residents: those who lived there illegally and did not have a leg to stand on and those who disposed over some legal documents (even if building licenses were not issued according to the rules). Within this second category, at least two subgroups can be identified: those living in the art centre and those living in the village proper. Those we will designate the ‘villagers‘, had made considerable investments during the last months. A survey by Robert Mangurian in September 2009, showed that the number of replacements was

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extremely high: almost 80% of the once one-storey houses had been replaced with three-storey brick buildings and concrete affairs (containing a warren of 3 metre X 5 metre spaces)(written info by Robert Mangurian). It was as plain as day that the controversial issue of who was entitled to the windfall from rising real estate prices was written on the walls. Most likely, it was a twin rip-off: house-owners with insider knowledge, trying to boost future compensation and people from the local administration ready to take a piece of the pie. Indeed, ‘signature building’ means that anything goes as long as you can have an officially signed document, and it does not matter how you obtained the permission. Anyway, being a member of the village-leader Maotai club can be very helpful. And as the price is but a rough estimate, supporting a member of the family can have positive effects: one good turn deserves another. As far as the building licenses are concerned, they are no part of the holy books, but are subjected to amendments. *** This brings us to two related items: the legislation and regulations covering land use, and the changing nature of the local administration and decision-making centres on the shop-floor. The question of ownership and land-use is extremely complicated as public and collective ownership was widely considered to be the backbone of a revolution both inspired and carried on by the peasantry. Deng’s modernization process of stepping into the globalized capitalist economy was of course putting heavy pressure on these sacrosanct principles. It was a delicate job – similar to the explanation of the nature of the virgin mother – how this could be in line with Chinese communism and the least one could do to change the mindscape, was to show that it would end up in a win-win-situation for all. The ‘Household Contract Responsibility System’ (1978) was the first move to introduce aspects of a controlled market system. It sounded the knell of the former communes and paved the way for the merchandizing of farming products. Although regulations remained different in rural and urban areas, the direction of the transformation ran in parallel to the protection of users’ rights. The ‘Provisional Regulation on the Grant and Transfer of Use Rights in urban Land’ (1990) was giving way to the commodification of urban land, while ‘The Property Law’ (2007) introduced the so-called LURs ( Land Use Rights), underpinning a leasehold system with a long-term contractual management rights (Lu, Murphy, 2008: 26). This whole transformation layout is an illustration of the principle of groping for stepping-stones to cross a river. The push of premier Zhu Rongji (1998) for example, the introduction of a package of reforms facilitating the commodification of houses, was not primarily the result of an ideological shift, but was meant as an answer to the Asian financial crisis. As a result of this approach, there are still many grey areas as the legal boundaries remain blurred. Whether central or local governments are in charge of many issues is still debatable. ‘…ownership defined in law and ownership as understood and practiced in society often diverge, and the property law-making often lags behind social change‘ (Xu et al., op.cit.:31). This is of course leading to situations where pragmatism is turning into opportunism and governmental entrepreneurship can drift into corruption.

Running against this age-old trend sometimes resembles the hammering of nails with a ripe banana.

Caochangdi is one of the so-called ‘villages in the city’ and although practical examples are there to demonstrate the urban land-use system, the whole question is full of ambiguities, open to formal consertation, to guanxi practices, to powerabuse, and so on. Therefore a short step aside to the local power-pyramid is necessary. The ‘Organic Law on Village Committees’ (1987) changed the nature of the relationship between central and local authorities, as there was now a legal basis for direct elections and a municipal base. Despite the role of the local government leaders as representatives of the State, they were forced to win popular support (Guo, Bernstein; 2004: 275). They had to meet the demands for economic development for example, which was demonstrated by the Pearl River Delta region. ‘…where local government played a highly interventionist role and exemplified the experimental and evolving way that local governments were used’ (Fahim;2006: 5). On the other hand, local baronies can seriously hinder positive measures put forward by the central authorities. Chinese civil society has learned to fill in an autonomous space by combining the best of both worlds: backing locals if it is in their interests and kowtowing on the staircases of the ’People’s Hall’ to ease away the support of the top. In the pre-1978 era, community organizations were work-based into the danwei, later they developed into residents committees and nowadays they are upgraded into shequ-mechanisms. The shequs are seen as mediating between the people at grass roots level and the administration, and assist in basic social welfare provision and services, such as housing programmes. In the vision of Hu Jintao, China should be shaped along the lines of a harmonious society (he xie). This is more than ‘xiatong’, a society in which the differences between classes are not so deep as to undermine social stability, and less than the final Marxist utopia of each according to their needs (Peerenboom, 2007 :349). However, the primacy of social justice as correcting the rationality

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of the market, was not a hollow shallow-brained formula, as “the official discourse has been accompanied by a plethora of social politics” (Lee, C.K, Hsing, Y.T, 2010 : 1). Although many unclear items, controversial issues and frictions concerning competence are constantly around the corner, central government, local administrative units and the shequs are condemned to look for compromises when implementing the global lines.

The village leader of Caochangdi named Zhang Gengqi, who is from a well-off family and perfectly organized to use official and backdoor politics. The following excerpts are from an interview conducted by Robert Mangurian and Mary-An Ray (14 June, 2010). Asked about the structure of command, the village leader answered ‘Caochangdi reports to the Cuige Township, the Township reports to the Chaoyang District, and the District reports to the City. But really, Caochangdi operates as an autonomously governed entity, but it does so within the guidelines of the overall planning of the City’. As far as I can judge, this is not what one calls transparent decision-making machinery. But the village leader went on: ‘It has been tiring trying to transform this ‘natural village’ (ziran cun) into an International Arts Village. And really, it is agrarian people and farm workers (nong ming gong) who have done the actual work of this transformation … This is the countryside after all. I am now working to get the village to meet government standards for things like water, electricity, drainage sewer systems …’ This is also rather misty as one cannot really judge whether he is going for the ultimate rescue operation, or is trying to make the compensation much more interesting. Asked whether the mid-May decision on the status of the future of Caocangdi was still promising doom and gloom, he answered ‘Demolition will not happen this year. As for next year, I do not know for sure. Saving the village will require everyone’s efforts …’ Except for the fact that Zhang Gengqi was underlining the need for money to support the operation, it is not very clear if what’s sauce for thegoose is indeed sauce for the gander: how do all the scenarios (artist village, leadership, residents, migrants, etc.) match? And how about the specific contribution of the art sector?

Public space – place promotion?

Caochangdi has – not yet? – been re-engineered into a trendy post-modern space full of veggie eateries, trendy bars and fancy boutiques. Looking here for wine-and-bubbles bodegas or cutting-edge shops is but a waste of time. Although there is a neat difference between the old village and the art quarter, one can also discover links as far as architecture is concerned.

For example, Ai Weiwei designed some buildings an the demand of the village leader. According to their creed, most of the artists don’t bow to the demands of the market and are still giving a great deal of prominence to art as counter-culture. Of course, some of the art galleries are aiming mainly at easy cultural consumption, but, in other places or on other occasions, one can see that ‘the words of the prophets are still written on the subway-walls‘, to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel.

Although the quarter may be known now as a hotspot by some tourists, the scene still does not have a unique selling position and receives less place promotion than 798. So, in terms of importance when it comes to city marketability, Caochangdi is of lower ranking than 798. This of course could influence the final decision of the authorities, as the “sustainable value of iconic buildings is increasingly questioned” (Evans, 2005, p. 977).

‘The least one could say is that high ranking authorities were both talking and acting along the lines of a favourable stand towards modern cultural events. Wen Jiabao himself was very clear on this matter: ‘To develop the country and to rejuvenate the nation, we must not only be economically strong, but more importantly, be culturally strong. Culture is the spirit and soul of a nation, and the determining factor of whether it is truly strong or not. It can profoundly affect the progress of a country’s development and change the destiny of a nation. If we don’t develop an advanced culture and improve the whole nation’s cultural and ethical levels, we cannot truly modernize. Emancipating our minds and reform and opening up embody the spirit of our times …Over the past years, we vigorously developed non-profit cultural programs, sped up the reform of cultural reform management system, improved the system of public cultural services, stimulated the rapid growth of our culture industry, brought prosperity to the culture market and effectively expanded domestic demand’ (Report on the work of the Government, delivered at the third session of the eleventh National People’s Congress on 5 March, 2010).These remarks and promises did not elude the protesters’ attention and they reminded the premier of his solemn pledge in their pamphlet.

The question remains to what degree Wen is pulling the strings when it comes to affairs of the capital with 2012 ahead, and, whether he is willing to rely on power games in each and every conflict between local authorities and artists (I am not going to go into the problem of whether Wu is an admirer of modern or avant-garde art).

Anyway, in the 11th Municipal Five-Year Plan, the Beijing Municipal Government states as well that it will give priority to the

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development of cultural creative sites as the ‘cultural creative industy’ is one the future pillars of Beijings development. In October Ai Weiwei was involved in a real-estate conflict in Shanghai’s Jiading district: he started the construction of a 2,000 square metre art studio as part of a bigger cultural area. “…it was the head of the district, Sun Jiwei, who asked him to build the studio two years ago‘ (Han, 2010: 1). But, according to Chen Jie, director of the Urban Construction Department in Malu township (the home of the studio): ‘Ai’s studio did not go through the application procedures, therefore it is illegal’ (id.).

Most of the buildings in China are somehow illegal. So, one could wonder whether this was a sly dig from the local authorities, as the surrounding constructions remained untouched (Branigan, Gabbatt, 2010: 1).

Or probably, there is something bigger at stake. This could be a warning that even if you have an exhibition running at the Tate Modern, and even if your name is linked to the Bird’s Nest, you are not ‘un cittadino al di sopra di ogni so’. The Sichuan earthquake (2008) killed thousands of schoolchildren according to an investigation started by Ai Weiwei. As the authorities refused to publish details – strong suspicions exist of messy work in the construction of schools – Ai created his ‘Snake Ceiling‘, a serpent formed from hundreds of students’ backpacks. As a result of his guerrillas condemning the cover-up, he was heavily beaten by the police. This was already a signal that he was crossing a line. As he heard that his studio would be knocked down, he organized a kind of farewell party in the building. He announced that they would eat ‘river crab’, which sounds a little bit puzzling for Westerners. But, ‘he xie’, standing for ‘river crab’ with slightly different intonation also means ‘ harmonious’, a term very dear to Wen Jiabao (Wen’s ‘harmonious society’). And, those whose websites are blocked also sarcastically say ‘I have been harmonised’ (MacKinnin, 2010: 1). As ‘eating river-crab’ was labelled a very sensitive keyword, directly pointing at the top, Ai was put under house arrest. Zi Xiangdong, press officer at the Beijing Municipal Bureau refused to comment on this issue, but once again it was clearly demonstrated that even world famous persons do not enjoy immunity. The unwitting highpoint of the affair was the yearly CIMAM conference (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art), held in Shanghai during that very weekend. Grasp et al., ‘Trim your sail to the wind’ seemed to be the device of CIMAMdirector, Borja Villa.

After the summary and laconic demolition announcement, a petition was launched by Frank Uytterhaegen and Ai Weiwei (see attachment 2). This protest was also distributed worldwide through the internet and presented to many ambassadors in Beijing. But, the results are very uncertain as no reaction whatsoever was heard from any officials on any level. The village residents are not formally organized and structured contacts between them and the initiators of the petition are virtually non-existent. Most of the village people do not know what is happening behind the brick-walls of the art-studios and never set foot inside the galleries. And , even if they have visited an exposition: one could ask oneself whether they were really impressed by the work? There is certainly less spontaneous compatibility with their world and avant-garde art than with the social realism of the Mao canon. But, even if they are not flabbergasted by Wang Xingwei’s ‘Hare’ or not knocked off their feet by Ai Weiwei completing an antique vase with the ‘CocaCola’ – emblem, they know how to sail with the wind. If Caochangdi becomes an expanding art-village, sales prices of their houses or hiring costs of studios will go up considerably. Even if the buildings are finally compulsorily expropriated, they can cash in an added value. On a basic level there is an objective and material basis for solidarity between the ‘normal’ villagers on the one hand and the ‘wild bunch’ on the other. Until now, no formal association was formed in the village and no structured contacts exist between the two companions in misfortune (although ‘misfortune ‘ is relative), which could be a weak point in negation processes. Unfortunately, people like Ai Weiwei are excellent performers in the 100 metres, but to cope with the bureaucracy, the lungs of a marathon runner are better suited.

Conclusion The case of 798 is a perfect example of how processes of city marketing fit into the picture of globalization – Beijing as a ‘global city’ – and the growing possibilities of local power to outline strategic environmental intervention. It is also a good demonstration of the ‘repressive tolerance’ article of Herbert Marcuse, published in 1965, creating a storm of criticism (Fopp, 2007). ‘… today tolerance appears again as what was in its origins … a partisan goal , a subversive liberating notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today , is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression’ (Marcuse, 1969 : 1). But, one should not forget – at least – two things: this kind of ‘repression’ is far preferable from brutal violence from those gird for brutal violence, and, those in power don’t have to put too much pressure sometimes on those they want to seduce. Originally, avant-garde artists in China criticized the

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system, organized iconoclastic assaults against the recent past and irritated those behind the walls of the new forbidden city tremendously. The sneering was even more painful as post-Maoist leaders depicted themselves as modern cosmopolitans with Chinese characteristics. The occupation and transformation of 798 can be seen as an act of reclaiming public space in the sense Lefèbvre saw it: as a rupture from the spirit of commodification. Things have changed: gallerists became cultural pundits, artists were sedated by big money and local authorities turned 798 into a cultural theme park. Back to normal, business as usual, tolerance as soft power. The old guanxi-thing, knits together what looks irreconcilable into a new patchwork tempting the logics of high theories. Tradition is hyperdynamically remodelling the new into something pleasing to the eyes and ears of the Chinese. Is this the profound meaning of ‘geming’ – revolution – literally restoring the order?

Caochangdi is no carbon copy of 798, but there are of course certain similarities. As ‘becoming rich is honorable’ is still valid, administrators, real estate managers, house-owners, gallerists are looking for windows of opportunity. If Caochangdi can be saved, bonfires will be lit; if demolition is inescapable compensation-claims will be strengthened: in the end, it is money that makes the world turn around. Of course, the whole double-hearted attitude of the administration(s), the lack of transparency when it comes to recording the qualifications of the multi-layered governance, the lack of clarity in the law-making process of ‘…bumenzhuyi or expanding interest, evading responsibility …’, all create grounds for fixers and corruption and the flourishing of a shadow economy (Tanner: 1999: 120).

Caochangdi also amply demonstrates how ‘civil society‘ in itself can be a problematic concept, especially for those who see it as a sacrosanct and democratic answer to the threats of the big bad wolf: the state and politics in general. Social capital and the strengthening of civil society is a bare necessity in the eyes of Robert Putnam in order to save democracy and the community (Putnam, 2000). What he fails to see is the ambiguity of a much more complicated thing called ‘civil society’, than he wishes to believe. China is a perfect example of how people lost their former – forced – confidence in the state because of this long tradition of political tragedies. But, is a dense network of civil associations – in fact interest groups – the answer? Is this only promoting ‘… stability and effectiveness of a democratic polity through both the effects of associations on citizens ‘habits of the heart’ and the ability of associations to mobilize citizens on behalf of public causes …’? (Foley, Edwards, 1996 :38). As we saw, many associations are not working for the public interest, but are the expression of the market. If, according to Waltzer, civil societies are like ideological markets, one cannot be surprised to see how some of these networks do not strengthen civility but produce and reproduce inequality and fragmentation (Waltzer, 1992). Finally, if, for many a good reason for the old dogma of the infallible leadership having been left behind, this does not automatically come down to the necessity of a minimal state, and indeed, many persons still turn for protection to the state. Or, relationships between market, state, civil society and arts are much more dynamic and complicated than often suggested.

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Petition in Protection of Our home by Residents of Beijing Chaoyang District Caochangdi Village Unpublished Written: 2010.04.16

On July 18th of 2009, at the Urbanization Land Reserve Motivation conference, commissioner of Beijing Chaoyang District announced: “this year, Jinzhan, Cuigezhuang and total of seven regions are included in the land reserve project. The work to vacate and demolish in the areas for relocation housing and land reserve is to be completed by June 30th of next year.”

On August 4th of 2009, the regional Government of Cuigezhuang noticed all the state and private owned enterprises in Caochangdi: “For the sake of realizing the intentions of city and district, our region’s 14 villages has all been listed within the perimeters of land reserve, soon the work of demolition, eviction and survey will begin step by step.”

In September 2009, Caochangdi village employed survey office to evaluate and register the rental land and buildings in the art district of Caochangdi.

On April 16th, 2010, Caochangdi Village noticed the resident enterprises: “Following the progression of urbanization, our village has been listed in the area of demolition and eviction, but the time has not been specified. To avoid loss in the process of demolition, we are now conducting an information survey on tenant and sublet enterprises.”

The demolition and eviction of Caochangdi area is about to become a reality.

Caochangdi village’s residential area is just short of one square kilometer, with total land of 1400 acres, there are 400 families of 1100 locals. Since the year 1999, artist and art institutions began moving in and transforming Caochangdi. With an effort of more than 10 years, presently there are more than 300 cultural enterprises residing in Caochangdi, the art district building area just exceeds 80,000 square meters, migrant population reaching 8000, it has naturally formed the most emblematic and important creative industry collective in China, claiming a place on the international cultural map.

When expropriating land, aside from the immediate economical demands, the government should first consider for the future demands of society. Cultural industry has become an important standard to evaluate modern society and crucial content for a sustainable strategic urban development; simultaneously it is the most valuable resource for the economical progress and transformation in China. The building and development of cultural strength has already become a long term national policy.

The demolition of Caochangdi, the re-planning of China’s most emblematic cultural collective did not initiate any communication at all with the resident artists. It is arbitrary and unreasonable for the local government to come to the careless decision for demolition; this will surely arouse social conflict caused by the lack of normal communication and fair negotiation.

We believe that relying on “listed for land reserve” to enforce demolition on Caochangdi violated the related articles in the Constitution and Property Law. Property Law article 42 regulates, “For the need of public good, in accordance with the procedure and perimeter set by law, land and building properties owned by individuals or communities can be expropriated,” yet the policy of land reserve has no discernable base in legal regulation nor is there any way of judging whether it is for the need of public good, it cannot be set as a legal license for demolition.

The ever intensifying land disputes in recent years instigated endless conflicts; this included building property, land usage alteration and property transfer. They were on one hand reflecting the obsolete thinking model employed by the government regarding land issues, on the other hand they showed that the governmental choice to scorn private property, legal contract, individual and minority groups had caused the accumulation and eruption of social conflicts and had grown into a major factor of social unrest, shadowing urbanization and civil progress.

To the impending situation, long term residents who’s been living and working in Caochangdi, artist and art institutions, enterprises and employees united in declaring:

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1. Calling for the city and the district government’s attention to re-examine the plan of Caochangdi demolition, to realize that cultural and creative industry constitute an essential aspect of urban life, to understand cultural development as a meaningful force in a city’s progress, and the status of “soft power” in the regional and international economical competition, to respect the individual artist’s right to live, to re-evaluate the possibility of the demolition of Caochangdi.

2. Calling for the society, communities and media’s attention on the protection of individual property rights and integrity of law, to do what your can in supporting and helping Caochangdi residents’ fight in guarding their home and rights.

3. Calling for the individuals and institutions, those about to have their interests violated by the demolition process, devote yourselves in the fight for your rights that may happen in the future, express your views clearly and rationally, work together, to win the widest support from society, to use multiple channels such as internet and media to inform the world about our fight in Caochangdi.

We hereby state, our fight in Caochangdi will defend our rights and dignity to culture and survival at all costs.

Artist and art institutions, enterprises and employees of Caochangdi Village April 16th, 2010 Lists of Art Institutions signed the Petition: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Urs Meile Gallery, Beijing-Lucerne, Beijing, Mizuma & One gallery, ArtMia Foundation Art Channel (TBD) , Shanghart Beijing, Alexander Ochs Galleries Beijing, White Space Beijing, Pekin Fine Arts Gallery, Chambers Fine Art, C-Space, Taikang Space,Beijing Art Now Gallery, Li Space, Michael Schultz Gallery, Fanzheng House, EGG Gallery, Rosie Art Space, B.A.S.E. Beijing, China Art Archives & Warehouse, Fake Design, Morrison Advertizing, Fenglei Visual and Audio Media and Communication, Ai Weiwei studio, Lu Qing studio, Wang Qingsong studio, He Yunchang studio, Li Songsong studio, Nie Mu studio, Huang Wenya studio, Wang Xingwei studio, Xia Xing Studio, Mao Ran studio, Li Yefu studio, Liu Zhenggang studio, Zhao Dalu studio, Xia Xiaoxi studio, Zhang Rui studio, Shi Jing studio, Zhao Zhao studio

Please contact us if you have suggestions or interested taking part in Caochangdi Petition Email: ccdyswq@gmail.com Address: #258 Caochangdi, Cuigezhuang Region, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100015 Phone: 84564194, 84565695

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Why Caochangdi?

