Rarely does the leading political dissident in a country turn out to be its best known visual artist as well. Once again, that is the case with China’s Ai Weiwei, a thorn in the side of the Communist Party ever since he emerged as a trouble-making artist with a world-wide reputation.
On Wednesday, Weiwei was released from police detention after nearly three months, when nobody knew his fate. His disappearance stirred an international protest by governments and the art world. Few artists in memory have held a regime up to as much embarrassing scrutiny as the 54-year-old designer, filmmaker, architect, and blogger. One art critic describes Weiwei’s work as “social and performance-based interventions,” a good description of what political dissidents have always done.And as always, the complex politics of dissent has come into play around the Weiwei case. For a start, his father had been a famed patriotic poet before the Cultural Revolution. To Weiwei's credit, his own creative works have made him a cause célèbre in the international art world. With such stature, he seemed untouchable by the Communist Party, despite his flamboyant art at the Party’s expense. In hopes of generating cultural good will around the world, the Communist Party let Weiwei build studios and art centers. He was part of the team that designed the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Already in 2005, however, he had begun blogging against the government, eventually an effusion of nearly 7,000 blogs that some art critics call a work of social art in itself. Twitter was also his secret weapon. He criticized Beijing’s corruption, greed, and censorship. He especially condemned the regime’s complicity in the death of thousands of school children when shoddy school buildings collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
The next year his blog was shut down. The regime closed his studios, once using a bulldozer. On April 3, the day he planned to leave for Hong Kong, the police intercepted him at the airport. They raided his office, confiscated his records, and intimated that he had evaded taxes.
Such “disappearing,” however, can ignite a worldwide protest, as it soon would do. So why did the Communist Party act so rashly? In one view, the street revolutions of the Arab world had unnerved China’s rulers. From experiences ranging from Tiananmen Square to the Falun Gong, moreover, the Communist government knew it could crack down at will—including with Weiwei—and then simply wait for the stigma to pass by.
As Weiwei went missing, the art world made its own calculations. The first was to launch a bellicose protest. A global petition was signed by all the top art leaders and institutions. Artists canceled shows planned for China. Perhaps most visually, the Tate Modern gallery in London staged a second showing of Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds” art, millions of ceramic seeds handmade and painted by local Chinese in Weiwei's homeland.
However, the art world did not go whole hog: it did not shut down in honor of Weiwie, nor did it boycott China. For the most part, business as usual commenced. As planned, Weiwei’s art continued to get first-class exhibitions from New York City to the Venice Biennale. His already-scheduled outdoor bronze sculptures, “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads,” stand today in Manhattan and London as a continuing protest to Beijing.
Still, some artists believe the art world did not do enough. Maybe the Weiwei case, like the Berlin Wall, could have been the end of the Bamboo Curtain. It certainly would have advanced the artistic cause of absolute free expression, including, as Weiwei famously did, going naked in front of the Communist Party and the world, telling the Party to “f----” its mother.
This is the more utopian view of protest. The British government has been constrained to a more realpolitik. One theory on Weiwei’s release is that it came just as a top Chinese leadership delegation arrives in England (after visiting Hungary and Germany as well). Apparently the Chinese want to avoid embarrassing questions in London.
The English have a whole set of calculations to make as well, especially as China hands them the baton, as it were, for the next Olympic games. The calculations are as old as the delicate balance between human rights and political diplomacy. While it may have informed China that it did not approve of its treatment of Weiwei, the British government will not cancel a 12-city tour of British art in China next year, as some human rights activists have demanded. In defense of the tour, one British official said: “It is through cultural exchange that we best demonstrate the benefits of free artistic expression.”
On Wednesday, the bearded, jovial artist was resting at home. The next morning he told reporters he was on "probation" and could not comment further. The government announced that he is restricted to Beijing for a year. Its Xinhua news agency said he was released because of his health and a “good attitude in confessing his crimes,” described as tax evasion.
We can hope for the best for this brave, stubborn artist. His case reveals the trade-offs in human rights disputes. Should the free world’s protest be absolute, or should it be quiet and behind-the-scenes, using commerce to erode dictatorships? For his own part, Weiwei has not offered a platform to reform China. He calls for free expression. Indeed, that is why he became an artist, he says. In this the artist is like the impossible prophet of old. The prophet said, “Thus sayeth the Lord,” but without a practical way forward.
Even so, embarrassing bad regimes and throwing light on injustice is the way to begin. As Weiwei insisted in a video shown recently at the popular TED conference, “Art is about social change.” He’s also said he is pessimistic. Even artists can know this: political change can take time. Free expression is easiest in art shows and hardest in closed, communist-ruled, societies.
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