Conversations, by Ai Weiwei (chapter 1)

1 Conversation with Andrew Solomon

Alexandra Munroe Our speakers tonight hardly need an introduction. We know Weiwei as the world’s most famous artist and activist.

He is also a curator of some of the most influential shows in the history of Chinese art; an architect of an entire art neighborhood in eastern Beijing; the first artist possibly anywhere in the world to see the internet as a space of free mobilization, as a forum for free expression—especially in China, where such mobilization and constellation convening of a forum were unprecedented in modern Chinese history. When Evan Osnos asked him why he spent eight hours a day blogging and on Twitter, before the Chinese government shut down his blog in 2009, Weiwei responded, “It’s no different than making art. My stance in life is my art.” Robert Bergold some years later asked him what advice he had for young artists; Weiwei responded, “Forget about art. Fight for freedom.”

Andrew Solomon is also someone who needs absolutely no introduction. His honors go on and on, but what they really recognize is Andrew’s influence and power as today’s most transformational public intellectual. He is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture, and psychology as a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and as the president of the beloved PEN America. Most important for us tonight, he is an activist on LGBT rights, mental health, and the arts. Andrew’s books, his essays, his TED talks, and his upcoming film Far from the Tree are connected by a deep humanity, a compassion so deep and so true that it can save—and actually has saved—hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

What Weiwei and Andrew share is a passionate belief in the rights and the dignity of each individual life. Whether you are a poet in jail somewhere in Xinjiang province or a manic-depressive in a psychiatric ward in Akron, Ohio, it is this alliance of mind and mission that brings the two together for this special PEN America evening. May I introduce Andrew Solomon and Ai Weiwei.

Andrew Solomon Well, the thing about being introduced by Alexandra Munroe is that one hardly need say anything further. It’s a privilege and an honor for me to sit here with Ai Weiwei. As Alexandra mentioned, I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine. I went to China in 1992, persuaded that there must be interesting art happening there, but with no real access to what it was until I arrived.

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It’s hard now, in this age of internationalism, to remember a time when people here insisted that if what was being made outside of the so-called Western developed world looked like what was being made here, then it was derivative. If it looked different, then it was provincial.

It took a great shift in consciousness for us to arrive at the international art world that seems so obvious to us today. When I was doing my research in China, Ai Weiwei was in New York, but everyone in China talked about him. I came home with his number, but I was too overwhelmed and didn’t dial it. It’s a real privilege, finally, to be sitting here with you. Thank you so much for doing this.

I think I’ll begin by asking you to comment on the word dissident.

I find, in having written a lot about art that falls outside of the so-called Western mainstream, that many artists resist the title of dissident. They say that it somehow trivializes the purity of their artistic expression.

Others claim it as a banner. You have done more to work through what it means to be both a dissident and an artist, and indeed a dissident artist, than almost anyone else. Tell me how you feel about that word.

Ai Weiwei Dissident means very different things in different societies.

I only can speak about what a dissident is in China, which is just having different opinions and different expressions. Expression can easily become very different if you don’t self-censor, you don’t recognize the totalitarian’s power, and you don’t see that power having any legitimacy. If you think you have the right to vote or the right to write down your ideas or to put them on the internet, you become a dissident. It doesn’t take too much effort.

It’s very hard to imagine that, among 1.4 billion people, there are very few people who can be called dissidents. It’s not that they are not smart or that they don’t have different opinions, but there’s no way to carry out an idea, to write down a clear sentence, to state your mind, or to talk to the public. In most times, this is not possible. Today, it’s even harder in China. The internet is a regional internet there, and still it’s dangerous to have any original thinking about social or political topics.

Andrew Solomon Do you think there is a conflict, as some artists maintain there is, between adhering to the nuance integral to a work of art and adhering to the kind of broad strokes that are often required

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to support a revolution? How do you manage to combine in your own work that feeling of nuance and the energy and the emphasis on freedom that suffuses everything you do?

Ai Weiwei I think you need character. That means you need to be a bit stubborn, and you have to believe what you do is right or what you believe is right. It is quite simple because I’ve never been very well educated. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and my father was a writer. He spent time in the 1930s in Paris learning art and then, right after he came back to China, he was put in jail by the nationalists. Later he became a refugee and part of the revolution. He established the new nation with that first generation of revolutionary leaders.

Also, he was quite recognized, the best-known poet in China, but after eight years, China changed. He became one among 350,000– 500,000 Chinese intellectuals who were punished as rightists. I grew up in that kind of family, which was called antirevolutionary or anti–the people. They always told me that I’m the kind of person who can be educated. That means you come from bad blood, but you can be reeducated, which is true. Since then, I have hated any kind of education. I never finished my university degree, even though I got into several universities. I was quite capable of studying, but I just hated school.

Andrew Solomon Talk a little bit about the role that your father and your father’s reeducation played in your emerging sense of self. He was put through really quite serious privations, and you were witness to some of those privations. Did that set you in your determination as an artist?