Rong Rong and Inri From: Photospring 2010 Book Published: 2010

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BASEtalk: Robert Bernell Conducted at Timezone 8 Written: 2007.05.16

RM RB

= =

Robert Mangurian Robert Bernell

RM: So we are ready to begin now. I have to give my admiration to Robert for having designed or having come into being such a beautiful space, it’s just astounding. Mary-Ann (Ray) and Ann (Bergren) are like the good introducers of people, so I am not, but I will just ramble on a little bit..... it will go on for about half an hour or so, so bear with me (muffled chuckles).

You know the only reason, I have said this once before, well there is Bernard, Drew, and Pelli, or another only reason for us being here is Robert Bernell, and because for four years we just toughed it out in strange ways and so on, and when we came to Beijing we had about four or five good friends and stimulating people, and Robert was really a key person for us. And I am going to let Robert tell his own story, and it will kind of be a dialogue.

RB: Right RM: But, it’s sort of an inspiring story. Are you going to tell any of the missteps? You could.

RB: The missteps, I think a series of missteps.

RM: I can help remind you. You know, art in Beijing is like, the China Art scene in the world is, well, they are feeling pretty good about it, and Beijing really is the center of it. Shanghai is ok, but Beijing really is the center, or they claim it, and it really is. And Robert I think played such an important role in this. It will be hard for you to believe, but I’ll throw out a year here, and you can correct me, but seven years ago to visit an artist here you had to call someone who called someone else who called someone else to make the connection to get in because everybody was pretty much under cover, is that right?

RB: Yes. RM: And there was a group called the Seven Stars, no the Star Group, definitely not the Seven Star Group.

RB: Before the Seven Star Group RM: They wandered out, they smelled Tiananmen Square coming and they left and went out- you know one of them had a studio on Union Square down south of Soho and decided to walk a little further south and found that there was a stock market there - Zhou Gang - and so he has basically retired now from art.

But all to of the others that were here did not have much exposure to western art. We have these dear friends Stanley and Elyse Grinstein who came over here God knows when - maybe in the seventies?

RB: No, 1985.

RM: And you know, he was like the first artist that ever showed up on these shores from the outside - I am kind of making it up a little but I think that it is true, and he gave a very influential lecture.

RB: Well yes, and an exhibition too.

RM: But the real explosion happened through Robert’s efforts in making China art accessible to the rest of the world and also

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the rest of the world’s art accessible to China. And I think, and I always want to give Robert credit for opening up the visual dialogue in art. And Robert is also famous for beating all of the other gringos that live around the airport and play golf, and the tournament, which is coming up when?

RB: The 25th.

RM: There is a golfer in the crowd now isn’t there? Maybe not in the crowd tonight. He claims he is good. You’ll take him on, right?

RB: No. RM: Is it you? And, so, there we are, Robert - such a good friend, and not many people would try to convert a bookstore now this is a transition zone as a restaurant, it is soon going to become what was it? A brothel? So I’m going to sit down here for a little while, and then we can get up and provoke him in various ways... he deserves it.

RB: OK. Well.....

LECTURE Well, this is a very daunting task, and I told Robert that I will probably run out of things to say after about ten minutes. So, please ask questions and interrupt me because I think that’s the only way that I will make it until dinner which I have scheduled in about a half an hour. It’s a great exit/excuse..... dinner starts. I came to China 1n 1986, to Nanjing University’s John Hopkins Center, and at the time, I came, I was signed up to study economic law, but I spent almost all of my time at the Nanjing Art Academy which was humming at the time, and 1986 was the height of what was called the “New Tide Movement” in China and it was just after the Rauschenburg exhibition in 1985 and all of China was on this “juggernaut” to learn as much about the west as quickly as possible. So the artist were experimenting, but a lot of it was very derivative, it was coping, and they were reading enormous amounts of literature on philosophy, aesthetics, and etc. And they were also looking at their own tradition and their own tradition had been discredited by the communist and completely wiped clear. So what actually existed in 1986 was a coterie of communist approved artist and in the universities there was this movement afoot that was basically to discredit..... They said that ink and wash has gone...has finished, there was no was out for ink and wash and a book was written at the time called Zhongguoxiandaihuihuashi and was written by two professors at Nanjing Art Academy and translated that is “The History of Chinese Painting by Lixiaoshan and Zhang xiaoxia. It came out and it basically traced the development of Chinese painting to the present and said that everything that could be done had been done and it would be pretty pointless to continue this tradition and that it is time to start looking beyond the past. Of course, this caused an enormous controversy within the university. So I thought this was very interesting take on things and worked with a professors to translate the book and I got very interested in some of the work that was being done on that platform. Now, interesting enough Lixiaoshan was the writer ...... is still an independent curator and curates almost exclusively ink and wash works.

So he has discovered the era of his way and is a born again Christian. But, anyway that was kind the beginning. I went back to Stanford and got my Master’s Degree in Chinese Language and Literature, I had changed my degree from Law. I was really interested in heart. I wrote a lot of papers on art Min fen yan and Wu guanzhong the modernist movement in the 1930’s and Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu including a lot of the discussion about East and West and the importance of continuing the modernizing of tradition. Then Tiananmen happened and I was at Stanford at the time and prior to Tiananmen was the China avant-garde art exibition which happened in April just before June and at that exhibition there was the “Gun Shot,” there were a number of performance works. It was shut down three times and the last time was because an Artist came in with a gun and shot her own installation which was a phone booth. She was immediately taken away and arrested with her was her partner. As it turns out she was the daughter of a Major General and that is how she had access to a gun and so she was released two days later.

RM: Not her partner?

RB: No. Her partner actually spent another two months in confinement.

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RB: I remember at the time How excited I was and all my friends from Nanjing were that participated and they did a slide of all of the works and they sent them to me and I made a presentation at Stanford over that particular show. Anyway this was were my passion was. I collected art where and when I could. Its very cheap and even as a student I was able to collect works by young professors at the institutes and academies. After graduating from Stanford with a degree of Chinese language and Literature and found out that it was a pretty useless degree. So I got a job at a PR company in Silicon Valley doing press releases and things like that for some of the Silicon Valet companies. They sent me out to Hong Kong to handle their tech marketing their. I had Intel, Northern Telecom, Motorola, C Gate, and a couple of other smaller accounts on applied materials and etc. I had their Asian accounts so I did precedents and news releases and things like that for them. But they will have made some money after awhile and so I continued to collect 13:23??? had some works by Liu Xiaodong. I remember I collected the first painting sold by Liu Xiaodong. He did set a record recently, one of his paintings just sold for three million US dollars. I picked that one up for ten thousand dollars so I am really happy about that.

RM: And you sold it for?

RB: I sold it for thirty and though I had made a killing.

RB: Anyway, Motorola hired me because they thought it was too expensive to find a personal seller so they hire me. So I went over to the business development manager I did a lot of traveling in China and every chance I got I would come to Beijing.

Where I would come to the Central Art Academy here. Like Robert said to find an Artist you had to go to their dormitory and inevitably no one would be there, there were no mobile phones, so you had to leave your name card with a note “I came to see you if possible can you call me after nine at my hotel here. I would really like to come to your studio.” So I got to know Liu Xiaodong and I told him, basically, I’m doing a lot of traveling and I would like to know more about what is happening can you introduce me to a critic. He introduced me to , who is a professor at the Academy of Art and History department and I commissioned a report on what was happening in the art field. Every month he would give me about three thousand Chinese Characters and about one hundred photographs of works that he thought were interesting, and it was an original criticism. Although, his essay was written specifically for me and the point was to guide my collecting activities. After awhile my door started to fill up and the internet had just started. To me it was like opium, it was like a drug, and I wanted to share it with everyone. So I thought I would put it online. So I translated all of his works and writings and scanned all the images and got his permission to put it on the web and registered Chinese-art.com. I did not want it to be Robert’s webpage on Chinese Art. com. So to avoid this, one of my mentors, Hou Hanru and I decided to make it a bimonthly with Yi Ying and have it guest edited. Where it would have almost zero of my input and the guest editor would nominate the next guest editor.

That way we ran the gamut of about twenty top art critics and independent curators where each one choose their own topic and a lot of it had to do with Post Colonialism and identity politics. Basically, if it were not for people like Robert interfering in the Chinese art scene, it would be much more authentic. So there was a lot of very pointed criticism aimed at the reader which was clearly identified “the global reader” that was going to be testing the website.

RM: Was that 17:04[] over the works?

RB: Yes. We were able to sustain the website through galleries who took out 17:21[]. Then I took on an investor and at the time it was very heavy days. We started in December of 1997 and I think it was 2001 just before the bubble burst a venture capitalist offered us a million dollars for twenty-five percent of the company. So the valuation was four million dollars for this website. Which is just outrageous looking back on it. The art newspaper ranked it as one of the top art websites in the world.

Top 5 actually just after Artnet.com and a couple of others and it was doing really well. We were putting up on average about a hundred images a day. One of the things that did impress upon most people was that the scene here was not just the politic pop one or two artists taking advantage of the system or whatever. It was a really vast and diverse group of people that were the so called “Chinese Artists.” But, when the bubble did burst we ran out of money in the ads and everything dried up and that is when we said alright what are we going to do we have all this great material we want to continue spreading the word.

So we thought why not publish it in book form. So I called John Clark, who is the University of Sidney Art History Department Chair and expert on modern Asian art, and he said he would be happy to edit the essays. He took the essays, compiled them, edited the essays, and wrote an introduction. So that was our first book which was Chinese Art at the End of the Mil-

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lennium published in 1999. In 2000 Wu Hong University of Chicago took the second half of what was being published on the website which was a little more sophisticated and compiled it into Chinese Art at the Crossroads Between East and West Between Past and Future. Which was the title of the big show we did at the International Center of Photography in New York later on “Between Past and Future. The book sold really well and we had funding again and we were able to support the publication of “On the Mid Ground” the collective writings of Hou Hanru. Who I still think is truly one of the most important writers on contemporary art and culture, not just Chinese but world wide. He has been based in Paris since 1989 and he has worked with 20:40[] on Cities on the Move and a number of other projects. His first show titled Heart of Darkness in a catalogue, there were San Yi, Hou Hanru, David Malia from the Moma Oxford, and later he was at the 21:07[]. I forgot who but there was one other writer on Cultural Studies and Contemporary Art and I just cannot think of his name, but 21:18[] just made them all pale by comparison, including, SanYi on the sophistication of his argument. His argument was a very 21:36[] thing kind of thing to impose an identity on Chinese artists and say ink and wash why are you not doing ink and wash it 21:50[] in a corner it is to limit the tools and things they have at their disposal to pursue artistic expression. He found it very interesting in Europe, when he first arrived, that he could not do anything that did not involve ink and wash or that did not begin or end with ink and wash. He said it was very limiting and in Paris it was naturally assumed that since he was Chinese that he would know something about Chinese ink and wash paintings and he said that the reverse was true when he got back to China that people naturally assumed that after living in Paris for ten years that he would know 22:32[] and all of the major city Sherman. In many cases he did but this kind of stereotypes on both sides this kind of East-West argument, he very successfully undermine. He took kind of the cause of several other writers like 22:58[] who said that Chinese Art does not exist and that the whole notion of East and West is a fallacy and is a non starter and the Greek Arch tradition, the Christian tradition, the Muslim tradition, and the Secular tradition. Are we talking about modernism? When you say West what are you talking about? When you say East what are you talking about? Would it not be much better if we just began at the individual level and talked about people as individuals? Rather than colors, regions, or whatever. So I think he in many ways liberated Chinese art and Chinese design and culture. His theory, which is not to give credit where credit was due, this was based on a lot of existing theory in Europe at the time and just applied in a very effective way for that particular situation. Hanru wrote a book of collective writings we published. That one was difficult and did not sell well. I forgot what happened but Chinese art was not cool anymore and at least for a couple of years. So I had to layoff all my staff and rented out part of the space next door. It was me and an advertising company and I had rented it out by chair. Six Hundred RMB per chair. We moved into the space next door in February of 2002 and at the time it was the Muslim Cantin for 798. Which was the military factory designed by East Germans in the mid 1950’s. It was very secretive thus the number 798 so that you could not define what they were manufacturing. In fact the electronics here were used in China’s first atomic bomb. There are pictures and documents that we were able to get access to that showed that all of the nations leaders came here and East Germany’s top leadership also visited.

RM: The microphone.

RB: Yes that is right. The microphone that Mao Zedong used was also manufactured here by 798. 798 still makes really good audio products. In fact it is upside down actually they put the screws on the top. (laughter) Maybe it was suppose to hang from the ceiling or something. So when I moved into 798 they asked ‘what do you want?’ And I said a hundred square meters and they showed me the Muslim Cantin and all the windows were broken and they had this “insane asylum” green that came up about four feet and it was white the rest of the way up. But the white was just covered in grease. So I said do you have anything else and they said no and it was obvious that they were trying to get rid of me so I said ok I will take it. Which I thought this has got to be better than the office space I have right now which was thirty-three square meters. So I invited Ai Weiwei over and I could not afford him. He had just started off as a designer and I asked him what I should do with it and he said well put a coat of varnish over the grease and leave the rest exactly as it is and do a 26:59[] get your tubes, straight lines all the way around, put some varnish of the floor and varnish over raw wood for your shelves and that is all you need and for your desk get some work benches and lay some doors across them. He said to put some bricks out front.

RM: Gray Brick.

RB: He did not specify gray brick. (laughter) Anyway, we took a lot of his advise, I could not afford anymore than that. My accountant was the wife of Tang Xing, who is one of the top performance artists in China and he would come everyday at

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six o’clock and pick-up Xiao Li. He would bring with him his artist friends and we would go out and drink until 2 or 3 in the morning and Tang Xing would carry me back to a taxi and I would go home. So that was kind of my life for a number of years but I got to know a number of artists that way and we got to have a lot of philosophical discussions with the sixty-two percent alcohol ErGuotou that they served up at these places. Inevitably, when Tang Xing would bring artists they would say wow this is a really cool space how much are you paying for this. Xiao Li would show them around. I can honestly say that Xiao Li and Tang Xing populated maybe thirty-forty percent of 798 today. Some of which either came with Tang Xing or some way or another Xiao Li. She would take them to the management office and helped them negotiate the contract.

Otherwise they would not have a clue how to negotiate the contract. She would show them around and greased the palms that need to be greased she basically did everything to get the artists in and 798 kind of took off. It was very secretive and the factory was still working. Until along came this guy named Huang Rui. He was with the star group and he brought in Beijing, Tokyo art projects again through Xiao Li and they had big events. Seven-eight hundred people came, the media came, and so it started to get some press. Then he set up the Da Shan Zi International Art Festival and that was just enormous. He had invited artist from all over the world to participate. His girlfriend was the daughter of the ministry of culture in France, so, he was able to get top French Artists to come over. He also worked with a performing artist and he really an did an enormous amount of work to get this place on the map. In fact I will never forget it was the night before the first Dashanzi called a meeting and told us well it has been cancelled by Seven Stars. He said there where certain crowd and fire restrictions that apply and we do not meet those requirements.

RM: The Toilets.

RB: Yeah. Not enough public toilets but the key was the crowds and that was the excuse they were using to shut down the event. Huang Rui some how got word to the ChaoYang district government who came to the rescue who sent their police force in to do their crowd and fire patrol. Which really was the first time that the Chinese government ever came to do anything for contemporary/experimental Art in China, but they saved the day. The next day eighty thousand people showed up and the place was just deluged with young kids mostly, a very young hip crowd, and there were a lot from the Embassy. After that the 32:00[] came the commissioner of the EU came, the Chao-Yang district government brought a delegation of mayors from the United States down and it just really took off. Seven Stars meanwhile are thinking what have I done. We have created a monster, because they had plans to make this into an electronic city and those plans had been approved by the state counsel in the five year plan. So that was written in stone. So all this talk of culture, artist and things like that was getting in the way of their plans.

RM: Which included tearing everything down.

RB: Yeah. Right. The plan was to tearing everything down and building glass high rises because again this factory became the embarrassment to the Seven Stars and the fact that artists, just one 33:03[] above dogs, were able to rent space and do what they were doing was really difficult for them psychologically. So they said no artists, no foreigners, it was kind of the reverse of Shang Hai. No dogs, no artist, no foreigners were allowed in the area and no taxis. They did everything they could to shut down 798. They would not allow anything to happen but the momentum was there. Next year the Dashanzi International festival was twice as big and they tried to shut it down again and they did everything they could, but this time the city government interviewed. At the same time there was this sculpture artist at 798 Li Changchun and he was the National Peoples Delegate and he tabled a movement to make this into a cultural district at the time and this was in 2005. So it was taken under consideration, whatever that means, no decision was made. Until just last year. In 2006, it was officially declared a cultural district. Basically at that point it was like ok this worth looking into. So they sent down all the departments including the mayor to look into 798 to see if it was viable and if it was good for Beijing. Most of the reports were good, the media was still glowing and things like that. Except for the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Interior Safety, the secret police essentially who came down and found all the works of dealing with Mao Zedong and things like that and reported it to the mayor and he said well something has got to be done. So they came into our bookstore and confiscated all of the books that had anything to do with Mao Zedong. What they did not know was, this is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, that the ministry of culture had approved a number of publishing houses to go ahead and publish some of these political pop works and so they had been published before. Where as were originally going to be charged with a sedition act, article number 6, and my passport was going to be scanned the place would be closed and completely confiscated and

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torn down and everything like that. We were given a slap on the wrist and they said that they were going to keep the nine books and we highly recommend you do not display them in a prominent fashion, but you can go ahead. Mind you, none of this could have happened without discussion at very high levels in the government. So anyway, China has basically decided that their Contemporary Art and Culture is ok. There is kind of a new policy platform that is aimed at fostering the creative industries in China and China does not want to continue manufacturing widgets anymore and then there is all this talk about cultural deficits for every five hundred books that China translates and imports into the United States, the United States translates and imports one, in the reverse. So this kind of commitment to developing a local culture that can participate in this international art, architecture, creative and design discourse around the world is now really all the way at the top levels of the government and 798 is kind of a manifestation of that. We published two books on 798 one of the books was clearly divided into the past, which covered the 1950’s and all the black and white pictures of all the leaders, workers, and the space. Back when Huang Rui when he was growing up he wanted to work here. They had the best mess halls, the best cafeterias, basketball courts, on the weekends they have Evel Knievel motorcycle jumping contests, ballet, lessons for children, and during the cultural revolution there was no strife here what so ever because everybody here had qualified for three generation red. So there was no class tension and they were all clearly proletariat form the landless class with no blemishes. So this was the ideal work place and then when you go into some of these large spaces you can see they are very well lit airy very nice spaces for the workers. So we covered that period and then we covered the present which included everybody from Dashanzi National Art Festival to lots of international singers coming through and doing performances in some of the bigger spaces. Cindy Crawford did an Omega show which became kind of a glitzy, glamorous kind of art district and that was the present, but with the edges. But with the future, Robert and Mary-ann, where kind enough to contribute one version of a possible future for 798, in conjunction with the School of Architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Art. So we had two kind of future possibilities for 798 which are in a book to be published in the bookstore. So kind of a plug for ourselves. If you get a chance it is called Beijing 798 reflections on Art, Architecture and Society by Huang Rui. RM: Let me add that that book 39:50-40:00[] it was a crucial time because it, you can probally speak on it longer than I can, the thing could have either gone shut it all down tear down the buildings and do the thing or have it be at a kind of limbo which opened the door to where it is today and the book had an enormous tie in swaying it thorough the latter.

