Freedom, Ai Weiwei, and the art world.
The artist Ai Weiwei wrote the blurb for my last book, Fear: An Alternative History of the World. Actually, it wasn’t a blurb so much as a mini essay that got redacted to the obligatory cover soundbite. To have Weiwei write meant a lot because his work was an inspiration for the book. “I have to speak for people who are afraid,” Weiwei once said, and fear is a pervasive theme in his art; fear as emotion, behavior, tool of power, and catalyst for protest, as well as fear’s role in the struggle for freedom. Reflecting on the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, he observed: “Fear will always unite people. But you can see politicians always use that to play into that fear and profit from it.”
But here’s an admission: I wasn’t always a Weiwei fan. Perhaps it was his status as “China’s first global art star” and his promotion by the art world establishment that put me off. In 2011, after he was detained for trumped-up charges of tax evasion by the Chinese government, “Free Ai Weiwei” badges were handed out at the Hong Kong International Art Fair (since 2013, Art Basel Hong Kong). It wasn’t a case of the cool dying when they get too hot. It was more that big-name commercial galleries plugging human rights as a side-line to Damien Hirst merch felt wrong. A bit like clothing companies trading on Jimmy Hendrix’s bohemian edge with $200 T-shirts. Weiwei was prescribed and ubiquitous, like an arthouse Mao. He was worn on the lapels of flashy suits in the Art Fair’s VIP lounge, stuck onto the side of buildings with the caption “Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei?”, his stenciled image staring up from sidewalks. And yet, for all these pious declarations of support, it was business as usual for the international art establishment who had their eyes on China as a lucrative new market. Nothing was going to rock the boat, not even China’s first rock star artist.
Then two things happened. In 2014, the Umbrella Movement emerged in a mass movement of passive resistance to the Hong Kong government, which set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the 2019 pro-democracy protests and a draconian crackdown by the authorities under the guise of pandemic control. “Politicians always profit from fear,” Weiwei has observed. And never more so than in China. These were—and are—unsettling times in Hong Kong. Weiwei’s experience of censorship and exile, and his longstanding concern for the plight of those caught up in the dehumanizing politics of fear, became central to many of us as we navigated a new world of arbitrary detentions and political trials under Beijing’s hawkish surveillance.
In that same year, 2014, I began to supervise a postgraduate student’s thesis at the University of Hong Kong on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. As part of this, I focused on the art that Weiwei had produced in response to the magnitude 7.9 quake, which had claimed well over 70,000 lives, including more than 5,000 school children who were killed when their shoddily constructed government schools collapsed. Weiwei had launched an investigation into the disaster, uncovering evidence of corruption, which had led to the circumvention of building regulations. Out of this tragedy, he produced some of his most engaging work, like the installation ‘Straight’ which consisted of tonnes of reinforced steel rods, straightened after they’d been mangled in the earthquake. Laid out on the floor in wave-like formations, the rods echoed the waveforms on a life support monitor or seismograph—bodies and earth alive in a reflection on the cruel engineering of death and the twisted politics that let it happen. Perhaps best known is his installation ‘Remembering’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, a memorial to the dead school children which featured 9,000 colored backpacks.
Weiwei is often described as an artist and activist, as if his activism is somehow detachable from the process of art-making. For Weiwei, it has never been a case of politics shaping art, but rather a realization that art as a practice is fundamentally social and as a consequence, intrinsically political. His two documentary films, both produced in 2020, on the Hong Kong protests and the Wuhan lockdown—’Cockroach’ and ‘Coronation’—aren’t just the most insightful commentaries I’ve come across on Hong Kong, China and the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re also works of art in the way that they grapple with profound human situations, compelling us to see those situations in a new light.
But now, in the midst of an escalating conflict in the Middle East and with the ascendency in many parts of the world of autocratic-leaning governments, the art world is heading back to the white cube hibernaculum, the place it feels most secure. When at the end of last year the Lisson Gallery announced that it had postponed Weiwei’s show, which had been scheduled to open on November 15, because of a Tweet by the artist about the Israel-Hamas war, it felt like 2011 all over again—but this time without the glam badges. For anyone who’s lived in the double-speak world of dictatorship, the Gallery’s press announcement was chilling to read, blending PC with PR to sound a lot like the PRC.
“In my opinion,” Weiwei wrote in response to the Lisson’s decision, “all kinds of opinions can be expressed, even when they are not correct. Incorrect opinions should be especially encouraged. If free expression is limited to the same kind of opinions, it becomes an imprisonment of expression. Freedom of speech is about different voices, voices different from ours. Simply put, we have never lived in a society with freedom of expression but rather in a society where speech is not cherished; an individual’s speech is not deemed important or acceptable by controllers of speech.”
Although the Lisson has since announced a new date for the Weiwei show, in early 2025, it’s shocking that this still needs to be said, and a reminder that it will always need repeating: art can’t thrive in a world where a profit-from-fear consortium is in the business of silencing free expression under the guise of humanitarian diplomacy. “Why do the powerful fear poets?” Weiwei onced asked. Because they deal in questions, not answers; because they open doors, rather than close them.