Ai Weiwei and the Art of Ideas
How to Stand Up
Last month, I visited the Seattle Art Museum to see an exhibit of the Chinese conceptual artist, Ai Weiwei’s work. I’ll admit that conceptual art isn’t always my cup of tea. I like the idea of ideas, but for me, much of a concept gets lost in the execution or the execution just feels too forced. I think after seeing this exhibit, I have a new appreciation for conceptual art and art outside the bounds of gallery walls, held aloft and untouchable. What Ai Weiwei offers is the potential for art to say something powerful, for the viewer to pause and take the time to understand what is in front of them. This isn’t the kind of art to blow through, take some quick photos of to share on social media, to say you’ve seen that, and move on.
Why is there a snake form of children’s backpacks? It’s to remind people of the thousands of schoolchildren who died when the 2008 earthquake in China caused state-built schools to collapse. When the government was asked for the names of the victims and questioned as to why the schools were so poorly built, they tried to suppress the issue.
As Ai Weiwei and others pushed to get answers, they were surveilled and harassed. Police detained him after he and six others tried to attend the trial of an activist accused of subversion for his inquiry into the number of schoolchildren deaths. Later, under Ai Weiwei’s direction, a large LEGO “painting” reproduced the selfie he took when police escorted him into a hotel elevator along with his friend, Zuoxiao Zuzhou. It’s a document of a moment of injustice and standing up to it.
For another piece, Ai Weiwei painted a Coca-Cola logo on an over 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty vase, either defacing something sacred, rendering history unprecious, and/or showing the pervasiveness of a consumer society, even in a tightly controlled country like China.
Ai Weiwei’s activism reminds me of the work of Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist with the online news site, Rappler. Her reporting has been critical of the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte and his policies, which led to her arrest in 2019 on made up charges. Yet, “Silence is complicity,” she writes. Ai Weiwei and Maria Ressa don’t provoke, but ask questions that others don’t want answered. It takes bravery to confront those with the power to lie at will and to make arrests with no due process.
The historian Timothy Snyder writes, “It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.”
What hits me hardest is not that tyrants exist but that tyrants can only wield power and strength with the help of others. It takes a village to build something better and it takes a village to destroy it all. No person can do it alone. Maria Ressa stated it best when she said, “…authority can give us the freedom to be our worst selves.”
So to investigate is to build. To relinquish to authority is to shut down that part of you that questions, that investigates.
As Ai Weiwei says, “Creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put…creativity is the power to act.”