RB: Yeah. On that point at the time it was reported in the press daily that 798 was eminent that it was going to be demolished and they were tearing down buildings. In fact, the front of the building along the road was actually torn down and I was originally a beautiful building in the original design and they tore that down and they were really trying to tear everything down as fast as they could. They did not even have a buyer or a development plan. They were just tearing it down to prevent this thing from becoming an arts district. So the point of the book was to show that it was valuable in the past and this is key it was for Huang Rui and all of the artists that is their past. Everyone thinks that Chinese past is five thousand years of history, but it is not. It was not taught. It was completely cut off from the life of Huang Rui. Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, all of this. If you ask an artist today you seem to have Zen elements in your art work, and they would say you know when I was about thirty I read about Zen Buddhism for the first time I came across it. It was an amazing discovery but that was after I read Heidegger and Marks and you know it was just a great discovery but it has nothing to do with me. What has to do with me is my own personal memory and experiences and plus collective memory or experience of society at the time. Which was socialism and communism and again the past and tradition had been wiped clean. There were movements against Confucianism, against tradition which was deemed feudalist. Literally there was nothing left to Chinese culture when Huang Rui was growing up. So this was his past and his history and it was for a lot of people. I remember giving a book to cadres and government officials and they were all fascinated by the heyday of the 1950’s. That was so near and dear to their heart they still have a very romantic memory. Of course it has been shaped by many things media did not agree but it is of that period and those were the good old days the 1950’s when we were working side by side with our brethren Soviet Union and Germany and there were no prostitutes and beggars and there was no drug use and none of this nude art and no foreigners. So I think that assets of the book at least really hit home because China had destroyed almost all of it. They did not consider it was worth saving the factories, the 1950’s architecture and culture, everything else from the 1950’s and 60’s. They thought it was kind of embarrassing looking back on it. A lot of people died and they made a lot of mistakes and things went wrong but still if you look around there is not much of this kind of architecture and this kind of space left in Beijing and in China they are tearing it down as fast as they could or at least they were. Now I think the book had a real impact in that regard. People like Zaha Hadid, Robert, Many-Ann, Rem Koolhaas and architects from around the world were coming into 798 remarking on the remarkable

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architecture and design and how it was really a world heritage. Xu Ming did a proposal also for the development of 798. Steven Holl, you know everyone has come through and remarked to you have a remarkable legacy here you know do not lose it.

So I think in that regard it did have a certain impacted on the way people thought about this period and art and architecture and that is where the real appeal was because there is no really sympathy and there is no real love in contemporary art. I will never forget the conversations we had with the media who were trying to be sympathetic. In a sense they would send out their editor and chief there is this economic newspaper trying to emulate the financial times by focusing on art and architecture, film, literature, and etc. So the Editor and Chief came down and called together all the artists to talk. So he began the talk with “Frankly, it is not that I do not get it, I just do not like it. This contemporary art stuff.� (laughter) RB: In which the artists would quickly point out it is like saying you do not like someone asking questions because that is what contemporary art is about. It is about addressing issues in society and asking questions, not answering them so much. So to say you do not like contemporary art is like saying you do not like people to ask questions and as an Editor and Chief you better look deep inside yourself and hopefully you will come to a different conclusion about the importance of asking questions. I think it did bring together different elements, societies, artists and non-art communities. So I think the book was very important in that regard.

RM: We went into a landlords office in Seven Star and you opened the door and tried to find somebody and we got the wrong office. I remember one time we looked in and they had their computers, two or three in there, and the screen saver was the turning point.

RB: Yeah. Well I think that is the other impact. A lot of [compadres], government officials and people who got involved in 798 found that artist were not blood sucking vampires, evil trying to integrate and overturn the government type people, but very nice people. The artists would invite the top management from Seven Stars to have beer and a barbecue or join them for a party. Afterward they would sit around and talk and they found out that artists were real people too. Before long real friendships started between the workers and the people who originally inhabited this place and the artists. It became quite apparent when you would walk into some of the offices at Seven Stars and on their screen savers there would be art work by Zhao Bandi or Tang Xing. This was just totally astounding that it could happen so quickly and that these bonds could be formed and they would in return become champions to their superiors who obviously very high placed in the government. So how 798 kind of came about, after all these snapshots that I have seen, is still kind of a mystery but it is a great story. Maybe after twenty to thirty years from now somebody might have a clearer perspective on how 798 came about.

RM So I know your real love and focus is in photography, I think you studied that at Stanford, and I know that a lot of art in China is photography and video. So if you could speak about that some.

RB Well, I spent a lot of time, in my formative years, with Tang Xing. What happened then was these performance artists who would get out into the country side and they would do these wild performances. For instance, nine artists got together and then they would strip and weight themselves on a scale then they would lay down on top of this anonymous mountain. The artists would be measured at about a meter or so then a photograph would be taken and that was the work and it was called To Add a Meter to an Anonymous Mountain. It was about artists being marginalized and able to make a difference. So now the mountain is no longer anonymous, it has been memorialized by this particular work and the artists made a difference.

They actually changed the physical height of the mountain. Later on they did another one that was to raise the level of a fish pond one inch. So they invited a hundred migrant workers to strip and walk into a fish pond together and by doing so they were able to measure that the level of the fish pond went up this much. So there was this real kind of movement that was happening and a lot of very exciting things happening in performance, but it was happening for a lot of us through photographs. This is because they would just do it and take pictures and so what you would see was photographs. There is still today discussions around the US and the rest of the world rather or not this is kind of a new genera of performance photography because it stays but it is not a tableau it is not like a Cindy Sherman. It is not dress up for the photograph. It is documentary but it is also staged. So that was interesting to me. So I thought since we do publish and I wanted to get into

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additions we rented this space right here. Again thanks largely to Robert again. At the time to get Robert in the door of Senior Management here we had to go find the senior president. Which I would have never went to go find because I had my space and I was perfectly satisfied with it. We had to go really far up in Bureaucracy to get four thousand square meters of space for Base in 798 or 706. Low and behold this space was the drivers recreation room for this very high official. He said “Well Robert what can I do for you? You have introduced me to Robert and Mary-Ann and it is great and I am really excited about having world class architects and people like that working together with us to come up with a plan for 798. What can I do for you?” I said can you give me the space? So he said done. The drivers moved out the next day and to this day they still hate me. (laughter) Then Robert was kind enough to do a kind of back of the neck design for this space and he knew an engineer named Robert [Meyerhands] who installed shacks off for heating and cooling for the space. You know he warned me up front he said you know we are not going to do the rustic A-frame bookstore design. Ok Robert if that is ok with you.

So it was some back and forth emailing and some drawings on napkins and very simple stuff. He made this space into what it was today. The content was to be photography exhibited in this area here or addition work but primarily photography. I had collected a lot of photography from the 1930’s black and white by China’s top photographers. Then on that side was to serve coffee. Wallpapers City Guide to Beijing, a magazine, has now chosen it as the top three coolest places in Beijing to go and they said the design is really nice, very spacious design by Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray. So it was kind of this unplanned thing that you wake up one day and you sit back and ask yourself how it happened. No off this was planned it kind of just happened. One mistake to the other or one person introduced you to the other. In China, and a number of people have remarked on this, everything is possible and also everything is also difficult. Zhang Yonghe at MIT chair actually said that. So it is true when you meet somebody and get to talking and brainstorm which turns into dreams and visions. It becomes easy to realize your dreams and I think that is what happened here. One step at a time no master plan. I think that this is a good way to end my talk and open it up for questions.

Audience: Who exactly is the Seven Stars Group?

RB: Seven Stars is the property manager for these factories.

Audience: I meant the power source that can come and make you leave or try to shut you down. How many are they? How do they get to have this position? I just wanted to learn more about the group.

RB: Property managers comprise primarily of people appointed by the owners, which is the Beijing Oriental Electronics Conglomerate and the Chairman of the National People of Congress. It was a State owned enterprise that was privatized and when it was privatized they set up the Property Management Company. But, again, this was populated by staff from the Beijing Oriental Electronics Conglomerate. I would say that they got maybe hundred and fifty people in the Seven Stars property group. In the Beijing Oriental Electronics Conglomerate, I think in just pensioners and unemployed alone they said they have ten thousand people that are drawing pension or unemployment from the Beijing Oriental Electronics Conglomerate, from the original 798 factory.

Audience: So the property is owned by the Beijing Oriental Electronics Conglomerate and they hire Seven Stars Group as project managers and as managers they have say about how gets to have a lease, how long and what you can do there. How many people comprise the Seven Stars Group?

RB: I would say about seventy to hundred people.

Audience: Is there a Hierarchy in that group?

RB: They cannot make any major decisions without going to the owner of Beijing Oriental Electronics Conglomerate top management.

Audience: Which is privatized now?

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RB: Yes. Audience: So you have the government say lets promote culture, lets have China be noted in the world for this. Will the government be in contact with BOE and give the word from top down? Is that how it would kind of go?

RB: It was a corporation and the corporation had legitimate economic interests so the government gave them some land in the country side and lots of money to build whatever the factories they needed. So compensation in other words for preserving it not tearing it down and building. The Seven Stars is still managing it, but they are managing it in conjunction with a representative of the 1:00:58 district government. This is a real sensitive area where government policy meets economic interest in this very capitalist China, and it is in a state of flux, it moves back and forth and everything is being defined as they move forward.

Audience: Will the day come that this will be the next book you do? The story of how this happened. Not just the specific history of this area but as a model the evolution of decision making and the allegiance of corporate and aesthetic concerns.

Can you see that day coming?

RB: Yeah and it will be fascinating. Robert has already come up with a great idea for a dangerous supplement, there are pit falls on this road that they have embarked upon making this a government sponsored cultural district. It has got to be self funding and you know. But getting the inside into the interworkings of the government is still problematic now. I do not know to what degree we could get into the heads of the policy makers and are those decisions. So that is why I said that one day someone is going to write the real history of what happened here and they are going to get access to the documents that the major policy makers in the Chinese government that decided our place. But, yeah, it would be a great project and the people in Seven Stars, BOE, and the 1:02:26 district government would probably open up to us. I think that the Seven Stars and 1:04:11 district government want the story told. It is to their credit. They have nothing but to benefit from such a story.

RM: It is also, you might describe it, the cluster of stuff that is here. Which ranges from 1:04:29 to fine arts to still some factory work and some schools down here people go outside and wave the flags or what do they do there?

RB: It is the school that is affiliated with the factory 751, which it still an operating electronics factory.

RM: That has spawned all the other arts, compounds, districts, in Beijing, of which, there must be 1:05:03.

RB: It is not that I would not be interested in doing the book. It would just be an enormous undertaking. You know I have heard Robert talk about 798 as some of the Architecture and some of the stuff that is happening here as being kind of unigue around the world. I think a lot of people are interested in learning if they are learning about something new that they can derive from what is happening here. That is certainly an area that could be high yield. There is a lot more political work today and it is happening under the 1:07:40 of the government and this kind of policy that they have called Harmony. Harmony is the opposite of what they use to do to performance artists. When the performance artists did a show and the police would come in and beat the hell out of him, throw him in jail and leave him down there with no food for three days. When they did that of course they made him famous because it was an enormous PR (public relations) boost for the artist. So they kinda figured out just to ignore is somehow a way to negate it because it does not get credence in the media or international market. So by ignoring it was a more effective way of dealing with it. So, yeah, you see a lot of particular stuff around here in this region. Recesntly there was a festival on prostitution and things like that which are very political. I was asked if I wanted to participate in the publication of a book on prostitution. I said to myself, wow this is really inserting myself into a political debate and I am a guest in this country and I do not think that I would be particularly welcome to engage in a domestic debate on prostitution. So I said as much as I would like to I could get killed for doing such a thing and besides who am I to get involved in that debate. So yes there is more and more political work and more and more political talk. My wife tells me there is a lot happening in cyber space. In fact, it is just uncontrollable and the government cannot control it and there is a lot of very very serious political discussions happening in cyber space.

RM: So the peculiar thing, just at the moment that Robert described that the thing was going so this way and that way at the

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same time and it could have gone either way, easily and at the moment it was kind of legitimized.

RB: This is where it dangers supplementers because they kind of co-opted it (1:10:18-1:10:22). You know all the political force and impacts of the works and just the existence of the artist where suddenly changed when the government said it was ok and they came in and they started managing it. So the first act that they did after they declared this a cultural district was to kick out Huang Rui, the leader of the artists. In Chinese it was “1:10:52-1:10:54,� which means to kill the chicken to show the monkey. So they kicked him out and everyone was just scared shitless after that. So this is the dangerous supplement that Robert was talking about. So this co-opting is kind of this velvet glove approach to art. Where the government is taking part and sponsoring events is taking a very proactive control over what is said and what is not said.

RM: I would say on the positive side because that thrust was one of the main points of this present five year plan. Which is to promote creativity, originality, stop being the experts on widgets or keeping the experts on widgets but you have to add this other to life. So in that way it is kind of riding on the wave of the other but to keep something quite positive was quite 1:12:13.

RB: The 1:12:18 foundation is being set up and there is all kinds of things afoot. 1:12:23 is the director of the China National Arts Gallery. He was appointed just about the time this policy platform was announced and since he has taken over he has done three-hundred years of Chinese Art. He has cooperated with the Guggenheim and a Denmark museum called the Louisiana Museum. He is working with 1:12:46 - 1:12:47, he is holding talks, world class exhibitions. In fact, Matthew Barneys pre-masters series, all five films where shown publicly. Mind you five years ago this involves full male frontal nudity, genitalia.

I mean man he goes a lot of places in these things. So all of this was shown to about two-hundred and fifty thousand people who came to see that show. There is a lot that has changed and a lot of freedom that has happened in that. What its relationship with 798 is I am not sure.

Audience: How has your role as a publisher changed or how is it now?

RB: I still try and publish manuscripts of local writers as much as I can. I use to do all the translation myself but now it is just too expensive. A book with one hundred-thousand characters would cost be about one hundred-thousand RMB to translate into English and that is about twelve thousand dollars and there is not a lot of funding afterwards. So it has been changed and I try to keep myself out of the equation as much as possible so that I can provide a platform rather than a political position or stance but I am not as able to do that as I was with the internet. That is really sad because I find myself in the position of censoring works or deciding certain publications can or cannot be published and I really feel that it is not my position to be deciding these things. Even by deciding not to decide you have done something that is political. So it is a very difficult position but I am trying to withdraw myself from the equation and provide a neutral platform as much as possible for voices in China to be heard elsewhere.

Audience: Do you have a sense of when this harmony is going to be too much, when there is a breaking point and secondly where are the artists who do work that the government will not allow? Where are they working? Are they working?

RB: Now on the second question they are almost all in cyber space. There is a great example 1:12:47. Now she is interesting.

She straddles both sides. She has done a lot of political work that can never be shown but her work for 1:18:48 will actually be a party that she is throwing on second life 1:18:56 and that is going to be broadcast live and everyone will be invited to participate. It is a virtual world. Now I did not know this but you can take pictures in second life of all of her lovers, friends, and all of the people she has met and that influenced her, who she has done business with or talked to and she talks about how she would kind of change her identity and go into the gay parts of town and listen in to conversations about gays and then she would participate in political discussions about China’s future. During this she would have her identity concealed so that no one would know who she was. So a lot of artists are moving to the safe confounds of cyber space to do really political work that would not be allowed. I mean sexuality and homosexuality is still kind of hidden away and any discussion about present political regime or policy that is out and out in opposition is not allowed in public. You cannot do anything that involves the present leadership. So there is a lot of network that is going on there. So there is a lot of this apartment art that is documented on the web. Maybe even Youtube. Huang Rui, Ai Weiwei and everyone else have figured out that the best

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way to criticize the government is actually to choose an existing part of an existing policy and to raise it in such prominence that people recognize it decent. I will give you an example 1:21:54, a well-known film director, in 1991 shot a film called “The Swear.� He went to Tiananmen. It was a two hour film interviewing the police who killed all the students and it was interesting because they talked about everything except for the incedent. So it was two hours on Tiananmen Square. Its history, the crazy people that come there and set themselves on fire, and the people that come there out of inspiration for Mao Zedong.

Every aspect of Tiananmen Square, except for the incident. In so doing the admission itself is very much a blatant criticism.

There is just all this work that you just cannot criticize if you were the government. You cannot criticize for doing a large monumental painting of the collective works of Mao Zedong. So there is a lot of this reversed co-opting of the government in art today.

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An artists’ community takes shape on Beijing’s edge Joyce Hor-Chung Lau From: The International Herald Tribune Written: 2006.03.06

BEIJING -- Changdian village, on the eastern edge of Beijing, is the kind of place where sheep are herded down the streets, laundry is left to dry on trees and the town garbage collector is a guy with a donkey cart. It is also set to be the home of the new Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as a complex of artists’ studios and exhibition spaces.

“The most interesting art developments this year will be in the periphery of this area,” said Zhang Zhaohui, a well-known curator who will act as the director of the museum, known as BJ Moca. “There are probably more than 300 unique artists’ studios in the east district.”

Zhang, his breath frosting slightly in the morning cold, stood on a plot of land he had rented from a farmer and explained how one building would become an 1,100-square-meter, or 11,850-square-foot, exhibition space, while an empty block across the dirt yard would become the BJ Moca headquarters. On yet another site, he plans to open about 30 studios and two exhibition spaces in a complex he says is inspired by New York’s PS1 project.

It takes an extraordinary amount of optimism to look at a bunch of unheated concrete blocks in an obscure Chinese village and imagine opening a museum and studio complex by this summer.

But Zhang, a native Beijinger, has seen some extraordinary growth in his hometown. China’s economic boom has also meant a boom in its contemporary art market, as well as a transformation of the rural and industrial suburbs outside the nation’s capital. As downtown rents skyrocket, farmhouses and abandoned factories on the fringes of this sprawling city of 15 million are being overtaken by artists and gallery owners seeking larger and more affordable spaces.

The cultural development of east Beijing began in the early 2000s, when local artists, along with one enterprising bookstore owner, moved into the Dashanzi area, home to numerous abandoned former East German factories.

They stumbled onto a gold mine. The area’s ‘50s-era Bauhaus architecture gave their studios and galleries a fashionably edgy, underground feel, while the timing of their move coincided with the rising price of Chinese contemporary art internationally.

Dealers and gallerygoers, thrilled by the idea of viewing increasingly saleable works in such cool surroundings, have flocked to the area.

The larger area now known as the 798 Art District i named after Factory #798, the best known of the renovated spaces i has developed in the blink of an eye. Today, against a backdrop of smokestacks and giant factory pipes, shiny new signs advertise more than 30 galleries, as well as cafes, restaurants, boutiques, small media companies and even a new nightclub.

But despite the commercialization of the area, 798’s art has generally not suffered. There are none of the endless landscapes and portraits of pretty Chinese women in red dresses sold in markets downtown. Instead, there are works by critically acclaimed overseas artists, like the French conceptualist Daniel Buren, who has transformed the three-story Galleria Continua into a site-specific installation. Solo shows at 798 are granted to both big-name Chinese artists and to the young, like the 24-year-old Chi Peng, whose sexually disturbing series is displayed next to old Maoist slogans painted in red on the walls i a leftover from when the White Space Gallery was a factory during the Cultural Revolution.

798 has not lost its gritty touch i there are still far more factory workers riding home on bicycles than SUVs i but in a city where the average monthly salary is less than 4,000 yuan, or about $500, it has already ceased to be an affordable refuge for

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many artists.

So artists and galleries are moving even farther away to what seem like an endless number of little-known villages on Beijing’s eastern fringes: Caochangdi (which means “Grasslands” in Mandarin), Jiuchang (“Liquor Factory”) and the twin communities of Feijiacun and Saojiacun, the second of which teeters between flourishing as an artists’ community and being demolished by the government.

The new F2 Gallery has wisely arranged for a shuttle bus to bring people from 798 to its space in Caochangdi, which even local taxi drivers have a hard time finding. It’s a grubby little hamlet and the last place one would expect to see works by Julian Schnabel and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, two darlings of the New York art scene, but that’s what F2 showed when it first opened in January. It followed up quickly with another high-profile opening Feb. 18, with brazenly political works by Sheng Qi, the Chinese artist known for cutting off his pinky finger in protest after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.

Fabien Fryns, F2’s Belgian owner, who lives in an apartment behind the gallery, says he deliberately opened somewhere off the beaten track.

He dismissed the suggestion that his gallery was too far away. “We had between 200 and 300 for the Schnabel-Basquiat opening,” he said. “And anyway, everything changes so fast in Beijing. A new highway goes up, and suddenly you’re a halfhour closer to the city.”

He could not have moved to Caochangdi village at a better time. The village is also home to the pioneering China Art and Archive Warehouse, LA Gallery, the CourtYard Annex and a new government-funded film museum.

There is a similar level of growth in another east Beijing village called Jiuchang, home to what has probably been the most impressive new development in this area: The Korean-owned Arario gallery’s five-building complex, with 3,000 square meters of exhibition space. Yun Chea Gab, the gallery director, predicts that the area will be “redeveloped as a huge art district, in accordance with the cultural boom in this area.”

