Ai is part of a fresh wave of artists and journalists targeted by a regime deigning to quell dissent by silencing those who would hold a mirror up to reality. While other Chinese artists have protected their status in society by shying away from political themes, Ai has made an industry out of observing his observers.
One of his exhibitions included replicas of the surveillance cameras that have recently been installed outside his Shanghai studio, and until recently he made sport of documenting the comings and goings of an unmarked police van using a digital camera and his Twitter feed.
He drew the ire of Chinese authorities with his response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake which killed at least 68,000 people (at least, again, in the sense that the real figure has been hidden from us by the authorities). Ai conducted an independent investigation of the disaster, compiling a list of students killed as a result of poor construction of schoolhouses. By the end of the project, he had collected the names of 5,385 children.
Infusing his art with a mix of curiosity and rebelliousness, Ai knows perfectly that the more outspoken his protest, the harder it is for authorities to dispose of him––something he learned from his father, the poet Ai Qing, who was suspected of "rightism" during the Cultural Revolution and exiled to Xinjiang, but not killed.
Somewhere along the line, Ai fils learned that consciousness and observation of one's surroundings can be the most potent transgression against an authority that thrives on its own invisibility. His lesson bears the hallmark of his Russian forebear, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who bemoaned his countrymen's apathy in the face of tyranny.
Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is an epic-length analysis of how secret police organizations like the Cheka and KGB exploited a silent, cowering populace. By isolating one citizen from another, these organizations dragged hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Soviet citizens to prisons and forced labor camps.
He argued there that if even one citizen had protested while being taken away, the secret police would never have dared to proceed as brazenly as they had, and the crimes against the Russian people would have been greatly mitigated.
Instead, the people of the Soviet Union quietly cooperated with their oppressors. The rest is history.
Ai, whose art boldly investigates Ai's investigators, has refused to pretend that everything is copasetic in the PRC. His metacognition of the police as a subject prioritizes his own consciousness over blind obedience to the unspoken rules of living in an unfree society.
Alex Pasternak, one of Ai's associates writing for Slate, tells us that,
"The combination of breakneck development, deeply rooted cultural ties and the giant panopticon of an unpredictable authoritarian state can make you feel like you're living in an unending magical realist saga, the kind that yields the sort of spectacles that in quick retrospect make as much sense as anything else."
Ai's rebellion––and, ultimately, his genius––is that he never succumbed to the temptation to normalize the abuses that took place all around him. For him, the everyday violence in "the giant panopticon" would always be weird, intrusive, and impossible to ignore. Documenting those abuses and publicizing them draws attention to all the ways the system coerces the people it's ostensibly designed to protect.
It's also Ai's way of telling the authorities that he refuses to play the game by their rules.
Until two days ago, this strategy had worked for Ai. Yes, he'd been beaten nearly to death by police thugs. He'd been threatened. Shanghai municipal authorities even razed his newly-built studio, which he later claimed was his most brilliant artistic endeavor––playing the people who tried to silence him for fools. But now he's in jail. Like Solzhenitsyn before him, he's somewhat protected by his notoriety, and may only face deportation.
We hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment