Age of Ambition (29 page)

The family was ordered out to a remote western stretch 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. The family was assigned to live in an underground cavern that had been used as a birthing place for farm animals. They were there for five years. Of his father, Ai told me, “That period in his life was the absolute bottom, the most painful. He attempted suicide several times.”

As a child, Ai Weiwei distracted himself by working with his hands, making ice skates and gunpowder. Ai's parents could not shield their sons from what Ai Dan called “the pressure and humiliation and hopelessness.” Speaking of his brother, Ai Dan said, “He was a sensitive, fragile child, so he saw and heard more than other people.” In his teens, Ai Weiwei wrote a letter to his brother that recalled their childhood: “The sound of smashing furniture and people begging for mercy; the cat being hanged until it was dead … the bullying and cursing in front of people. We were so young but we had to bear all the crimes.” He resolved never to be a prisoner of the fate his nation might ordain. “I want a better life for myself to control my own destiny.”

Ai graduated from high school the year the family was allowed to return 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.”) He gravitated to the group of avant-garde artists known as the Stars, but their activism was circumscribed. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping put an end to an incipient political movement called Democracy Wall; its central figure, Wei Jingsheng, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, on charges of leaking state secrets. After that, Ai Weiwei recalled, “I felt I can no longer live in this country.” His girlfriend at the time was moving to the United States to go to school, and in February 1981 he joined her.

*   *   *

In New York, Ai studied English and found a cheap basement apartment near East Seventh Street and Second Avenue. He spent his weekends haunting the galleries, roaming the city, as his brother put it, like “a mud-fish burrowing wherever there is muck.” He was intoxicated by the raw energy of the East Village, which to him felt “like a volcano with smoke always billowing out of the top.” Joan Lebold Cohen, a historian of Chinese art who got to know 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.”

He did odd jobs—housekeeper, gardener, babysitter, construction worker—but mostly he played blackjack in Atlantic City. (He was such a frequent visitor that, years later, the gaming press reported that gamblers who knew him were stunned to discover that he was also into art.) He earned some money as a sidewalk portrait painter, avoiding customers who were immigrants, like him, because they tried to bargain down the price. Soon, Ai 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.)

Ai was accumulating influences. At a poetry reading at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, he met Allen Ginsberg, and they struck up an unlikely friendship. But nobody affected him as deeply as Duchamp, whose subversion of orthodoxy was thrilling to Chinese artists raised on academic realism. Ai took to photography 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 a Chinese interviewer. “When those in power are infatuated with you, you feel valued.”

The market for Chinese contemporary art, however, was dismal. 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.” When, in April of 1993, Ai got word that his father was ill, he returned to Beijing. Upon arrival, he discovered that, in the years after Tiananmen, many young Chinese intellectuals had disengaged from public life. A popular T-shirt had a picture of three monkeys covering their ears, eyes, and mouths, and the phrase “Keeping Out of Harm's Way.”

In 1999, Ai Weiwei leased some vegetable fields in the village of Caochangdi, on the fringe of Beijing, and sketched out a studio complex in an afternoon. He had no training as an architect, but the design was distinctive, and it attracted a flurry of commissions for buildings and public art installations. Before long, he had one of China's most influential architecture practices, which he named FAKE Design—a nod to his accidental success and his fascination with questions of authenticity. (“I know nothing about architecture,” he liked to say.)

As years went by, Ai Weiwei spent more and more of his time on the intersection of politics, free expression, and technology. The Chinese website Sina invited him to host a blog, and at first he used it in an odd way—putting his own life under surveillance by posting dozens, sometimes hundreds, of snapshots each day, depicting his visitors, his cats, his wanderings. The blog gave him a far wider audience than he had ever encountered. He took to commenting on subjects ranging far beyond art. He wrote of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky and witless gluttons” who “spend two hundred billion yuan on drinking and dining and an equal amount on the military budget every year.” Unlike journalists who had to heed the directives from the Department, Ai Weiwei was something new; he had no job from which to be fired for speaking out.

He became engrossed in one sensitive issue after another. “He'd be reading the news and he'd say, ‘How can this be?'” Zhao Zhao, a younger artist who was working as one of Ai's assistants, told me. “And then the next day, and the day after that, he'd still be saying the same thing.” By May 2009 he was one of China's most outspoken voices, and police officers visited Ai and his mother to ask him about his activities. He responded with an open letter, posted online: “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.

*   *   *

The intersection of wealth and authoritarianism posed a predicament for members of China's new creative class. They were not the first artists forced to reckon with a society that supported the arts but suppressed free expression. Mies van der Rohe worked with the Nazis and was criticized for it. In China during the Cultural Revolution, artists were barred from playing Bach, Beethoven, and other composers, and had to perform only the permissible “revolutionary operas.” The current pressures were more subtle: there had never been more money available for the arts in China, but receiving those spoils required tolerating the limits on expression. Writers, painters, and filmmakers had to decide how much of their work was activism and how much of it was to produce a commodity. They had to balance the pressures from an overheated commercial market, foreign expectations of artists toiling in the People's Republic, and of course the Party.

To understand how that felt, 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 “genius grant” and commanding high prices for his art. Then, in 2008, he 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 met up with Xu Bing at a Beijing museum, where he was installing a set of giant steel phoenixes that dangled from construction cranes. We got a drink and I asked him why he had returned to China in the way he had. “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.” He laughed, and continued, “But then 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.”

Ai Weiwei occupied an especially awkward niche in the world of Chinese contemporary art: overseas, his reputation (and prices) was growing—he received a coveted commission to fill the cathedral-like Turbine Hall, at Britain's Tate Modern—but, in China, he was never invited to hold a major exhibition, and his relations with fellow artists were tepid. Zhao Zhao told me, “Galleries and magazines send him things, and he doesn't even open them.”

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

Many Chinese artists, like other elites, have explored Western liberalism or lived abroad, but as with Tang Jie or the Stanford engineer I met in Palo Alto, the exposure heightened their patriotism and made them suspicious of Western critiques of China. To his detractors, Ai Weiwei was too quick to satisfy Western expectations of “the dissident,” too willing to reduce the complexity of today's China into black-and-white absolutes that appealed to foreign sympathies. They accused him of hypocrisy—for criticizing others' passivity in the face of injustice, though his own famous family name and his profile in the West seemed to afford him a level of protection that others did not enjoy. The fact that Ai exhibited mostly abroad fueled criticism that he was 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.)

At one point, Ai Weiwei was close friends with Xu Bing, the MacArthur fellow who had joined the Central Academy. But they had grown apart, and 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 was when he came back to China.” 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.”

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.”

*   *   *

A couple of months after his blog was shut down, Ai Weiwei went to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, to attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, an earthquake activist who had been accused of inciting subversion of the state. At 3:00 a.m. on August 12, 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. 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 force 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, the doctor's statements, and photographs of himself in the hospital with a drain protruding from his scalp. 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.”