Arario Beijing’s debut exhibition, “Beautiful Cynicism,” has dozens of works by international stars like Cindy Sherman and Yue Minjun, and it will be followed by a series of solo shows.

In general, moneyed galleries and dealers have an easier time in east Beijing than actual artists looking for studio spaces.

Mainland China’s muddled bureaucracy often makes it difficult to ascertain whether a piece of land is private or public, belongs to a farmer or a government department, or is legal or not legal to rent. Even 798’s fate was uncertain for several years before it became as well-known as it is today.

While some parts of East Beijing are flourishing, things are less rosy at Saojiacun, an artists’ community that has already been partially demolished by the government, which says the development is illegal.

According to Chao Ziyi, a ceramic artist and sculptor at Saojiacun, there were originally about 200 artists working in about 150 studios in the area before the government sent around demolition notices. Now some of Saojiacun’s red-brick, one-story studios have been bulldozed, and he is one of the few artists left.

Sitting in his frigid studio, with his 2-year-old son wrapped in so many layers of winter clothes he can barely walk, Chao insists he will stay. He can use a neighbor’s electric kiln, he says, and in any case is busy with an exhibition coming up at a gallery in the 798 area.

“The first demolition notification came last summer, and we put up a fight for its survival. Artists were feeling despondent, because we put so much time and money into fixing this place up,” he said. “Several months ago, when the police force came, we planned to move even farther north and east. But I found nowhere better than here. So I decided it was useless to worry about what I cannot control.”

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Despite it all, “I think this area will grow a lot,” Chao said.

Zhang, who is hoping to open the BJ Moca, has also had issues opening what will be one of the few privately run, contemporary art museums in the country.

“It’s totally different from the West,” Zhang said. “There are no art protection laws, no tax exemptions to encourage corporate sponsorship. China is not part of the international museum network, where there are lots of exchanges and shared resources.”

Still, Zhang maintains the sense of ambition and optimism that has driven these unlikely developments in Beijing. “In two or three years, we hope to be exchanging from London, New York and Paris,” he said.

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Tiananmen and Liang Sicheng Sus Van Elzen From: Dragon & Rose Garden: Art and Power in China Book Published: 2009

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Tiananmen and Liang Sicheng Sus Van Elzen From: Dragon & Rose Garden: Art and Power in China Book Published: 2009

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798, a factory in east beijing Sus Van Elzen

From: Dragon & Rose Garden: Art and Power in China Book Published: 2009

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798, a Cultural petting zoo Zhu Yan From: 798: A Photographic Journal Book Published: 2005

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New Frontier Jonathan Napack From: Beijing 798: Reflections on a Factory of Art Book Published: 2007

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798 History Huang Rui From: Beijing 798: Reflections on a Factory of Art Book Published: 2007

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From 718 to 798 Li Yang From: Beijing 798 Now Book Published: 2007

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FAKE_DISCIPLINE: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ARCHITECTURE

LEARNING FROM UNCERTAINTY Yung Ho Chang From: Area Article Published: 2005.01

“Not that I don’t get, The world changes fast.”

Lyric by Cui Jian, Beijing rock singer The other day, one of my colleagues speculated whether or not Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York was inspired or directly influenced by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas. A week later, I read the interview with Scott Brown and Venturi by Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. From the foursome conversation, there seemed no doubt that my colleague was correct. Interestingly, the interview was entitled Re-Learning from Las Vegas. I could not help but to wonder if Koolhaas’ manifesto about city and/or density could be renamed as Learning from the Metropolis. However, the more significant revelation coming to mind is the potentiality to learn from anything, beside the pop and the urban culture.

Or, anything from reality.

Koolhaas’ Great Leap Forward or Learning from China includes lessons about quantity, size, speed, thus about efficiency and about an attitude toward design that counters the prevailing Western mentality. Koolhaas sees a big, quick, and rough architecture that will eventually undo the precious, delicate construct of the Western elitist artist-architects, if the Chinese model should be followed. For me, however, practicing in China has been a process of Learning from Uncertainty, which could be defined as a set of conditions that makes anything possible but everything extremely difficult. Some of the conditions that effect architecture most may be grouped in four categories: 1. The Myths: Certain practices in the building industry in China do create a grand illusion of an incredible productivity but also compromise the result in the end: Budget: The cost of construction is typically calculated by RMBs per square meter for the bare structure and enclosure first. For a low-rise concrete frame building, the estimate should be around 1,200 RMBs (8.27RMBs =1USD) per square meter. Yet, everything else, such as exterior and interior finish, or heating and air conditioning, are budgeted separately, could be more expensive than the structure, and are added on one after another through out the design and sometimes construction periods. Not only the total building cost isn’t that low eventually but neither the architect nor the client in some cases knows what the final figure might be until it happens or has happened. Today, a project that started with 1,200 RMBs per-square-meter naked estimate could easily end up in the neighborhood of 4,000 RMBs for a fairly conventional design.

Although these numbers are still competitive with the ones in the economically more mature countries, the particular way of budgeting is extremely vulnerable to an ever-rising price tag, and incidentally (or not?) echoes Robert Venturi’s theory of a Decorated Shed, in which the superficial is peeled off and triumphs over the substantial. It, the Cheap or the Shed, is often an architecture without architectonics or quality, as at least in a classic sense.

Speed: The initial design timetable is always tight. The schematic design, regardless the scale of the project, is given often a couple of weeks down to a few days. It is not unusual at all when the construction documents for a building of approximately 10,000 square meters are asked to be done in a month. The unrealistic schedule is then often extended in small increments, say a week or two at each time; thus it is similar to the budget estimate. For the client, the rationale behind this strange phenomenon is that, if the architect is given too much time, s/he would likely not work on the project

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for the client in question but some other more urgent projects, since architects in China tend to handle a number of commissions at the same time. In other words, by so doing, the client may feel having more control over the pacing of the design. The victim of speeding is again the product. Construction documents are not fully detailed before rushing out and full of mistakes. Then extra workdays have to be put in to make corrections and achieve completion, let alone alteration on the construction site due to the poor drawings. The design process can be further delayed by the slow and unpredictable governmental approval procedures and indecisiveness on the client’s part. Even construction is scheduled very much in the same add-on way. Therefore, more often than not, the overall time invested in one projects isn’t so little. Acceleration decelerates.

The Morphs: Some aspects, both general and specific, in China are evolving so rapidly that you cannot really put a handle on but they may call for original or extraordinary solutions in architecture and urbanism: Society: The social changes unfolding in China are having a tremendous impact on Chinese city and architecture; the rise of the urban population, the emergence of a middle class, the newly acknowledged property ownership, the increase of private cars, and suburbanization are only some of the most obvious ones. The problems that have come along seem to be even more: the traffic jam, the pollution, the floating population, the epidemics, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the energy crisis, to mention a few. One does not know the exact state of many of these affairs, since any survey when made available is already obsolete, and nothing can be predicted. Any plans measured in months could be considered as long-term. The Chinese population naturally tends to possess a mind set just as unstable and to be concerned with immediate interests.

Client: The boom also breeds a new generation of private/individual clients for architecture, who, armed with newly acquired wealth, are typically young, energetic, optimistic, ambitious, and ideologically as well as aesthetically confused. They are open-minded and bias-free until some of they travel to Las Vegas and/or Paris. Returning from their global tour, they are ready to consume the best of the world or the name brands and know what they what in architecture and urbanism back home: Approximation of images that they have seen, like a postcard or a souvenir sculpture. In general, a piece of architecture serves the crowd twice: first as production tool and/or commodity, secondly as showcase of success and/or vehicle of promotion. However, since the client may not have the time or idea for the preparation of a building program, an architect may get involved in a project early on to propose and design functions or ways in which buildings or cities might be engaged and experienced.

Technology and Material: While concrete is still the most popular structural material in China, other options are emerging. Steel is certainly one of them if the prize of which does not fluctuate so much in recent years. Non-structural building materials expand from the quintessential ceramic wall tiles and tinted glass to Italy travertine and Spanish marble to anything produced anywhere in the world thanks to globalization. Meanwhile, all Chinese architects’ offices are fully computerized and the softwares are updated so often, due to the highly efficient underground piracy. Compatibility can thus be an issue while collaborating with architects from elsewhere. In general, experience is discarded faster than accumulated. Practice is truly a perpetuated learning process.

The Debatables: There are clear directions in some areas, such as the preference for tabula rasa or the urban planning policies, which I have difficulties to accept: Environment: Flat city is fast to design and build, a particular logic produced by the onslaught of urbanization and an insatiable desire for efficiency. Hills and mountains have been and still are being removed to create pads for rapid urban developments.

Such practice of land flattening has been institutionalized in China as one of the prerequisites for urbanization: To prepare

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the land for development, San Tong Yi Ping or Three Connections One Leveling has to be performed first. Three connections are referred to the building of infrastructure to a site – electricity, water, and vehicular access or road. Later, the number of connections grew to seven: electricity, water, sewerage, telecommunication, gas, (central) heating, and vehicular access or road. Recently, two more connections have been added to the list: Internet and the separation of sewer and rainwater. For the moment, it is Jiu Tong or Nine Connections and the double treatment of wastewater brings even a signal for environmental concerns. However, One Leveling remains unchanged and has been always the same as the making of a perfect erasure: Vegetations, buildings, and any other existing conditions are eliminated along with the topography.

Urbanism: On top of the flat city, city of objects is built. This is a city that is transformed into an urban field that displays freestanding, figurative, trophy-building-sculptures with a neglected, disorganized or damaged fabric or simply without one. Architecture is collected to assume the role of the trinkets that fill up a Chinese treasure shelves. Among the typical symptoms for the city of imagery, are ill conceived and/or unresolved public transportation systems, traffic congestion, lack of public spaces and pedestrian streets, poorly defined urban edges, discontinuous and isolated neighborhoods, and insufficient commercial infrastructure. Urban pleasure diminishes. Once more, city as a mechanism and/or organism for living is threatened. While urban planning seems to be constantly compromised by the market economy, a city is in fact shaped just as much by the effective administration of codes, among which, Daylight Distance, Floor Area Ratio (FAR), Building Coverage, Greenery Coverage, and Setback are of paramount importance. With current Daylight Distance at 1.6 and up, FAR rising to 4.0 or more frequently, both Building Coverage and Greenery Coverage around 30%, plus 5-meter minimum setback, there can be no other possibilities but a city of objects. Therefore, a city of objects is intentionally envisioned and deliberately planned. Will Chinese cities become more livable or soon reach the point of total dysfunction? On a positive note, how to make Chinese cities work? Of course, it very much depends on the city and the answer will not be a simple one if any.

The Uknowns: A contemporary Chinese identity in architecture is the terra incognita of today, where one finds frustrations as well as inspirations: Tradition: Beside the unique forms and decorations, China’s architectural heritage is also rich in tectonics and space, among others.

Yet, to embrace any tradition in a meaningful way in design proves to be a challenge. Specifically, how to accommodate the new life styles and programs in the old spatial structures and urban fabric? How does Chinese space such as courtyard evolve when density rises multiple folds? How to translate the signature curved roofs into contemporary tectonics? To what extent can pre-industrial materials, such as earth and wood, be incorporated into modern construction method? What else is there beside space, tectonics, and form? Only to mention a few questions which are confrontational. Recently in our office for instance, the request for a potential regional architecture has led us to experiments with roofs of building complex as continuous topography, interpretation of timber frame with laminated wood and clay brick wall with concrete blocks, making master plan of community with the figure ground of vernacular town collaged onto the site, and so on. Nonetheless, these explorations are limited to low rise (no more than four stories perhaps) and/or small-scale projects. The difficulty mounts with the increase of density and building height. Does contemporary architecture have to take on tradition? Could the world have move on so much that tradition becomes irrelevant? These seem to be valid questions, too.

Modernity: To approach a contemporary Chinese architecture, it is necessary to define Chinese modernity, which we know very little. It is a very young modernity, perhaps started in mid nineteenth century after the Opium War and flourished in 1910’s with the birth of the republic (1912) and later May 4th Movement (1919), in comparison with the European one, which could be traced back to the Renaissance more than five hundred years ago or earlier. Moreover, it may be overlapped with postmodernity, as suggested by the Singaporean architect and theorist William Lim in his discussion of an Asian modernity.

That is to say issues such as tradition could only enter the postmodern discourse in Europe and in America but is an integral element of modernity in Asia or China since modernity was introduced to the region from the outside and inevitably interacted with the local, pre-modern culture. The Mao jacket or the Sun Yat Sen’s uniform, since it was in fact designed by

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Dr. Sun, the founder of the republic, is a perfect example of Chinese modernity: The front of the jacket was adapted from European military uniform and the back from Cantonese peasant clothing. The stitching together of the two produced a distinct modern Chinese fashion. Unfortunately, such stitching or splicing can no longer be achieved easily to mediate the different contemporary forces, from globalization to technology to sustainability. Rather, any direct solution is to be tore apart. Capturing the zeitgeist in China is no help since it swings and stays at the same time, from Marxist Materialism to Capitalist Materialism, both with indeed complex Chinese characteristics. In reality, we do have an identity crisis, at least in architecture.

Hopefully, the above analysis did not make swimming in uncertainty while keeping the head out sound too formidable. I am only trying to say that China is going through one of the most drastic and dramatic social and cultural transition in its modern history. Under the conditions of present-day China, conventions of social practice, including the ones of architecture, are inevitably undermined or at least interpreted and altered in radical ways. Invention, reinvention, sometimes even revolution, becomes a basic function of a practitioner, even if it is only to do something quick or fake. I think one can learn to master uncertainty in three different stages: 1. Learn to live with uncertainty; 2. Learn to take advantage of it; 3. Enjoy uncertainty. For the moment, I am perhaps between Level One and Two: I have learnt to cope with various fluxes but am a long way yet from developing an appreciation. The key to reach the next level perhaps is to learn to select opportunity while not to be an opportunist.

Tentatively, I wonder if THE opportunity offered by the uncertainty today (it may change tomorrow or anytime) that I should grip is the potential construct of a new relationship between economy and architecture or a more active involvement of the architect in the economy and thus society. Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim saving a city is only one and one side of the story. It appears that architecture beyond signature and not so iconic can also have positive impacts on the economic development due to the openness of uncertainty. However, it has to be a researched, thoughtful architecture other than a mere production of buildings. The engagement in economy could also potentially turns into a cultural endeavor, that is to contribute to the definition of contemporary Chinese architecture since it just is blurry as to how to transform and reform a society from pre-modern to post industrial, overnight. Ultimately, it has to be possible for an architect to be socially and culturally responsible through design, at least at this point in China.

My writing will be stopped here without a definitive conclusion, as you see I am still learning‌ In Beijing, 2004 PS: Heartfelt thanks to Mr. Rodney Place, whose Laboratory of Uncertainty studio that I took in 1981-82 is an inspiration for this essay.

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city of objects AKA city of desire Yung Ho Chang From: A + U Article Published: 2003.12

Opener The Guest finishes talking about the invisibility of his hometown and takes a sip from his tea cup. Responding to the Guest’s narrative, the Host breaks silence while putting out his cigarette: I think that I have a city story to offer as well...

City without Towers It used to be a Horizontal City where I grew up. From the air, one saw nothing but a grey ocean of tiled roofs over mostly single-story brick houses only interrupted by the green of the trees floating over the courtyards and the golden yellow from the City within the City. A handful of brick pagodas and two white stupas, one situates within the urban fabric and the other crowns a hilly garden, attempted a coup to the grand harmony yet were overwhelmed by its greatness. However, a revolution to sabotage this urban and architectural coheren,ce and to develop singularity as well as verticality was to unfold...

The First Object built People’s Hero Monument designed by historian/architect Liang Sicheng in 1951: A rather lonesome, rectangular granite column located in the vast Tiananmen Square.

The First Object Building (OB) imagined A sketch drawn also by Liang and published in 1954: A 35-story high-rise with traditional roof feathers yet without suggestion of any urban context.

The First OB built Minority Culture Palace designed by architect Zhang Bo, in 1959: On Chang’ an Avenue, with green glazed tile roofs and trims over a white mass, the complex climaxes with a slender 13-story tower, which measures 22.4 by 22.4 meters in plan and 67 meters in height, on the central axis.

Definition of an OB Detached from and often contrasting with its surroundings, a typical OB is freestanding, figural, sculptural, and formally unique in terms of geometry, material, and color. It is often tall but height is not a critical criterion.

City of Objects The once uniform urban landscape is now a metropolitan field that is inundated with skyscrapers and individually expressive architecture with a disorganized or damaged fabric or simply without.

Tallest OB (so far) in town Jingguang New World Center co-designed by Nihon Sekkei and Beijing Institute of Architectural Design and Research in 1990: A glass-curtain-walled, curved slab that goes up 51 floors and 208 meters. Some of the most recent and near future additions of OBs to the City. The Fabulous Four or F4 (like the Chinese Pop band): National Grand Theater, a titanium clad, elliptical volume, next to the Tiananmen Square, by Paul Andreau is well under construction. Olympic Stadium, a circular configuration with an elaborate woven structural system, by Herzog & de Meuron and Olympic Swimming Pool, a fractalized glass cube, by PTW of Australia collaborating with China General Construction Company, will start construction within this year. CCTV, with a twisted glazed arch as its main building, on the eastern Third ring road, by Rem Koolhaas, will be built.

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City with a Master Plan While urban planning seems to be constantly challenged by,negotiating with and compromised by the market economy, the City is shaped just as much by a myriad of codes, among which, Daylight Distance, Floor Area Ratio (FAR), Building Coverage, Greenery Coverage, and Setback are of paramount importance. With current Daylight Distance at 1.6 and up, FAR rising to 4.0 or more frequently, both Building Coverage and Greenery Coverage around 30%, plus 5-meter minimum setback, there can be no other possibilities but a City of Objects. Therefore, a City of Objects is envisioned as intention and deliberately planned.

Some substitute names for City of Objects Billboard City, City of Decoration, City of Display, City of Discontinuity, City as Exposition, Flattened City, City of Fragments, City of Image, City of Isolation, One Dimensional City, Picturesque City, Postcard City, Silhouette City, City without Space, City of Spectacles, City of Wonders Sample definitions: City of Decoration: In such a city, buildings, streets, urban spaces, and landscape can only be ostentatious ornaments - and meanwhile their significance in urban life is greatly reduced.

City as Exposition: The main thoroughfare of the City, Chang’an Avenue is organized as an exhibition of unrelated, if not competing architectural statements.

City as Exposition: The main thoroughfare of the City, Chang’an Avenue is organized as an exhibition of unrelated, if not competing architectural statements. Life in the City of Objects Objects do not automatically make a city. III conceived and/or promised public transportation systems, traffic congestion, lack of public spaces and pedestrian streets, poorly defined’ urban edges, discontinuous neighborhoods, absence of substantial public housing program, and insufficient commercial infrastructure are among the typical symptoms of the City of Objects. Urban pleasure diminishes. The city as a mechanism and/or organism may potentially go from dysfunctional to defunct.

2008 and after When the collection of objects is complete, the City of Objects or rather the City disappears. Only the Objects will remain. aka City of Desire or the city behind The robust and relentless new market economy creates a cultural void and triggers a Great Cultural Transition. In addition to the State, the boom also breeds a new generation of private/individual clients for architecture and urbanism, who, armed with newly acquired wealth, are young, energetic, optimistic, ambitious, and ideologically as well as aesthetically confused, very much like the current economy itself. They are open-minded, bias-free, and ready to consume the best of the world or the name brands. A piece of architecture serves the crowd twice: first as production tool and/or commodity, secondly as showcase of success. City of Objects seems to be, for fue time being, the outcome of or solution to such desire.

City of Objects, therefore, could be translated into City of Ambition, City of Desire, City of Greed, City for Opportunists.

But it does not have to be any of the above. With economic growth and social transformation as the basic conditions of the City, it at least could be City of Adventure, Open City, City of Opportunities (instead of City for Opportunists), City of Uncertainty.

Architects may participate in defining the City, critically. To be critical means that an architectural practice under such circumstances requires clear social agenda and design strategies. Then, it is possible to involve the newly established clientele as willing collaborators in the shaping of a contemporary architecture, urbanism, and/or culture in general. It is also possible to take on the pressure of quantity and speed of production as well as the challenge of less-than-supportive design and construction social system. It is ultimately possible to change, to turn, to make, to impact, to influence this city into a more desirable place than a City of Objects. Beijing is the City of Objects, for now. Beijing still opens to other definitions.