Ai Weiwei I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and everybody was in bad shape except Chairman Mao. Everybody had been put in jail, even his colleagues and his comrades. Many of them committed suicide or were killed. You can’t even find their tombs with their real names. People just disappeared. My family had a tough situation. As a child, I often thought it’s like you’re standing in the rain. You accept the situation. You know you’re going to get wet because everybody’s getting wet. No single person can be exempt from these kinds of conditions.

So, I was taken away by the secret police in a kidnapping-type fashion

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and had a black hood put on my head and was brought from the airport to an unknown secret location. During those days, I basically had nothing to do—only to sit there. Two soldiers were sitting in front of me, and they would stare at me but would not blink. They would just stare at me. I also tried just to look at them without blinking for quite a long time. When they felt you could really win this staring game, they’d start to become a little bit more relaxed because these soldiers were only nineteen years old. Coming from the poorest locations in China, they were happy to be soldiers only because they were served three meals a day. These soldiers didn’t know who I was. They couldn’t talk to me.

I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t make a move. I couldn’t put my foot like this, but I had to do this. My hand had to be placed here. I would ask permission to scratch my head. I would say, “Can I scratch my head?”

They would say, “Yes.” They didn’t know how to say no or yes, except yes is the only answer they gave, so I had to do it. I said, “Can I go to the toilet?” They would say yes. They would accompany me to the toilet, and I would do whatever I wanted to do in the bathroom. Then I would ask if I could go back.

It’s a kind of training. I think it’s a strong psychological training about human behavior. Since I’m an artist, I can easily get used to counting all the tiles on the ground or looking at all the details in the room even though there are not many details. Everything’s covered by this kind of soft cushion. I imagine they were afraid that I would commit suicide. I’m not going to commit suicide. I think they should commit suicide.

You cannot let your brain just be empty, so I started to memorize all the details in my life—all the details since I was born and for as long as I could remember. I only really remember from about ten years old.

I don’t have much to remember. In about one week, I memorized everything that happened to me, every event I could remember, every person, every location, and every incident.

Then I felt I had nothing to be or to remember anymore—completely empty.

The only thing that came to me was that I felt sorry I’d never asked my father about his feelings in life. How did he think about his revolutionary life? Or why did he stop writing poetry for twenty years? What did he think of Mao Zedong and all those leaders?

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The Communist Party? I never asked anything. This is probably the biggest regret I have.

Then I realized this person really influenced me so much.

I thought about the hard labor he was doing. He was forced to clean the public toilet in this very primitive village. It was dug into the ground, and there were thirteen of them. There were about two hundred people in the village. Every day he had to go to do this job. He never stopped for one day. If he stopped for one day, the next day was unbearable. It doubled the whole work. He said, “I cannot rest for five years.” Sometimes I would go with him when he cleaned those toilets. I was ten years old.

He was fifty-eight. We were quite apart in age, but I watched how he would do it because those areas you cannot even step in. It was dirty with all these flies. It was not a covered toilet. There was no roof there.

He had to first ask if anybody was there because he had to clean the women’s toilet also. There’s a lot of liquid in the women’s toilet. There was much more liquid, and it was more colorful too.

He was so patient. I look at this man with the utmost respect. You know he was a poet. He wrote beautiful poems and never did physical work. When he worked, people looked and laughed because you could totally tell an intellectual couldn’t handle this kind of work. After one or two hours, if you walked into the room, you would be shocked. You would say, “This is not possible. This is not the same room. It’s not.”

Everything was so clean. All the corners were cut very sharp and all the dry sand had been put on. It was amazing. I always remember every toilet after he passed through it. It became so clean. It was better than Donald Judd’s artwork. It’s true. There’s no comparison.

Andrew Solomon I’m sure that if Donald Judd could only hear that comparison, he’d be deeply moved by it. Tell me, though, about the ability you have that I think your father didn’t have, except in your recounting of him, to take the circumstances of being so oppressed and make them an occasion of having an ever larger and more audible voice.

Your father was sent off, and he wrote poems, and they were read only by people who thought, “He doesn’t know how to live in this village.”

But you took the fact of being imprisoned, and instead of it silencing you as it was intended to do, it amplified your voice. How do you work with oppression to make it so compelling?

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Ai Weiwei I think the only differences between my father and me are maybe these two characteristics: First, in my father’s time, being repressed or being in harsh conditions, he would have this understanding and tolerance of it all. I still don’t know why the whole generation behaved like that. My difference is I remember it, and I would think of revenge. Revenge not necessarily to hurt somebody, but to tell the story clearly and to make sure the people who did it can also read it clearly.

That’s my revenge, to show this to the people who did it.

The second difference is the internet. That’s more important than the first one. If I didn’t have the internet, it would not be possible for me to become Ai Weiwei today. I don’t know if it’s for good or for bad, but it challenges me and puts me in extremely difficult conditions only because I openly discuss any matter and answer any question on the internet. With my personal judgment, I bear the responsibility and consequences, so I think all those things make my actions meaningful because I believe I have to set an example of how to deal with this kind of tyranny. I don’t want to become like my father. I made all the efforts to clearly show everyone my mind.