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A Chinese Architect Goes Home; Yung-ho Chang Tries to Restore an Appreciation for Design Jonathan Napack From: International Herald Tribune Article Published: 2001.04.14

BEIJING -- “They turned it into a theme park,” says Yung-ho Chang, gesturing toward the Yuanmingyuan Palace park just beyond his office at Peking University. “Everything special about that place is gone.”

Around the headquarters of Chang’s new Graduate Center for Architecture, some unrestored fragments remain of the Yuanmingyuan -- a remarkable Chinese-baroque folly, built by the Jesuits for the emperor Qianlong, destroyed by AngloFrench armies in 1860 and still a potent symbol of the tragedy of China’s failed engagement with the wider world.

Now China wants a second chance to engage -- in this case with the practice of modern architecture. A naturalized American and former professor at several U.S. universities, Chang heads an entirely new department at China’s most prestigious university.

If the restored, commercialized Yuanmingyuan next door represents contemporary China’s infatuation with consumerism, Chang’s appointment marks another trend, the tentative rebirth of an appreciation of art and design after many years of poverty, isolation and destructive political struggle.

Despite his long teaching career, Chang, 45, really only began to practice upon returning to his native Beijing in 1997, setting up Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (“amazing” or “extreme architecture”) with his wife, Lu Lijia, and Wang Hui. Since then, he has received widespread praise for his combination of ecological ingenuity and creative reinterpretation of Chinese concepts.

“There are three aspects to his work,” says Hou Hanru, an art critic in Paris. “First is the attempt to reconcile modern architecture with the Chinese context. Second is to bring the environment, literally, into the building. Last, ‘micro-urbanism,’ the building as microcosm of the city.”

Chang’s proposal for Anji, in Zhejiang province, uses bamboo for both its structural and environmental potential. In his accompanying essay “Urbanizing Bamboo,” he writes, “Density is embraced, since it underpins a very Chinese lifestyle.

Skyscrapers and glass curtain walls can be made green, the bamboo acts as sun shade, air purifier, and humidifier -- a live curtain wall.”

His 1999 Morningside Center for Mathematics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences uses passages and bridges to create the illusion of a micro-city, its central atrium squeezed to fit the far more dense contemporary city. A residence for the “Commune by the Great Wall” development in suburban Beijing incorporates such topographical features as streams into the interior of the structure, and uses stamped earth, which is harder than concrete, is an excellent insulator and has been in use since the Shang Dynasty.

Although his father worked for the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design and Research, “sort of a municipal building department,” Chang came to architecture reluctantly. “I was much more interested in fine art,” he says. But the Cultural Revolution delayed his education, and when the universities reopened in 1977, competition for admissions was intense, “especially for painting and music, which people could practice in private.” So he ended up at his father’s alma mater, then known as the Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeast University). “The important thing was getting into somewhere.

My interest in architecture just developed along the way.”

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The courses were highly technical, “universities were terrified of anything remotely ideological” but this had its advantages: “Nowadays students get sudden exposure to contemporary Western ideas without any foundation. We, on the other hand, were totally out of the loop. I remember getting excited about Mies van der Rohe, then finding out he’d died 10 years earlier.”

In 1979, students were allowed to go abroad again, and in 1981 Chang received a scholarship from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, to pursue his bachelor’s degree in architecture. “You still needed good connections,” he says. “First of all, nobody had any money. You could only get about $50 in foreign exchange. Luckily we had family friends living in the U.S.” Chang flew to San Francisco, where his family connections lived, and took a bus to Indiana, “an interesting exposure to America.” He also did a six-month internship with Clement Chen, the San Francisco architect behind Beijing’s first jointventure hotel, the Jianguo. “It was sort of disheartening,” Chang remembers. “He was quite talented but, being Chinese, he had become very practical. The Jianguo, for example, was a direct copy of the Palo Alto Holiday Inn.” After graduation, Chang went to the University of California at Berkeley for his master’s. He toyed afterwards with working for Chen but ended up teaching, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1990, at Berkeley until 1992, finally at Rice University in Houston.

Disappointed by the lack of opportunity to build, Chang became frustrated with life in academia. “Lars Lerup, one of my teachers, and the guy who brought me to Rice as its dean always urged me to get out of the black box.” How architecture affected society, he felt, was very important.

On a Chinese New Year visit to Beijing, he was amazed by the numerous requests for his talents. “In America I was thinking, When will I ever do a building?” His first job was for a casino in Shantou, in the east of Guangdong province.

“Unfortunately, the client died in a freak accident.”

Atelier Feichang Jianzhu started with interiors, such as the now-defunct Xi Shu bookstore; their first building was the Morningside Center. “After the opening ceremony, my father asked me to join him at a banquet. When I arrived, the president of Peking University asked me to start a faculty of architecture at his university. I had never considered teaching here, as I don’t have a high opinion of Chinese schools, particularly architecture schools. But this was really an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Since then Feichang Jianzhu’s business has taken off -- projects today include office towers in Shanghai and Hebei province, a seaside international conference center in Qingdao, a town hall in Dongguan County, a community of 306 villas near Beijing and Bamboo Tower, a small office development in Zhongguacun, China’s Silicon Valley, with bamboo walls and other of his “living building” ideas.

Frustrations? “Contractors are so sloppy that buildings often cost more than in Hong Kong, despite the huge difference in the cost of land and labor. It’s not uncommon for finished buildings to be so badly made they have to be torn down.” And on the bright side? “You’d be surprised, but it’s actually easier to build here than in America. There’s more to be built, for sure. But funny enough, people are more open-minded. They’re thinking about these things for the first time.”

Jonathan Napack writes about art and popular culture in Asia.

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MICRO-URBANISM: A COnversation with yung ho chang Hou Hanru From: International Herald Tribune Article Published: 1999.08.23

Yung Ho Chang is a leading architect from China. After studying and teaching in the US for 15 years, he went back to his native Beijing to establish its first private architecture firm, Atelier FCJZ (“Fei Chang Jian Zhu” or unusual architecture), in the early 1990s. In the unprecedentedly rapid and radical modernization and urbanization process in China, the questions of international influence and Chinese tradition, as well as globalization and local specificity, have become the main issues in architectural and artistic debates and practice. Having experience in both the West and China, Yung Ho Chang critically observes and analyzes the current situation of urban explosion in China and proposes highly inventive solutions. Inspired by both the transformational capacity of traditional Chinese architecture and urban planning as well as contemporary developments in architecture, economics and technology, Yung Ho Chang and his firm have developed new concepts and approaches, such as “Micro-Urbanism,” to negotiate the urban condition of high density and complexity.

From April 22 to May 22, 1999 an exhibition entitled “ Street Theater” will take place in Apex Art in New York (curated

by Hou Hanru and Evelyne Jouanno). This will be their first solo exhibition in the US. For this show, Chang has created a site-specific installation to provide the audience with a direct and corporeal experience of his architectural vision and projects.

One part of the installation will function as a “Street Theater” (the other a “Peepshow Theater”) in which a dialogue between Beijing’s urban reality and Chang’s innovative projects in the city takes place. Visible from outside and inside, it is also an intelligent and efficient “translation” of a made-in-China text into the New York context while adding strong visual impact to the New York street. This is Yung Ho Chang’s new adventure to bring architectural investigation in the context of the visual arts after his exhibition design for two versions of “Cities on the Move” exhibition in the Vienna Secession and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark.

CYH: Right now, a good number of people would look at contemporary Chinese architecture in terms of the opposition between East and West. I think the issue really involves the question of How one perceives Western influence in contemporary Chinese architecture? or Does import always equals invasion? In the history, Chinese culture assimilated more than a few ideas from the outside. In fact, many culture are able to take something from others and make it into its own.

During the process of assimilation, the idea loses its foreign-ness and becomes just an idea. Therefore, to understand Chinese architecture today through an East vs. West argument could be too simplistic.

HHR: Are you saying that the pursuit of a Chinese identity is motivated by the presence of Western culture in China?

CYH: Yes, to certain extent. Foreign culture is like a mirror, which makes you realize that you are or should be different from the aliens. Then starts the complex process of rejecting, learning, and absorbing, etc. And you ask: What is Chinese? What is not? What are the cultural definitions? Is this contemporary Chinese or ancient Chinese? Though never get clear answers.

Chinese believe in the middle-of-the-road approach, meaning everyone is a conformist. Can an individual still be effective in such a society? And how? This is an interesting challenge. In architectural practice, the size of the project does not mean much to me. It is always a part of a larger context. However, can an architect as an individual create a positive influence upon this larger urban context of China through the design of a part, perhaps a rather small part? That is how I like to define my practice. With more contact with the outside, we have certain pressure that other Chinese architects don’t have. Most Chinese architects are free of any moral burden in taking in an idea which has been done before. That is impossible for us. We are constantly working under some kind of Foucault-esque gaze. The gaze is also looking for Chinese identity. I think Chinese or Asian identity is more than a formal issue; it is far more complex. In our work, something is uniquely Asian that is density.

Beijing may not be the best example of high-density city. Southern cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, are much denser. Density can be seen as the outcome of an engaging urban life style.

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HHR: Speaking of density, there is an interesting phenomenon. Rem Koolhaas discovers Asian density and now influence the way the Dutch look at themselves. All of sudden, they realize Holland is the densest country in the world. Density has become a fashionable topic among architects.

CYH: However, Americans’ attitude towards density has been always negative. Density means for them lower living standards. A quintessential Modernist idea. Le Corbusier’s Radiant City is based on fresh air and sunlight. And air and light is the antithesis to density. Another concern of our work is quite traditional. On one hand, it regards found objects and is traditional in the modern sense: I had a conversation with the artist Chen Zhen. He said something which was very enlightening to me. He talked about the importance of transformation of found objects or ready-mades employed in the work. In the SMOCA (Small Museum of Contemporary Art) project we are designing for the artist Cai Guoqiang, we are using used building material. It will be critical how we transform these particular found objects or building parts. On the other hand, we are dealing with traditional construction method. We are trying to design a roof by putting together four found traditional wooden trusses of various sizes. Due to the difference in size, the resulted roof will certainly not traditional if not quite strange. A very rational design method is used and it leads to an irrational product. I’m madly interested in this.

I hope to realize another proposal this year. In traditional courtyard houses in Beijing, a lot of small sheds have been built in the yard by the residents themselves as kitchens or additional sleeping areas, etc. The quality of these sheds is very limited. I often wonder what can be achieved if architects are involved. As long as the residents would agree, I would like to take some architecture students and help them to redesign and rebuild the sheds.

HHR: This is a positive take on otherwise destructive modifications of an old architecture.

CYH: Yes. The spontaneous additions could be quite negative. Yet, if you analyze such phenomenon, its inevitability and rationality are there. Architect should not turn their heads away from it, right?

HHR: This reminds me of the “light urbanism” which is being discussed in the architectural circle of the West and attempts to take the chaos of everyday life into the consideration of architectural design and city planning.

CYH: It might be forced if such effort is made systematic. I refer a “micro-urbanism”: If every single building, regardless the size, achieves a positive relationship with the city, the city will for sure becomes a positive place to live. Having a bunch of people and buildings together may not make a city although you have a settlement. Singular building could have a macro side - A building grows into or is a city - as well as a micro side where a kitchen, a toilet, or a storage could be urbanistic. This notion is significant in Beijing today. And it should not be remained on the paper. Unlike US, it is possible to put such idea into action. Therefore, we are looking for one courtyard house. We may do a shed for one family or all the sheds in a yard.

It is also about the role of architect in the society. Architect does not direct the building process but participate in it, literally build the shed ourselves. It is volunteerism.

HHR: How is the possibility to realize it now?

CYH: We have got support from people in architecture like Wang Mingxian and Liu Kaiji. They are helping us in searching for a house. I would really like to do an entire courtyard.

HHR: Is there similar notion in your recent design projects?

CYH: As a way of thinking, such concern will certainly influence how we design new buildings.

HHR: When we proposed you to hold your solo exhibition in Apex Art, did you consider it mainly as a retrospective?

CYH: We have decided that the show deals with both past and present and has two parts. One part takes on Beijing as a complex cultural phenomenon. We isolated three areas: 1. the highly Westernized business district on the east side, 2. The college/culture district on the Northwest, and 3. the rural outskirts where “shan shui” (mountain water or Chinese landscape)

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can be experienced.

HHR: How about the Muslim enclave on the Southwest?

CYH: We picked the areas where we have been doing work. This is an architectural exhibition. How can we differentiate it from an art show? A typical architectural exhibition is about representation; it represents an architectural idea through drawings and models. But we want to offer people direct architectural experience. An architectural experience of two theater spaces. One can actually be inside of them. Of course, they are the architectural spaces of Apex, not of Beijing. It is the transformation of the Apex spaces.

HHR: As curators, we hope to bring something which is not so commonly considered today as a visual art discipline into a visual art exhibition space...

CYH: I think that interesting changes have happened to the relationship between art and architecture. In some ways, art and architecture are getting closer; in some other ways, they are coming apart. It would be important to know where these changes are. Today, interdisciplinary exchange is in. Under the circumstance, to understand the differences between disciplines is critical. When such understanding is achieved, interdisciplinary activities begin to make sense. If only the overlapped areas of different disciplines are stressed, what is left would be an ambiguous blob.

HHR: Another issue. Beside density, you are also concerned with notions from traditional Chinese architecture and city, such as square plan, courtyard, etc.

CYH: Yes, but with contradictions. If you look at Chinese and Asian cities, you will find the lack of clear traditional urban structures. Various urban models existed in Europe since the Middle Age; China has had only one: An introverted city, exemplified by the “Li Fang” system in ancient Chang An (now Xi’an). The entire city is divided by enclosed walls along streets. And the city only opens up behind these walls and in the courtyards. However, this introverted quality is at odds with the modern life style and openness demanded by the highly developed commercial society. Courtyard house migrates to the less-dense new suburbs. It is ironic in certain way. There is the tendency for a Chinese city to spread and to create suburbs in order to ease its density. The urban turns into suburban. Specifically, the development of so called villa district. For the moment, the courtyard houses that are being built in these suburbs are the fake antiques. We are interested in conceptual courtyards and have already done the design for more than one.

HHR: In specific terms, how does a conceptual courtyard work?

CYH: For example, in the restaurant “Glass Onion” in Beijing we designed, there is a compressed courtyard. The original function of the courtyard is transformed. The courtyard space becomes air walls or cruciform voids. Courtyard is brought back to the city as a linear element, no longer centric.

HHR: In other words, this courtyard is visual...

CYH: And inhabitable. A different kind of inhabitability. One may walk, sit, or read in such a courtyard. HHR: It seems that in your approach toward Chinese city, you are giving up big proposals and going into private spaces which are made into something public in the process.

CYH: You could be right about the big proposals since we haven’t done any. In fact, what we do is a kind of urban infill.

However, it’s not a strategy. Strategies change according to circumstances. City is complex. We are trying to analyze specific urban conditions to come up with specific tactics, which can be myopic. Thus, we feel like all we do is not building design but micro urban design.

HHR: Are you suggesting that privacy has become a public subject?

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CYH: Privacy is a delicate issue. When the occupancy of courtyard house changes from single family to multi ones, privacy is lost. Courtyard house always encourages people to interact, either within the family or among neighbours. “Chuan men”, or piercing/linking doors, is how informal neighborly visits were called. Now, in the apartment blocks of good privacy, “chuan men” has stopped. This is a part of the evolution of living conditions as well as building use. The significance of absolute introverted spaces is no wonder in doubt.

HHR: For past years, your work has focused on China, analyzing its problems and trying to find solutions. What would you do, if you are given the opportunity to design in the United States?

CYH: I really don’t know. If I’m working in the US, I may still pursue something Chinese.

HHR: Is it to say that your view of a particular environment will be tinted by your current work?

CYH: It is about superimposition. I’m not going to analyze myself now. Because my background, I constantly bring Western influence into my work with no conscious rejection. Based on the work I’m doing now, if one day high density architecture is transplanted into a low density locale or the reality of Chinese or Asian city is overlapped onto the one of American suburbia, it could produce interesting results. It is also a question of homogeneity and heterogeneity. The sudden change of density is particularly curious.

HHR: It’s little like how Asian density is interpreted in Rem Koolhaas’ approach in his recent Schiphol proposal. It also comes close to his notion of “generic city”...

CYH: Generic city is not so generic after all, thanks to 1. Differences in life styles and 2. Differences between individuals who involved in the making of city as architects or non-architects.

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AN Interview with Yung Ho Chang From: Infinite History: MIT +150 Published: 1999.08.23

Yung Ho Chang, Department Head and Professor of Architecture Architect and exhibited artist Yung Ho Chang is interested in sustainable building that takes into account city, materiality, and tradition. After growing up in Beijing and heading Peking University’s Graduate Center of Architecture, Professor Chang came to MIT in 2005 to head its department of architecture. He also established and still leads China’s first private architecture firm, Atelier FCJZ. Transcript INTERVIEWER: This is the interview with Professor Yung Ho Chang, for the 150th MIT celebration. And let me start by asking where were you born?

CHANG: So I was born in Beijing.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me a little bit about your family?

CHANG: Actually, my father was an architect. So my family, both my parents were from the Shanghai region. And then my mom’s family, which was huge, she had nine sisters and two brothers and they all moved up north. And then my father went to Beijing to work, so the family ended up being in Beijing, and I have a brother. So, in China -- my accent is very northern, actually, very Beijing, and even my locas actually very northern, but actually I got the southern genes, that’s who I am.

INTERVIEWER: Are there any significant events or influences from your childhood that you think have contributed to your professional work?

CHANG: That’s an interesting question because as far as my life, or really the life of my generation is concerned, probably the most influential historic event is the Great Cultural Revolution which happened during the late ‘60s to early ‘70s. That really changed the outlook of, again, probably more than one generation even. So now, although I became an architect, my friends were doing work in different fields, but we think that that was really the life-changing event.

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk a little bit about the way in which it changed or shaped?

CHANG: I was using the American term. I was a third grader at that time, I was in elementary school. I don’t even know how to begin to describe it to you. So basically we, my brother and I, the school closed down and then one day the so-called Red Guards, and they were just a little older than I was, they were probably teenagers in high school, high school students.

They came to our house and smashed the place and took things away, and so for me it happened like this. And then after high school -- well, my brother was not as lucky as I was, so he went to the military farm in the inner Mongolia and worked as a farmer for five and a half years. So I was able to finish high school. He missed out the entire high school in a period.

After high school -- I was in high school for five years, although I missed a couple of years, maybe three, and then I started to work as a laborer on a construction site. And then that place I was helping to build was a research institute for chemistry and metallurgy, right, that’s how you say it. And then I always study in English, so I landed a job in this library. Nothing was really -- it wasn’t a typical sort of a childhood in years for anyone. It was a whole series of totally chaotic, incomprehensible for a kid, events, and very traumatic too -- the events, I don’t know how to describe them to you. Like my father, and I suppose both of my parents, were put on a stage to be -- what would be the English word -- they were in a punished, right. So, I don’t know if you get an idea.

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INTERVIEWER: Yes. It sounds like you felt in danger and uncertain a lot.

CHANG: Yes. So our lives were literally threatened. I had a problem coming and going to school because the kids in the neighborhood would beat me up and -- because of my family.

INTERVIEWER: Was it the work in construction that started getting you interested in architecture or was that earlier from your dad?

CHANG: See, the construction part at that time really didn’t mean anything. But I was lucky, of course, to do that. What happened was that -- so in 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out, and then it took ten years to finish up. So in 1977 all the colleges reopened and held the first entrance examination after the Cultural Revolution. So, my brother, ten years of a high school student, we all took the exam at the same time. So my brother and I we all took that. And then, of course, all of a sudden we had to decide what we wanted to study. I was interested in art. You know, had to do with influence from my dad.

So I wanted to study painting, you know, western oil painting -- that was really the thing I was into. And then, however, my paintings were really terrible. We got relatives who are actually painters to take a look at my paintings, so very consistently they also said don’t apply. Because there were two things -- children were able -- young people were able to learn at home is painting and music. You can’t study science, for instance, at home and so on. So there were a lot of very talented young painters.

And then my family is very different from a typical Chinese family, otherwise my parents couldn’t care less what we were doing. You know, the Chinese family’s like study, study, take some additional courses or really work at home -- not my family.

My brother and I we just had a good time. We always play. So anyway, so I felt since I couldn’t really go to art school, I thought maybe I could study design -- I thought about product design. And then even the design school was very crowded with people who can really paint and draw. So I was at loss with what I wanted to study. One thing was clear was that I want to go to college -- it really doesn’t matter what to study. That’s what my brother did in the end. It wasn’t terrible, but he actually wanted to be an engineer, but as soon as he had no high school, he couldn’t possibly get into the engineering school, so he studied economics first and he got an MBA later. But anyway, so in my case, I thought maybe I could study design actually, industrial or product design. But I also was just hopeless to get into the design school. And then my father made a suggestion, and he said to me look, you know, you may want to consider what I do. You don’t have to be good with painting, you don’t have to be good with math or science courses. And you know I wasn’t good with any of those things. So when we considered that, and then that’s exactly what I did.

So I went to Nanjing -- that’s the oldest school of architecture, still one of the best and that’s where my father went.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you come to go from Nanjing to Muncie, Indiana?

CHANG: So, in ‘78, I was already in Nanjing, and then I heard from my father there is a professor in Muncie, Indiana at Ball State University, contacted him. His name is Marvin Rosenman. Marvin was interested in China, but at that time, very few people had the opportunity to visit China, and he was reading a magazine, I think it’s House and Garden, a magazine he shouldn’t have read, right -- just kidding. Not very professional, more for the housewife. Anyway, he read that magazine.

There was an interview with a Chinese architect -- you know, very, very unusual. And that architect was my father. And so he contacted the magazine and then he wrote to my father and asked if my father could help him to arrange a trip to go to China. And then my father, through the China Society of Architecture, extended an invitation to him and probably helped out in some other ways. So, Marvin came to China in ‘89 or -- I’m sorry, ‘79 or ‘80 to China with 19 students from Ball State.

And then they visited four cities, each has one of the architecture, you know, the better architecture schools. So, Beijing, Kenjing and Shanghai and Nanjing. So, I saw Marvin for the first time.

So that’s one story. Another story was that in the late ‘40s, my father got into, I think it’s in University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign to study. So everything he got, he’s in the passport/visa scholarship, so everything was set for him to go. And then there was a regime change, so the Communists took over the country, and so he was like a lot of young people, he had

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hope for the new regime. But also as an architect he thought there were opportunities for him as an architect. So for the second part he was actually very much right, so he got a lot of job for a short period of time. And then for the first part, he was actually very much disappointed. So he regretted later in his life that he didn’t go to the US, or he regretted that he didn’t really leave China. He wasn’t a very ideological kind of a person, he thought he would do better as an architect elsewhere, maybe in Hong Kong and so on. So he really urged my brother and I to go somewhere else.

My brother who’s older, who’s two and a half years older, he left China for -- we have relatives, we had even more at that time in the California in the Bay area, so my brother left for the US in 1980. So the combination of the Ball State delegation and my father’s encouragement, so I left for the US in 1981. And I knew nothing about the US and the English textbooks we studied were from England -- it was all about London poverty in, I don’t know, 1930s, they were pretty old. And about in Oxford and Cambridge, you know, the other Cambridge. And so I didn’t know what to expect. You know the only image of the US was really a postcard sort of Manhattan. So anyway, and then I ended up in Muncie. I took a Greyhound bus from San Francisco, so that was the real cultural shock really I experienced.

INTERVIEWER: You saw a lot of the country.

CHANG: Yeah, a lot of corn fields and a deteriorating downtown, which I just -- I didn’t know what I expected, maybe Manhattan. So that was very interesting.

INTERVIEWER: When you got to Ball State, what were your first impressions or what did you -- that must have been quite a culture shock.

CHANG: Yes, very different in every way. I wouldn’t -- again, I wouldn’t know where to begin. One thing I had a lot of difficulty with the music in our studio. It was rock and roll, it was not something -- I never heard -- well, it was something I never heard, but listened to it, and also I just really didn’t appreciate not until at least -- you know, that’s at ‘81 -- probably somewhere between ‘84, you know, three or even four years later, maybe -- yeah, probably around ‘84, and I discovered the Beatles for the first time, which I actually liked. So that was sort of the turning point for me to appreciate the more contemporary popular music of the west. But you know, among other things.

INTERVIEWER: I’m a huge Beatle’s fan. So, from Ball State, what made you decide to go to UC Berkeley?

CHANG: So again, although I was away in Nanjing from my family in Beijing for three years, and to be in the US all by myself was more difficult. So I just wanted to be with my brother -- my brother was at UC Berkeley. And then because of that, I didn’t really apply for any other graduate schools. I applied for Berkeley, and my brother applied for more than one. So, in the end, he didn’t get in Berkeley, it’s a graduate school, he got in at Yale, so we went like this. So I ended up on the west coast. So my dream really didn’t come true. So it was that. I had no idea about the school, but I was happy about my decision.

I met in Muncie at Ball State and Berkeley some really excellent teachers and I became also an educator myself. So looking back, I just had some of the amazingly good teachers, so I am very thankful for my experience at both institutions.

INTERVIEWER: And you did work briefly for an architect in San Francisco?

CHANG: Yes. I worked for several, actually. I worked for several architects, but during the daytime mostly for a ChineseAmerican architect. His name is -- was -- you know he passed away a long time ago -- Clement Chen, Jr. And then in the evening, I also moonlighted for a number of architects. Stanley Saitowitz who was my thesis advisor at Berkeley, and there were several other architects.

INTERVIEWER: What made you decide at that point to focus on teaching rather than becoming a working architect?

CHANG: One reason really was the teachers I had. At Ball State I had a teacher whose name is Rodney Place, he’s a South African British, and he came to the US from Architectural Association School of Architecture -- it’s kind of a silly name, so people usually just say AA. So he came from AA, the most experimental, radical school of architecture in the world at

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that time. So he came from AA and to discover the US -- he’s like one of those -- I didn’t know that until later. He was very much in a way a romantic kind of a South African/European, so he had this idea of an America that took him to teach in, especially in the midwest, he wanted to see the real America. It sounded like a Sarah Palin, but that’s not important. A lot of people kind of see the middle part that way. So anyway, and he was more than an inspiration. You know, I came from kind of an isolated society at that time. To be exposed to Marcel Duchan, and French new wave movies, all of that, was an incredible experience. And then he’s the best teacher I ever met. He could do one thing I still cannot, and other teachers I had were not able to. He would not give the students answers, even if we begged him, he wouldn’t given in. So you really had to think about it on your own and figure things out.

And then at Berkeley I had a Swedish professor, Lars Lerup, who was also just really outstanding in his own ways. He could read the minds of the students, and I didn’t know how he does that. Partly it has to do with his experience. So those people, you know, when you have really good teachers, you tend to also want to teach yourself -- that happened to me. And then Clement Chen’s office it was a let-down. Clement was a very good architect. If you have been to San Francisco, he actually designed the Holiday Inn hotel in Chinatown. It’s a landmark building, it’s a concrete structure -- you may or may not like it, but it’s a very unique structure, you know, original. And then he became a developer. He did mostly hotels and so on. So, when I was working for him, he was already in the developers mode, he wasn’t really interested in architecture or design.

And then I always remember my teachers, and by the way, they were -- both were also flamboyant in their lifestyles, and so Rodney would drive a car from the 1940s, always have a fresh flower, and imagine in Muncie, quite something. So I just decided try to teach.

INTERVIEWER: So you taught at Ball State and Michigan and Berkeley and Rice. What made you decide to go back to Beijing?

CHANG: While I was teaching, and actually in ‘86, the first year -- I started in ‘85, and it took me a year to really get into teaching. So in ‘86, I decided to start to do my own work. So I was doing design competitions, just doing -- there is a kind of odd phrase, theoretical design, meaning that I really didn’t have clients to ask me to do anything. I would come up with design problems and then just work on them. I did that for eight years. And then through that process there’s an increasing desire of really to make buildings. I got [INAUDIBLE] really very anxious, but yet without the social connections in the United States, and without also the social skills. Actually I’m otherwise a very quiet person. I don’t enjoy socializing/talking as much. So there weren’t any opportunities.

And then I, at that time, so I was at Berkeley as a visiting assistant professor, so I wasn’t on tenured track or anything. And I won the competition to receive a traveling scholarship, to travel in Europe for a year. And actually, you know, I tried to make everything a little more coherent and logic -- the reality wasn’t that as much. So the trip was -- I’m still not a very good planner, and so I never had much money and I had a credit card with I think a $3,000.00 limit. At home, my wife and I really with that money we have more than enough, but once we were traveling, we constantly had problems. And then already for how many years, we were never home for the Chinese New Year, which is still going on now this year, so we decided to go home. That’s in January of 1983.

So, we went home during the holidays, there was a friend of a relative’s a neighbor, that kind of a thing, just came to our apartment, my parents apartment, actually, to say hello because he knew my wife from their childhood. And then he asked if we would want to design an entertainment center -- it actually meant a casino in Southern China. That was our first commission. I was so thrilled, because I just couldn’t figure out for years who’s going to ask me to design a building. And then that’s how we started. And although, again, I got a teaching job at Rice University in Houston, but I was going back and forth. I really just wanted to build. So going back to China to build buildings, and then from Houston, so made the decision kind of easy. I had a hard time with Houston. It’s the south, I’m a northerner. And then also the city in my mind it wasn’t much of city, right, it’s sort of an extended suburbia, so we were glad to leave Houston to some extent, although I had a really good time at Rice University, made a lot of friends and so on.

INTERVIEWER: So this was the beginning of your company.

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CHANG: Yeah. So the beginning of the company was the dining table of my parents’ apartment.

INTERVIEWER: So the name of your firm I understand translates to unusual architecture?

CHANG: Or it’s like this -- it can be pronounced with different connotations, so the name of our firm, if I say Feichang Jianzhu, it’s my thought people would treat it as really a noun, so it means in unusual architecture, extraordinary architecture or abnormal buildings, whatever. And then if I make a comment and say that looks pretty feichang jianzhu, it’s very subtle the difference -- it means that something looks very architectural, has a pure geometrical shape, for instance. So we casually picked up the name because we realized in the early ‘90s, individuals’ qualifications and so on was not really acknowledged as much as a company, so we registered our company in Houston at that time, paid for $7.50 I think, I don’t know what kind of a registration that was, so we could hang onto a name for ten years. In the first part of ‘93, we actually had five commissions in the end, and then none of them really worked out. So out of the frustration, my wife, who is also an architect -- you know, we have been practicing together all these years. So she said maybe we should call the company Fei Jianzhu which means like non-architecture, so and non-architecture maybe. So I knew that wouldn’t really be very attractive with our potential clients.

So I added one word Chang - I added the word ordinary. So, it went from non-architecture to not ordinary architecture. Really it was a joke.

INTERVIEWER: But became very successful.

CHANG: We can’t change another -- people won’t -- they wouldn’t be able to find us.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think the firm has been so successful in China?

CHANG: We were -- early, we were dumb -- I think that’s very important. I’m not being modest, actually. I think Chinese culture, which I’m, of course, part of it, but I had some element, I don’t -- to say the least, I’m not very good at, probably to some extent. I don’t even agree with. So basically, my years in the US was, how should I put it, I don’t mean in any kind of a negative connotation, but it’s kind of a brainwash for me. In a way I really didn’t know it happened. When I went to the US, I came from an ideologically-heavy country, and there were political studies every Saturday afternoon for half a day, which is ridiculous for me. So like a lot of people from China, I was very tired of politics and ideology, all of that. And then Harvard -- so while I was in the US, so I had that attitude for many years. I didn’t quite understand why all my, especially when I was teaching my colleagues, were all so much into politics and so on, let alone most of them, all of them were and are in an all leftist anyway. So I just didn’t quite understand that either. And however, not until I went back to China that I realized, in the process somewhere, I have become a leftist myself. You know, I’m probably center-right, still not on the far right -- center-left, not on the far left, and I also realized how important that was for me because I was able to resist some of the temptations of the market economy. And that ideology I have, you know, I had, I was able to focus my work. Most people being this, you know, Chinese thing, they were a lot more flexible. I was far less flexible than they are. They could do anything to be successful. I was too, just too damn principaled, but I kind of think I -- and I want to be that way. So that’s the difference.

INTERVIEWER: You must have, maybe not being as flexible, you must have offered something in your design that people actually wanted.

CHANG: At the beginning I tried to bullshit people to buy in my ideas, and I wasn’t very successful, but I think I did well by moving my clients with my sincerity, because a couple of them told me so. They told me in the end they really weren’t convinced by what I was trying to tell them, but they saw, you know, if these guys really want to do it, maybe he really, you know, he got the point. So they let me to do it. And then my stubbornness, although I work very hard from the very beginning, so brought some field projects that eventually started to snowball. So it wasn’t my, in the end, my worst, but these projects that people can see and appreciate. Now that’s something actually very interesting about architecture. Architecture, it’s actually one of the least probably profound disciplines, although if you read architectural theory, especially produced, in a series produced in the past, three or so decades, they were pretty thick, it’s not easy at all to decipher. But actually, architecture

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is a very down to earth essential discipline. But the difficulty lies in the fact only when the building’s up, everyone can really understand it, otherwise, it is pretty abstract when it’s on a sheet of paper. Even a very realistic drawing doesn’t give you the experience of architecture. So that’s what the difficulty is. So anyway, I kind of new that, so I just wanted to -- it doesn’t matter how small a project is, I only wanted to do projects I could realize. So and then I started to build a portfolio of work.

INTERVIEWER: So, for a number of years you developed your company and you had increasing success, and then at some point you decided to come back to the United States, and I believe you were teaching at Harvard?

CHANG: That was just one semester. And what happened was that I -- still today, Beijing’s a little like Boston or in New York, you see every architect from all over the world. So while in Beijing, I was teaching at Peking university. I had at that time a very unusual lecture series, having a lot of the really big name architects from all over the world. So I made friends. So one -- I think his was -- after I taught at Harvard as a visitor for a semester, and then on my way back to Beijing, I went to a party, an office Christmas party -- oh, at actually, at Steven Holl’s office. Steven Holl designed the Simmons hall dormitory here at MIT, so I got to know him in China. So went over to Steven’s office to party and we were just gossiping and he teaches at Columbia. He started to talk about the dean search that was going on at Columbia. And then all of a sudden in the middle of the conversation he said hey, you know, you could be the dean at Columbia. The position was held by this really influential Swiss architect, but not Tschumi at the time. He’s one of the, you know, for the younger architects, he was one of the gods of architecture. So I thought he must be joking, but he looked very serious. So and he said if the provost of Columbia contacts you, would you at least say you’re willing to take part in the process? So I said oh, why not. And then they were other friends there and I ask them, is Steven serious? Both -- I ask probably a couple of people, they said just ignore him, he’s drunk.

So, and then, of course, I saw they were right, Steven’s looking a bit drunk anyway. And then I didn’t hear a thing for a few months, pretty much forgot about it. And then all of a sudden I did hear, and I got an email from the provost of Columbia, and then I was told there was a very long short list -- there were 20-some people on the short list. And then from that point on, I would receive an email every week or two and say the short list being shortened, and then you’d see it was 21 last week and now it’s 20. But I stayed on that short list until the very end and the search committee I heard that actually decided I was a top candidate, although I think the runner-up got the job. So at that point there were two things -- one was that I started seriously considering a teaching position in the US So, it started as a joke in a way. And then I got approached by various institutions. So one morning I went to the office and there was a fax -- you know, today when you receive a fax, it’s just a quite unusual event. It came from MIT, it came from Dean Adele Santos, inviting me to have an interview. I said in the next, I don’t know how long, several weeks at least, I wasn’t able to go to the US And then probably that was another fax from her saying in that case, I’m coming over to Beijing. So that’s how it started, and then it turned out, really among all the offers I had, MIT’s was by far the most challenging and most exciting. So I thought I was not that old, you know, five years, so I should really take MIT rather than the more comfortable ones. So here I am.

INTERVIEWER: What was it about -- what was the appeal of coming back and teaching in the US since you were teaching in Beijing?

CHANG: It wasn’t really just teaching in the US, I -- because I taught for a long, long time, I started to get some ideas about what architecture education probably should be, so I was getting very ambitious. So, in China, I was tackling some more basic issues in architectural education, but I wanted to also tackle some more of the cutting edge issues, and I wanted to really change the way architecture education was, in a way still is, in the US And with that, you know, with my overblown ambition, I thought coming back to the US was very interesting. So I had an interest in education, US would be the country, and MIT would be the right school, because I sensed already, now it’s crystal clear, but at that time, still they were a little vague, but I sensed really the importance of a number of things, you know, including, of course, technology and environmental issues and so on and how they would reshape architecture, the practice. It’s happening in practice actually faster than in education, and so education ought to be very different than the one I had in a way, especially than the way I taught. Now I look back, really I was teaching not the right thing to my students, so I decided to come back. And also nobody told me it was impossible to do this transcontinental, global practice. Thanks to technology, in fact, it did work out. It wasn’t, you know, it’s still not easy, but it’s actually in a way it’s possible. So, again, I wasn’t -- you know, I was hot-headed, as I have been always I guess. So I just came. It’s like the way I went to Rice University -- I never really visited Houston. I put my things in a car with my wife from

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California, we just drove to Houston and we discovered a city, so we weren’t as sure anyway.

INTERVIEWER: How would you define what you think architecture education should be about?

CHANG: At MIT, if I say that way I think architecture or architectural education should be, everyone understands. But if you know how architecture is being taught in the US, and so that’s a different story. For the past, again, probably close to four decades now, there was kind of a revolution in education, not only in architecture. I read in the Financial Times actually fairly recently, maybe a year ago, an article about English education at Harvard, this guy who is a Brit, he came here to study English -- he ended up learning everything but English. They discussed racial issues, gender issues, so, of course, literature and everything else, but not English. Architecture has been taught sort of that way, not as bad. We actually didn’t use the word building because that considered to be too perfunctory was the dirty word. See, architecture is okay to say and you have to talk about pretty big abstract theories, so architects were reading Jacques Derrida of grammatology -- I don’t remember the names of his books. So they were pretty thick, post-structural philosophies, and hoping that it would generate ideas. Of course, it might for some architect, but I don’t believe that’s how architecture should really be taught, because there are a lot of things. Number one, they are more fundamental.

Secondly, there are the issues we are confronted with in an urgent way than French philosophy and we got to take on.

You know it’s like the energy issue, the environment issue, the advancement of technology, globalization, the changing of practice. And so basically architecture has become for a while really kind of an abstract subject, and that when you do design a building, it’s always a house for ideally for a monk poet. There’s only one architect ever get to do that -- somebody in Japan did it, but otherwise, where do you find a monk poet? Or you do an art museum and nothing bigger than that. Architects don’t do shopping malls, don’t do factories, and don’t do this and that, and we don’t do much in the end. So, I was actually -- you know there are actually many other reasons for me to be here, and one of them actually is also the long tradition of covering social concerns in design work at MIT. So anyway, I thought so social, environmental, technological, all these things got to be part of the curriculum so that our students one day graduate so they can be better prepared to contribute to the society. We are the architects, you know, we are designers. We need to think about contributing to the discipline first. I think it’s only a slight difference and in the end it’s probably the same thing. But I felt very strong about that.

INTERVIEWER: If you could sort of take yourself back to 2005, can you remember what your first impressions of the students at MIT and how MIT felt different than other places you had taught?

CHANG: I actually told -- it doesn’t matter. Anyway, so I had kind of an interview at that point, so I still remember what I -- probably that was Scott Campbell in our school, and our amazing experience at MIT. Because I’ve taught in the US, I’ve taught in Chinese universities, at Peking University also is one of the -- Peking University and Tongji University, you got the best students from China there. But my wife and I were here for the interview and maybe for house-hunting already. We just remember one thing. I wish I still got that, because after being here for so long and then I got used to it, just the faces of students and people actually looked different. You see how smart they are and you can see that in their eyes. It’s an amazing thing for us. So you look at the eyes of these young people -- you know maybe today I would say probably has to do the kind of a nerdiness, you know, we kind of cherish that here, but they looked totally intelligent and we were impressed. I only remember that instance one more time when I was in the US only for a year, and Rodney Place, whom I was talking about, took some of the students to Cranbrook and I remember seeing the students had a very different sort of a gaze in the eyes.

They looked kind of like they were a bunch of people working in the basement and they looked like monks, got this kind of ascetic kind of a look in their eyes, which I remember and otherwise is the MIT look in the eyes. Sometimes I still look for that -- I don’t really see it because I see it every day now, but still once in awhile people here always remind me how really intelligent human beings can be.

INTERVIEWER: In what ways does MIT, being at MIT help your work, help your architecture work, your professional side?

CHANG: I just told my student how much I made him. If I were a student here I think MIT would have helped me even more. I really wanted to study here. But anyway, I’m very lucky as it is. So basically, is this -- so it developed a perspective on architecture through my practicing in China. I realize how important that is for an architect to really understand how a

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building, first of all is put together, so we need to understand the nuts and bolts. And also I realize that there are a lot of technology out there would really help us to make a better building, a cheaper building, and a more sustainable building, and we really need to know these technologies. And then the structure of the knowledge in architecture as a way I learned were not really helping us in that direction. So when I came to MIT, I did want to learn all of that. Again, as I was saying earlier, of course, I was not a student and I wasn’t able to have the time to take courses, but I got exposed to a lot of different things within our department. Some of my colleagues, one of them actually studying the kind of new materials, like fiber, concrete and so on. And then I remember going to the Department of Chemistry to listen to a lecture, it was very interesting, it was about really designing new materials on the nano level.

And so I started I don’t know how many years ago, probably close to the time I -- maybe a year or two, even before, maybe in ‘03, ‘04, I developed an interest in plastic. And that interest now is also, it’s still there, we’re doing a number of projects using fiberglass, polycarbonate, polyethylene, although I probably didn’t directly pick up some of these things at MIT, but I really pick up that kind of a spirit here very much. This is the, you know talking about, I don’t mean to be disrespectable, but actually I mean in a very kind of a good way, I have this kind of a stereotypical image of an MIT professor who would I have a beard kind of on the bigger side wearing shorts and tee-shirt all year round. I don’t know if you interview people that actually look like this, somehow probably not. They are PAC student -- there are people who look like that, believe it or not.

When I see people like this, I don’t know them and I don’t know what they do. It’s a reminder of why I am here. You know, I don’t know, you probably should edit that out and it politically probably is not correct. It’s kind of a funny thing.

So, in that way, I’m just talking about I probably got an education at MIT, and that’s -- the look of the people, their lives, when I look into them again I am clueless as to what they are trying to achieve, but they’re a reminder of the things I’m really interested. So I’m building a house using fiberglass for the structure, and then we are completing the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion for the Expo in Shanghai, World Expo that opens in early May using a lot of polycarbonate tubes with LED lights, with water for mist-making and with water for energy. We’re doing solar thermal and then thermal electricity exchange and so on.

So, I think that’s all had to do with my MIT side.

INTERVIEWER: So you’re able to take ideas and concepts that you pick up here and then put them to work in your design.

CHANG: Yeah. Again, it really is just the spirit of it. You know this and the atmosphere, I don’t know how much is in my department, but here. You know that’s why I was saying you just see it -- you see it on your way to your office, on your way to maybe the lunch place, Stata Center.

INTERVIEWER: How would you describe the great strengths of the Department of Architecture?

CHANG: Our school, you constantly probably hear it is really one of the oldest schools of architecture in the US For me, the process is very important, but also we are, in a way, one of the youngest schools also in the US because we’re a school on the rise, and we’re are, as a faculty, we’re very much determined to really make big changes. And I started to talk a lot about changes before President Obama -- just kidding, but in a way it’s true. So anyway, so we’re not burdened by our history and right now in the past five years, one thing I did I’m very proud of is to in a way to rebuild the faculty by hiring so far nine new people. So we have a lot of peer schools, they have a world class visiting faculty, especially the Ivy League schools, they were able to have a lot of visitors from elsewhere here for a semester or on a fairly regular basis even and so on. But I’m very comfortable to say that as far as an in-house faculty, and right now we’re the strongest in the country. And then our design faculty are from all over the world -- from Asia, India, Korea, Japan, China and so on, and from Europe, from the UK, from Belgium and so on. And then also there are the middle aged more mature level of people like myself and like Rahul Mahrotra from India, Nader Tehrani who has a local practice, one of the best offices in the US, but he’s from Iran. And so then we have a tier of upcoming and young designers and scholars and so on. So, university is all about the faculty. We could have a bigger -- you know, this I’m actually paraphrasing the first president of Peking University, because in Chinese we say university the big school, in Chinese “da” meaning big. So he said the big school is not about big facility and big buildings and so on, big campus, and he said big school is about big ideas, and it’s about a -- and not a lot of people -- not the big in terms

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of size, but about a big faculty. So I really believe what he said.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think MIT’s Architecture Department and school, what does that offer that other schools in this country or around the world do not offer?

CHANG: We’re not quite there yet, but eventually we ought to offer two things, which other schools may not able to do as well because they don’t have the resources. One is our core technology. You know the way technology has infiltrated our life here with the iPhones and all these i-this and i-that and all these things. And the other thing it has to do with a long MIT tradition is on the urban front. So in the 60s, 70s, at MIT we developed a very strong research about city and in urbanism -- when we say urbanism it’s how we see cities being designed. Although actually it started in the mid-’40s. So that tradition -- so we have the best department of planning here at MIT, especially in the US, and then I see -- although they don’t really design -- I see the combination of their knowledge and of our design ability, we really have the opportunity to be the best for urbanism and for urban design and so on. So in these two fronts, architecture that embraces technology and architecture combined with urbanism and, again, there’s a bit of the other things, but I think we really have a very good chance to excel, to be the best.

INTERVIEWER: Since you’re head of the Department of Architecture, is being an administrator, is that something that helps you achieve your goal, is it something that is time-consuming and keeps you from your design work? How does that fit in?

CHANG: That’s actually a question I’m still trying to figure out. First of all, I’m not very good at administration and management maybe. But as an architect it really is a very important part of our work. By having this job, I’ve become better in managing things. Again, it’s a very good learning experience. Still to balance my time really -- what would be the word -- to further develop my own administrative skills and these things, it actually is quite a struggle I have to say. But luckily, I have a really, a fantastic side-kick -- I have an associate department head, Leslie Norford, he’s a professor of building technology, his field is mechanical engineering. I have to say our engineers are better in that front. I imagine a lot of architects are pretty good, but I -- and with his help, I’m so lucky that really as a team we worked out very well. And then I have also a really first rate assistant, Anne Simunovic. She’s been at MIT for 30 years, maybe by now 35 years, and most of the time she’s spending in architecture. She would for me, although it’s not only that she helps a lot, so kind of make up my shortcoming in administration, but one remarkable thing, she would say, you know, I was mentioning a name, probably an icon in design, she would say yeah, yeah, I remember him. He used to come to MIT. It was quite a remarkable thing. The other day she -- I don’t know if you are interested in design as much -- I didn’t know, I think George Nelson used to -- if you go -- go to Design Within Reach, probably he’s like the Eames, you know Ray and Charles Eames. He designed so many things we still use -- wall clocks and chairs . Anne would know him -- no, that’s of course beside the point. It has nothing to do with administration.

But when we were talking about administration I couldn’t help but think of people I work together in the department headquarters.

INTERVIEWER: There was something intriguing that you said, you thought that wisdom is important in architecture. Can you talk a little about why wisdom is so important?

CHANG: Today if we talk about aesthetics, probably we can’t get two people to agree on much. Right, if something is pretty or ugly. There is just no one set of criteria that we can use. And then what is funny, what is humorous, what’s not?

What would make you tickle and laugh, what would make me tickle and laugh, who knows. But I find what’s consistent is actually the intelligence in art, even in comedy, and in the true sense of humor has to do with intelligence or wisdom. So in design, I’m afraid it’s probably also true. So it’s not so much an expression of a personality or other personality expressed in architectural forms, and if it’s geometry or shape or material choices and so on, but rather the architect or designer has really discovered something and then put that something into the design, so that’s wisdom. So in my case, I don’t do it that well, but I’m not really interested in big formal expressions. I think architecture is really interesting because it’s an integral part of daily life. So I watch too many of the French new wave movies, right, so they could be pretty boring, they could be very interesting, it all depends on your outlook of daily life. And then there are these little small wisdoms you’ll pick up. You’ll look at how people would appreciate a setting of dinner and so on, that gives the pleasure to people. And then often there’s

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something smart about it, so that it’s not sake for -- in a form for the sake of a form. There’s something you discover you learn. I think that’s really nice. Again, every day our philosophical often that they could come together. Have you seen the movie Over the Sky of Berlin?

INTERVIEWER: No. CHANG: It’s made by what’s the director’s name who also made the Paris, Texas -- he’s famous. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. So in that movie there was an American actor who used to play a detective call Colombo--.

INTERVIEWER: Peter Falk.

CHANG: Peter Falk. He was in that movie. In a cold Berlin morning, Berlin was 15 degrees below zero Celsius about a week ago still -- Berlin gets cold. In a very cold morning he was holding a cup of coffee, very hot, in his hand, he’s standing outside and he was talking about his philosophy of life -- of course, it was that. That’s kind of a wisdom. You know, the cold morning with a hot cup of coffee in his hand. And so although in that case it’s his revelation, but I think wisdom is on that level sometimes.

INTERVIEWER: When you approach a design or a design problem, is there a particular goal that you have in mind?

CHANG: My goal, if there is one, I want to -- you know, there are a lot of pretty serious yet basic goals, you know, there are needs of people, but architecture should meet, be it comfort or convenience, and there are loftier goals of inspiring people.

So that’s why an old big library would look like a cathedral. I may not do that myself, and I understand why it was designed that way and so on. But yet, there’s one goal, if I could, I would like to always achieve is to delight people. I don’t actually like things serious. I have to do things serious because I got the responsibilities, but otherwise if anything that is delightful, I love to do that.

INTERVIEWER: Is that why you think one of your designs, split house, has gotten so much attention?

CHANG: You know, I don’t think I -- I’m not even old enough, I’m pretty old but not enough to develop some really good wisdoms yet, but I got clever from time to time. So that was one of those projects, there were some actually very clear intentions. It means that I did understand something, I digested what I observed and spit out, so it’s better than something still un-digested, you know, half-baked. So, split house really had to do with a number of things, and one thing it was very important for me personally was the fact I had a courtyard house in my mind. I grew up in a courtyard house in the State of Beijing. I left the courtyard house when I was 13 years old. Of course, I had no idea that was still a house I lived the longest. I never lived in the house that long ever since. I moved around a lot, a lot. So in that house I understood a particular kind of in a living environment one might design the split house, it was there. So basically, a courtyard house would allow one to live in an introverted cosmo pretty much, so you’d have a piece of sky, you’d have a piece of ground right in the center and then you live around it. However, when I worked on the split house, I realized that was also an urban house. The introverted quality is for the density of the city. It wouldn’t make sense when we were doing the house in the open landscape. And then after many runs, actually, I came to the final version of it. So basically, there is an enclosure of a courtyard, but yet it’s enclosed half by the natural element, the slope half by building, half by the artificial, so that’s where the house came to be. And then as if a house being split in middle to make the artificial half and then a slope. So that was one of the ideas.

INTERVIEWER: Your area of interest is around the intersection of city and tradition and materiality -- is that how I would understand it? Can you talk a little about--?

CHANG: That’s what I put down many years ago. I am interested in these subject matters. Tradition sounds very general -- they all sound very general and generic and broad. But the reason I had it is that for my generation and the younger generation of Chinese architects and designers, there is a very strong tendency to ignore traditions, which I find really problematic actually, because I’m actually a big fan of Japanese design from architecture to industrial design to fashion design to graphic design. Japan is a big design country. What I learned from my Japanese counterparts, they were able to come by

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the tradition and almost ultra modern. I believe that we could do that as well. Our traditions are different from the Japanese, although we share a number of them and so on. I just remembered, again, as a person, I’m interested in the way people look very much-- who actually I know pretty well who’s a structural engineer. He designed some of the really the most fascinating structures. His name is Kawaguchi and he works with the architect Isozaki and so on, designs structures can be lift up from the ground, so it could be built very quickly and so on. So, Kawaguchi used to take me and others to karaoke and he would sing very traditional songs. And then I got to know him better, he actually told me that he belongs to, how do you say, you know, singing group. What’s the word?

INTERVIEWER: Choir or choral group.

CHANG: Yeah. So anyway so, he actually told me he would dance a very traditional outfit and then to sing. So can you imagine, I don’t think it’s a split off a personality, but rather it’s a pretty hell of a lot of integration of a culture, so I’m kind of interested in that very much. And then, of course, city is something people are actually living in. I don’t believe people living in a building or a house first, people live in a city first, otherwise, if you only live in the building you’re in a prison.

And so the importance of city is something cannot be really underestimated. And then today, of course, I’m actually very much interested in technology and environmental issues, energy and so on. So, I am interested in material very much and I’m interested in new materials, actually in the plastics, again. So my material interest has to do with my environmental concerns and my technological concerns that really haven’t really changed that much in that regard. However, in the past few years with a colleague in my office who’s a graduate of MIT, we have also been working on product design, so that’s something new for our office for myself. So we have then Chinaware, we have then glassware, decanters for western wine and kind of a, what’s the word, carafe -- no, something--.

INTERVIEWER: Carafe, yes.

CHANG: Carafe, right, to hold rice wine, and so we’re designing a teapot. We just finished the design of an oil and vinegar set. Now we’re working on a salt and pepper set, we’re working on a teapot using traditional purple clay. That probably doesn’t make sense. It’s this kind of a thing -- you see it [INAUDIBLE], you know. It’s kind of a very dark chocolate-colored clay. It’s the best thing for making tea, because the clay is porous would absorb the flavor of the tea in a way. And then even more recently, we are starting a clothing line, our office. So my interest is all over. That’s the only thing I can’t really convince my students is to focus because I don’t do very well myself.

INTERVIEWER: What do you see ahead for architecture? What kind of advice do you give your students?

CHANG: And I think to prepare the career of an architect, a student really should -- you know, it sounds like a cliche at MIT. It’s really it’s about mind and hands, right. Man and manners, whatever. Because although we, of course we think, right, but we are dealing with the physical world. So an architect is interested in this and that. You don’t only want to look at it to understand -- you want to touch it. It’s wood, it’s not cold. If it’s metal, would have a very different feel. Before I ever lifted a piece of stone, at Peking University there were a lot of old relics laying around because it’s part of the royal garden palaces from the Ching Dynasty. So one day I saw this piece of architecture -- this stone really very nicely sculpted in somehow in the wrong place. So, I wanted to move it. I got some students -- initially I chose three and plus myself, four of us. I thought we could move it. I really had no idea how heavy stone was, and then eventually we got eight people to move it. So when you understand the heaviness of stone, you can truly appreciate the lightness of a gothic cathedral, which is also made out of stone. So the Medieval Europeans, they were able to come up with this challenge -- let’s make a very light stone building.

It’s just really outrageous, totally crazy. See, that’s architecture. So if you only look at architecture buildings, you could be a scholar, but I don’t think you can be an architect. So it’s very important to do hands-on work. And we don’t do enough of it in our department at this point.

INTERVIEWER: Are you involved at all in the expansion plans for MIT? CHANG: No, I wish. I think I have ideas. At one breakfast I had to, over at the Gray House with our president, I was talking a bit about that. I’m not sure if she thought I was crazy anyway, because my understanding of city -- you know, my

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understanding of architecture is about life. So city is a place where people live. So it means that unless you are doing some heavy industrial production, you pretty much can live at a place, your work, your social, you’ll do your shopping and then you have cultural activities and so on. So a mixture of these different needs is very important. Cambridge as a city is not as mixed as Boston, for instance, and it doesn’t really have the right density. MIT as a campus could have used more density, could be a lot more mixed in the way it’s planned. Now there’s too much segregation of the dormitories and the teaching facilities and we don’t have enough amenities. We could have more cafes and shops and all of that, and again, mixed with our classical monumental buildings. I think we ought to lighten up. We need some daily little delights here and there.

INTERVIEWER: Well maybe they’ll ask you to design something.

CHANG: No, there’s a policy which wouldn’t allow, a rather recent policy, that wouldn’t allow our faculty, ‘our’ meaning architectural faculty to be involved in designing things on campus. I don’t think that’s right.

INTERVIEWER: We’re getting close to the end of our time. One thing I want to make sure I ask you is that despite the fact that your family did not think much of your art as a child, you are reasonably well-known as an artist. And I’m interested in what it is you’re able to do and say in your art that you aren’t able to do or say in your architecture?

CHANG: That’s an interesting question. I still have an interest in art, not that I would never come back to painting, but right now at least, I find architecture a lot more interesting as an art form, actually. More challenging, too. You know making architecture is like making film -- you work with a big team of people, and then you have to really be very careful with the resources, exactly because you get to be in charge of big money and so on. And then when it comes to art, we do art installations for Biennale’s, for museums and so on. They are really smaller, just much smaller architectural projects with not as much resources and it’s done quickly. And so they’re more light-hearted in some way. That’s probably one reason I could never really be an artist because real artists, although they may, again, have wisdom or delight, but they treat their art projects just as seriously, right. But for me -- I’m getting more serious because when I started to do art projects, they were like really extracurricular activities. So today, coming back to your question, if I’m going to really pick up art again, it can’t be installations, because they are too close architecture. I would rather paint. The last painting I did was probably in 80 -- I’m sorry, in ‘92 or ‘91 when I was teaching at Berkeley. Painting is something, oil painting is something that it gives me freedom, I think a kind of freedom usually I don’t even desire. I like the limitation of a design work, lots, lots of it. And then I work like a detective and I work through the limitation. But maybe if I paint again, I’d rather want the freedom.

INTERVIEWER: Well maybe it’s easier without the whole team.

CHANG: Exactly.

INTERVIEWER: To just say what you want to say.

CHANG: Right, right.

INTERVIEWER: So, I didn’t get to all of the questions I had, but we have about five minutes and what I’d like to know is is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you think is important to add about MIT, about your philosophy of architecture, about the future of anything?

CHANG: I have -- really I have a very serious suggestion for MIT I never really get to say. Maybe I’ll say it to you, so it’s on record. You know, after all we talked about, I really think the quality of lives are very important. So I was reading Time magazine the other day, I do know that I have a whole foods lifestyle, but I fit in that category so well I was a little surprised.

Not only we shop at Whole Foods, we actually drive a Prius, and my wife does yoga, so we do all of that. And you don’t have to do that, but the point is, of course, in the end we should care about the quality of life as we do as architects for other people, we should do that to ourselves. So, my grand suggestion for MIT is to officially have a one hour lunch break for the entire Institute. During that hour, of course, we need better cafes and restaurants and now we can eat a decent meal, and my recommendation it wouldn’t hurt to have a glass of wine even during lunch break, and then you meet more people at MIT,

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you enjoy life at MIT a lot more. So a one hour lunch break is my suggestion to MIT. I know it’s a long tradition not to have a lunch break, but it wouldn’t hurt to start that. I think the creativity and productivity would go up. I believe in that.

INTERVIEWER: That would be everybody taking the same hour.

CHANG: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And class meeting work would be totally forbidden during that one hour. 12:30 to 1:30 sounds pretty good. That’s it.

INTERVIEWER: That’s a very interesting -- you could just imagine all the collaboration and connecting that people could do, if that’s what they were supposed to do for that amount of time. Well thank you, and it is on the record.

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BASEtalk: Pi Li on art, urbanism, and public spaces in china Conducted at: B.A.S.E. Beijing Talk presented: 2007.05

Adrian Blackwell: It’s our pleasure this evening to learn more about our neighbor, Pi Li, and to learn more about his ideas on contemporary art and urban space. Pi llI is the co-founder, with Waling Boers, of Universal Studios Beijing in 2005. He has been an independent curator based in Beijing since the mid 90’s and since 2001 he’s been a lecturer of curatorial studies in the Art Administration Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and is currently teaching in Shanghai as well. He has curated numerous exhibitions across China and participated in a number of biennnials as well. He was the assistant curator for the Chinese pavillion at the Sao Paolo Biennial in 2002, Shanghai Biennial in 2002, Alors la Chine at the Centre Georges Pompidou in France in 2003. He’s published books, on sculptors and post-modernity in 2003. He’s the founder of the website Art Union and chief editor of Contemporary Art magazine. He’s been the director of the Chinese Contemporary Arts awards in 2001 and 2006. He was the comissioned curator of the Media City Seoul exhibit in 2006, and I believe also for the Venice Biennale this year with Hou Hanru. Tonight he will talk to you about art, urbanization, and public space. Please welcome Pi Li. Pi Li: It’s my pleasure to have a talk here. I’m sorry we didn’t have any formal welcome ceremony for you but I’m so happy you can be here. So I believe for most of you it is the first time you have come to China, and you have been to Cao Chang Di, I believe you’ve come to 798. I think it’s very hard for foreigners who come to China and have no taxi here, no public transportation, you ride a bicycle, and people spit on the street, and you totally cannot find your direction. But my talk today will give you some idea of what’s happening in China now and what’s happening in Chinese contemporary art. Some of you probably know that Chinese contemporary art has become so popular internationally, and everybody’s talking about China and the price is so high and so many shows are about Chinese contemporary art. And if you stay in Beijing, you’ll see how crazy it is in Beijing - no government in Europe or in the States could build the stadium or the CCTV tower or the opera house and make decisions over such a short time and make the buildings in such short time. Most of my collegues and I believe that Rem Koolhaas could never realize this kind of crazy project anywhere else in the world. So people ask why this could happen in China and it seems like many cities, like Shangai, like Guangzhou, are more and more involved in this kind of competition. So I think it’s very difficult for people to combine these two parts, the latent [native?] part and the highspeed development part all together. So I think that will be my topic for today.

So for today my topic is more talking about the public space, why the public space becomes a topic in contemporary art in China. So in order to discuss public spaces, we should go through what’s been happening in China in contemporary art over the last twenty years. China’s contemporary art is not like any contemporary art there is in Europe or in the States. Our contemporary art is completely born in this background, which we call social realism. In 1942, Chairman Mao gave a talk that represents his opinion on art as it related to politics. Chairman Mao said that art should serve for the people, for the politics.

That’s the base ground for social realism, so all the people regard art, or architecture, or music, as a tool to serve ideologies.

So we also believed during the Cultural Revolution that the individual i s nothing important, so all the art production had to serve more abstract Communist ideology. It was very tough for art in China until the 1980s.

In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping made a big change in the economic system. There were two major changes. One was to return China to international economic cycles, so in China we had international trade, not like in the 1970s when there was a block.

The other thing is that in the 1980s, the whole country had started to open internationally. Before the 1990s, for example, in the Chinese academies, art history was only taught through the middle of the nineteenth century. So after Impressionism and Beaux-Arts wasn’t taught in the schools - we thought it was totally capitalist. But after the 1980s, this kind of political change made more foreign information come back into China. But the other thing was that the whole social structure started to change. Why? I don’t know if you are familiar with the socialist economic system, but in China we were socialist before the 1980s. All the companies in China were nationally-owned companies, so people had to stay there and the government gave people their salaries. We didn’t need to buy a house - the government will build up so many - we called it a collective

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apartment - you can still find them around the Cao Chand Di area. So people were working in the same company or the same factory and they stayed in the same apartment, so we didn’t need to buy any apartment or house. In the 1980s, people didn’t have any economic freedom because it was a planned economy - the government made all of the decisions, like how many students graduated from the university, how many tons of steel had to be produced, and who they would be sold to at what price. So we had collectivity not only on the farms but also in the market. But after opening up the economy to the West in the 1980s, the market economy became important, so factories can produce things and artists can sell their work. For example, before the 1980s, artists studied, they graduated from the university, and they became teachers at the university, or they became musuem staff - what they would do there is just paint, they painted the huge paintings to celebrate the birthday of Chairman Mao. They would never sell the paintings, they got the salary from the government because nobody collected art. So this means that artists and architects would be working for some institute, and one day the government said, We want to build the Beijing Railway Station, and they gave the comission to some architectural institute, so the whole group started work, but they are not charged a comission, they are charged a salary - the government gave them a salary.

After the 1980s, the economic system changed quite a lot. For art, there are so many embassy people in Beijing and the foreigners would sometimes invite artists to have solo shows in their apartments or in the embassies. And sometimes the artists would start to sell the painting for 100 USD or something to some foreigners. So they started to earn some money from overseas and stop depending on national salaries. For the first times, artists began to have economic freedom from society.

At the same time, a lot of Western art was introduced to China. So already in the mid - 1980s we’ve got the first Chinese contemporary art movement - we called it the Chinese avant-garde movement, the first modernist art movement in China.

At that time, most people learned from Western modernist art. The style was quite far from social realism. So that was the first step, and it made the government quite nervous, so even until 1989, there were many shows closed down and not that many shows reopened. But that was the first step, that Chinese artists began to notice what the individual meant. The whole 1980s were a very brave period in China - its brave because a lot of artists were like heroes - they would make a show and then it would be closed and they would make another show and the police would come. More and more for the whole society, the Communist ideology became too loose. And so [artists] thought they would change the world, change Chinese society before 1989.

At the same time, more and more people were leaving the nationally-owned companies and starting their own businesses, and a lot of people started to earn money. So during 1989, we had this phenomenon of a new middle class come into being. A lot of Chinese artists had this sense of individuality, of the middle class. At the same time, the government still wanted to control politics and culture. There were big protests in March of 1989. The artists, the students, and even the new middle class protested for more power and human rights. Finally in the morning of June 4, 1989, the government sent the troops to Tiannamen Square, which the students occupied, and killed eight hundred people on the square. That was a very tough time in China. Artists had dreamed that they could change China, and they saw that no matter how active they were, [the government] still had this kind of hand to control them. After the 1980s, many artists ran away, so we still had a large group of Chinese artists overseas. On the other hand, inside China after 1989, after hundreds of students had been killed, the local atmosphere became more and more depressed. From 1989 to 1992, Chinese film, visual arts had the same depressed, ironic, cycnical tone. But on the other hand, artists became very abstract with their humor - they were not talking about ideology, just using a very cynical way to paint people, joking with the whole society. That was cynical realism, which was very popular in the mid-1990s. The other thing we saw was political pop - people combining art with politics - people took images of Chairman Mao or Tiannamen Square together with capitalist commercials, like Chairman Mao drinking Coca-Cola, or Cultural Revolution people wearing Prada. So those were two major styles of contemporary art in the beginning of the 1990s.

We saw that as still very ironic and very political.

But that caused another problem because before the 1990s, Chinese contemporary art was never shown internationally, but after 1992, the whole situation changed quite dramatically because China became the last Socialist country in the world. The Soviet Union crashed and Germany was unified. China became so popular because people wanted to know what was happening here. The 1993 Venice Bienniale was the first time Chinese contemporary art was shown. It was the same story before 1989 for the former Soviet Union art - a lot of European and American galleries came to Moscow and selected the art and sold it at very high prices in New York. They thought that China would become another example for art collection and

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art investment. After 1992, a lot of collectors and curators came to China to bring Chinese contemporary art to the whole world. Domestically, the government noticed that there had been mistakes in 1989. In 1992, Chairman Deng Xiaoping, before he retired, said that we shouldn’t talk about politics anymore, that we should keep working on the economic reforms and focus on being a part of the international economy. That was a very important talk in 1992, after which the whole social structure changed quite a lot. For example, most of the nationally-owned companies crashed. So if you see 798, it was the former government factory for military production - the government started to close lots of these kinds of factories, and lots of space started to empty. Also, many private companies started to open up. So after 1992, there were two basic changes in China. The first thing is the internet. You know, in North Korea, that have laptops, they have classes, but they don’t have access to the internet. In 1992, in China we had access to the internet. The other thing was that people had access to fake DVDs. For very cheap prices, people could get Hollywood films, so people started to get more information.

I think that the 1980s in China, any change is social life has to do with how much money you have. But after the 1990s, the nature of the change of social life is that the content of your life has been changed. You don’t need a newspaper - you can check on the internet. You don’t need to go to the cinema to buy the propoganda film beacause for a very cheap price you can buy a Hollywood film. And people started to move away from Socialist idealism - we say that in the 1980s, the whole Socialist atmosphere was quite romantic, quite idealist. But after the 1990s, the atmosphere became so much more realistic - people want to earn money, they want to be rich. There are so many private companies here that the government wanted more money in the bank and make their economy stronger. In the 1990s, the government began to develop real estate. Private companies can buy land and build apartments, and people can earn money and buy a house. I think this a huge change for China, because before, people were living in the same apartment, so nobody had ownership of their apartment. The apartment belongs to the country - if you work had, the country will give you an apartment. If you don’t, the government will take the apartment away and you will have no food and no house. But after 1992, you can buy a house if you have they money. You can choose your neighbor. Before the 1990s, people lived close together and you didn’t have any privacy; after, people started to live not by politics but by economics. For example, if you are rich, you can buy a more expensive house.

If you are poor, you can’t choose your neighbor. But before, you couldn’t choose the place where you lived. It was a huge change in China.

So I would like to propose that before 1992, we didn’t have such a definition between public space and private space. Every space was public. You go to 798 and you can still see this kind of format of collective buildings. It’s like a hotel - you don’t have a toilet, you don’t have a kitchen. Everybody had a bedroom and we shared the kitchen, we shared the bathroom. Even if you go to the courtyard, several people stayed in the same courtyard. This kind of new real estate thing really changed lives - people started to have their own private spaces, that’s the main thing. Even inside the family system in China - for example, if one family had three kids - usually, in China, we don’t have that much house, so people would have to share the bedroom, like all the family staying in one room. In the 1990s, it was a fantastic dream for a Chinese family to have their own apartment, with one kitchen and toilet and two bedrooms. For Westerners, it is very hard to understand how this change can inform that daily life for Chinese people. People started to have public space and privacy, their own space to act in. This was also reflected in art. From 1990 to 1997, Chinese contemporary art became so popular internationally - why? Because this is art from a Socialist country, and this art is very different from what happened in Europe, in the States - it was perceived as being quite exotic. So people talking about Chinese contemporary art can imagine Chairman Mao, Tiannamen Square, and people wearing the Mao suit. So Western people started to choose Chinese contemporary art based on their imagination of what was a Socialist country.

On another level, after 1995, the realities of China changed quite a lot. People had their own apartments, they could buy a car, the internet - the content of their daily life totally changed, to something quite close to Europe or what happened in Bangkok or Seoul. So in the 1990s, the older generation began to be displaced by the younger generation, because for them art is not something decided by the individual, sometimes the art style is decided by the market, who collects art. So the first generation of artists came in contact with Western collectors, who wanted to see Chairman Mao, the very political side of Chinese contemporary art. But the younger artists thought that that was fake because nobody cared about ideology anymore, they only cared about the daily life - what the daily life can bring to us. So we had fewer deep conflicts internationally in how we explain, how we have the frame to explain Chinese contemporary art. Usually for Westerners there are two frames - one is just the political frame, like Chinese contemporary art is borne under political pressure. But in reality artisits say no - we’re

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art investment. After 1992, a lot of collectors and curators came to China to bring Chinese contemporary art to the whole world. Domestically, the government noticed that there had been mistakes in 1989. In 1992, Chairman Deng Xiaoping, before he retired, said that we shouldn’t talk about politics anymore, that we should keep working on the economic reforms and focus on being a part of the international economy. That was a very important talk in 1992, after which the whole social structure changed quite a lot. For example, most of the nationally-owned companies crashed. So if you see 798, it was the former government factory for military production - the government started to close lots of these kinds of factories, and lots of space started to empty. Also, many private companies started to open up. So after 1992, there were two basic changes in China. The first thing is the internet. You know, in North Korea, that have laptops, they have classes, but they don’t have access to the internet. In 1992, in China we had access to the internet. The other thing was that people had access to fake DVDs. For very cheap prices, people could get Hollywood films, so people started to get more information.

I think that the 1980s in China, any change is social life has to do with how much money you have. But after the 1990s, the nature of the change of social life is that the content of your life has been changed. You don’t need a newspaper - you can check on the internet. You don’t need to go to the cinema to buy the propoganda film beacause for a very cheap price you can buy a Hollywood film. And people started to move away from Socialist idealism - we say that in the 1980s, the whole Socialist atmosphere was quite romantic, quite idealist. But after the 1990s, the atmosphere became so much more realistic - people want to earn money, they want to be rich. There are so many private companies here that the government wanted more money in the bank and make their economy stronger. In the 1990s, the government began to develop real estate. Private companies can buy land and build apartments, and people can earn money and buy a house. I think this a huge change for China, because before, people were living in the same apartment, so nobody had ownership of their apartment. The apartment belongs to the country - if you work had, the country will give you an apartment. If you don’t, the government will take the apartment away and you will have no food and no house. But after 1992, you can buy a house if you have they money. You can choose your neighbor. Before the 1990s, people lived close together and you didn’t have any privacy; after, people started to live not by politics but by economics. For example, if you are rich, you can buy a more expensive house.

If you are poor, you can’t choose your neighbor. But before, you couldn’t choose the place where you lived. It was a huge change in China.

So I would like to propose that before 1992, we didn’t have such a definition between public space and private space. Every space was public. You go to 798 and you can still see this kind of format of collective buildings. It’s like a hotel - you don’t have a toilet, you don’t have a kitchen. Everybody had a bedroom and we shared the kitchen, we shared the bathroom. Even if you go to the courtyard, several people stayed in the same courtyard. This kind of new real estate thing really changed lives - people started to have their own private spaces, that’s the main thing. Even inside the family system in China - for example, if one family had three kids - usually, in China, we don’t have that much house, so people would have to share the bedroom, like all the family staying in one room. In the 1990s, it was a fantastic dream for a Chinese family to have their own apartment, with one kitchen and toilet and two bedrooms. For Westerners, it is very hard to understand how this change can inform that daily life for Chinese people. People started to have public space and privacy, their own space to act in. This was also reflected in art. From 1990 to 1997, Chinese contemporary art became so popular internationally - why? Because this is art from a Socialist country, and this art is very different from what happened in Europe, in the States - it was perceived as being quite exotic. So people talking about Chinese contemporary art can imagine Chairman Mao, Tiannamen Square, and people wearing the Mao suit. So Western people started to choose Chinese contemporary art based on their imagination of what was a Socialist country.

On another level, after 1995, the realities of China changed quite a lot. People had their own apartments, they could buy a car, the internet - the content of their daily life totally changed, to something quite close to Europe or what happened in Bangkok or Seoul. So in the 1990s, the older generation began to be displaced by the younger generation, because for them art is not something decided by the individual, sometimes the art style is decided by the market, who collects art. So the first generation of artists came in contact with Western collectors, who wanted to see Chairman Mao, the very political side of Chinese contemporary art. But the younger artists thought that that was fake because nobody cared about ideology anymore, they only cared about the daily life - what the daily life can bring to us. So we had fewer deep conflicts internationally in how we explain, how we have the frame to explain Chinese contemporary art. Usually for Westerners there are two frames - one is just the political frame, like Chinese contemporary art is borne under political pressure. But in reality artisits say no - we’re

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not making political art - they want to use their art to reflect the social changes. In 1997 the whole social reality had changed because it was international - you could see the same thing in Seoul, in Bangkok, in Tokyo, in Asian countries. Because Asian countries all experienced the Second World War, they all experienced being occupied by Fascism, and the the Asian countries all experienced a collective political time, and then they all experienced an open economy. You have travelled to Shanghai, to Singapore, to Bangkok, to Hong Kong, and you see that Asian countries have developed a different city planning model. The Asian countries are not like the U.S. and not like Europe where you have the plan, you have the square, you have the lanes - in Asian countries we built while we were planning and we planned while we built so the whole city grows like grass - it’s following a different model. Asian countries develop so fast that artists and architects had to develop this strategy to catch the steps. If you have the chance to go to Shenzhen, you can see the whole city was built up in the 1970s as an official village - you only have to cross the street to be in Hong Kong. So in the 1980s, the government decided to open the area to Hong Kong to have more cheap labor to encourage Hong Kong factories to come to Shenzhen. Shenzhen was first developed to engage Hong Kong, from the east to the west, but after 1997, Hong Kong crashed, and Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta became more rich. So if you go to see the Pearl River Delta, you will see that the cities are not like a mass, they are more like a belt connecting to each other. You can see that in Beijing - the government decides that it needs more buildings, and so it starts to build. And once they started to build building, there were traffic jams, so they started to build a road, and then certain places become hot, and they build more buildings. So we have a joke about Beijing City Planning - it’s like making a pizza or making a cake. You move and the cake gets bigger, bigger, bigger. You can see this mind of city planning - it’s really awful, but it’s the typical Asian model. That’s why in the last Venice Bienniale, there was a special part talking about urbanization in China and in Asian countries - they are in the emergency zone. It’s like we’ve developed a new model of city planning, and it’s not about bad or good, but you can see that the Asian cities have a new function. And you can see that mix even in Cao Chang Di, you can see the very high tax [? 34:00] building or the very low tax [?] building. You can see the warehouse and the film museum and it’s mixed all together. That’s related not only to the architecture but also to the art.

So after the 1990s, artists began to see this purely political-ideological art as old-fashioned, and they wanted to give a new dimension to explaining what the artist’s creation means. So urbanization became the motive, because urbanization means not only the building, not only the city’s development, but also the artist’s attitude at facing development. This level of architecture and art and daily life come in big. So I think that’s the main characteristic of 1997. In 2002, we did a show called Urban Creation for the Shanghai Biennial about how most of Chinese society is not faced with these ideological things because most foreigners come to China thinking that China is still under pressure from the politics, that there still is censorship here. But in reality, there isn’t censorship - it is only about how much money you have earned and how rich you could be. China is the place we always joke that everything is possible, nothing is impossible. I don’t think that there is this kind of opportunity in Europe or the States - the city develops so crazily and everybody has the chance, whereas in Europe or the States your social position has already been set.

The other crazy part is about who is the owner of the city. I think that’s a very interesting part. For example, in Beijing, you have noticed the public transportation system - obviously, it is very weak. You move to Cao Chang Di and either you take the taxi or you bike, you walk - you have no public transportation. You walk down the newly-built road, for example the Fourth Ring Road or the new road in Cao Chang Di, and you soon find that it is very good for the car, but not so good for the people walking. Most people ride bicycles for transportation, but not like in Germany - in China, riding bicycles is so dangerous because we don’t have special roads for bicycles. So that’s really about who has the right for the city planning. That’s how it relates to this kind of half-socialism and half-capitalism in China. For example, every government, every city mayor is trying to build something as a monument to his memory. For example, I just talked with the villagers. They’re cutting the trees outside - they want to build a new wide road - I am the mayor of this village and I want to leave something there. They think it’s part of the politics but we don’t get to decide whether we want to road or not - we have no right to say whether we want to keep these trees or not. More and more mayors and city leaders regard architecture as a monument, so the CCTV tower is a monument to the Jiang Zemin government, and the stadium is the monument for the Hu Jintao government. So every government is able to build something new and huge, special. For the CCTV tower, I have no problem with Rem Koolhaas, but I have a big political problem with the CCTV tower - is that a building we want? Who decided we’d build the CCTV tower? You only can realize this kind of crazy project in a Communist government. Every city wants to build a new airport, like the new airport designed by Norman Foster, and they want famous foreign architects to come. And if you look, all of the city planning in Beijing or Shanghai is just for the people taking cars and if you are walking you feel totally lost. The city

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is on one side is a public space but on the other side it’s not a public space. Nobody can decide whether to build or not, and nobody can decide whether to keep their house or not. In Beijing there’s been a huge argument about the government starting to take away the old courtyards within the second ring road, that’s an area that’s been around for five hundred years and the government takes the courtyards to sell the land to developers. There were big protests on the street because who has the right to the land? That’s why the question of public space becomes so interesting.

For Western people, the city is the public space but in China, what does public space mean? I was thinking about it before I came here and the people were cutting the trees out front - no one gave their permission to cut the trees, but they’re building the new road. I asked the people why there were cutting trees and they said they didn’t know, they were just building the road.

They have no budget to build the road, but the tree has been cut. So these are what we call the hyper-realities in China, and that’s why public space becomes such an important issue in China. I hope that gives you a very rough idea.

In China, it is very hard to say that we have public space, or private space. Every space in China is a kind of hybrid. Everyone has a kind of small freedom. It’s not democratic, but I would like to say that it is a small freedom. I think that this hybrid situation, or this hybrid space, is a very funny condition in China.

I think that how we define the nature of space in China is very difficult. You must understand property rights, and know who has the rights to a certain space. The village Caochangdi has the rights to the land, and the village decided to develop the land to create the studios. And, they rented to artists and the artists pay money. The villages uses this money to build the village.

And then the city government comes and says that the village has no right to build this building on the land. And then the government sends a team to remove the house. It was actually reported by the newspapers, and especially reported by the American media. I would like to say a very simple thing. This is a piece of land and no one has the rights to it. Everybody wants to try to have the rights, but can’t. That’s what I’m saying about the hybrid. The hybrid is not only about ownership; it’s also about reaction. Most of the people and the artists are thinking about the symbol of freedom. One of my lawyer friends said that the development of most land is totally illegal. The government insists that is doing the right thing.

A good example of this is the 798 Arts District. It began as government factories. The artists came in to make big sculptures, and then the galleries came. When the artists moved in, they originally had contracts with 798 for five years. Foreign journalists started to come, and reported that the factories were fantastic studio spaces, and the artists didn’t want to move out. And the area developed very quickly. This made the owners very nervous. But then the rents went up with increased demand for space by large galleries, and institutions and commercial companies like Nike, and the artists were forced to move out. Some of the artists and galleries came to Caochangdi. Again, a hybrid situation.

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