Andrew Solomon Talk a little bit about medium. Your father was a poet. You also have a remarkable literary output, not only of a certain kind of poetry but of all of your now widely collected and circulated tweets on social media. In 1992 when I first became aware of your work, it was very much as an artist and not as a writer. Of course, the relationship between the individual arts and language historically has been different in a character-based system than it is in a system that uses the Latin alphabet. Still, you seemed to have made that switch back and forth between visual art and text. Even Donald Judd would be quite jealous of the skill with which you’ve been able to do that. Now you’ve made a film, Human Flow, which I should say is a remarkable film. Talk about media.

Ai Weiwei I think the real job of an artist is the struggle between media and language. For me, that is the true journey of how to use our knowledge and to dig out the different potential kinds of language.

Of course, language matters the most in writing, and maybe that is from my father’s influence. At an early age, I saw on his bookshelves all

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those poetry books. Even before I could really understand them, I liked their design and the smell of the paper. I liked to see all those drawings in the books. Often a poetry book is very thin and small. It doesn’t have much of a hardcover. But it’s so beautiful. It somehow becomes part of your body, and so those were the books I liked the most. He had a lot of Impressionist and Renaissance painting and beautiful hardcover books as well. One day I helped him to burn the books because all those books were the source of his getting into trouble.

I remember my father tearing down those books page by page because those beautiful hardcover books with paintings were very hard to burn. You had to really separate the pages so they could start to burn.

Red Guards came to my home, kicked down the door, and checked on those books, page by page. If they saw any nudity or religious books, they would question my father for hours. You know, it’s not his work, but they would think, why would he have those kinds of antirevolutionary images? Why am I talking about this?

Andrew Solomon (Laughs) I was asking you about media. I was asking you about the words and film and art.

Ai Weiwei Well, I started realizing why these powerful people hate expression. It’s just a poetry book if you don’t open it, you don’t even see what is inside. Once they read it, most people wouldn’t even understand what the book is about. I would read Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Éluard, and Lorca—all of them powerful poets. I think those poets have beautiful writing, simple and easy to understand. Of course, I’m not good at writing because I never really went through this kind of practice. I don’t think writing is difficult. It just takes some practice.

So I became an artist, making drawings and some paintings, at an early age. I wasn’t satisfied because these drawings and paintings were so far away from reality. I kind of gave up and started to learn from Marcel Duchamp. You don’t have to do anything. You just take it as readymade, which really liberated me so much. He has had a big influence on me. If you go to Washington Square now, you see under this arch, I made this silver metal cage. But there’s a door. The shape of the door comes from one of Marcel Duchamp’s early drawings. It’s two people holding each other. It’s just like a paper cut, and I made

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that door shiny. I took Marcel Duchamp as readymade, and I think I made a step forward.

In 1988, in this square, we had a big demonstration. I realized I had photos of that time. We were demonstrating about a curfew in those parks, Tompkins Square Park and Washington Square Park.

I really enjoyed those moments because I took a lot of photographs.

I would run to the nearest phone booth to call the New York Times to say, “Hey, I have this photo.” They said, “Just come over. We will pay for your taxi.” I said, “Okay.” I would take a taxi and go to their editorial department. They would print out my negative and say, “Okay, this one we can use. We can pay you …” I think it was thirty bucks or something.

I felt so happy.

The next morning, I would go to the newsstand, which was at St. Marks on Eighth Street and Second Avenue. Very often, I would see Woody Allen also standing there, waiting for the New York Times to be delivered. About three o’clock or four o’clock in the morning, the New York Times would come to the stand. I would open the newspaper and I would say, “Wow, Ai Weiwei, New York Times.” My photo’s there! Again, I was so happy. People told me if you had three photos published, you could get a press pass. That was my dream. Also, I had many images published in the New York Daily News and the New York Post. I don’t think I even got a press pass because it was just as easy to do without it.

Andrew Solomon Two things that I want to ask you about, in either order. One of them is your statement that because China is a country without a soul, it is not, in fact, going to dominate the world as we are regularly told it is in our local media. The other is your assertion that the removal of animal works from the exhibit of contemporary Chinese art 1989 to 2008 [Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World] is a violation not only of animal rights but also of human rights.

Let’s start with China not being about to take over the world.

Ai Weiwei Oh, yeah.

Andrew Solomon That would be reassuring.

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Ai Weiwei is one of the world’s most acclaimed artists and dissidents.

This book presents him in conversation with theorists, critics, journalists, and curators about key moments in his life and career.

These wide-ranging conversations flow between topics such as his relationship with China, the meaning of citizenship, moving his studio to Lesbos to be on the front lines of the migrant crisis, how to make art, and technology as a tool for freedom or oppression. Ai opens up about his relationship to his father as a poet and as a dissident forced into hard labor in a small village after the Cultural Revolution.

He shares his thoughts on formal education and the importance of finding your own way as an artist.

New York—both the city and its people—was formative for Ai Weiwei, and he speaks eloquently about how his experiences there continue to influence him. Ai conjures up scenes from his long relationship with New York: dropping out of Parsons because he couldn’t afford tuition, making portraits in Washington Square Park as an undocumented immigrant in the 1980s, taking photos for the New York Times at demonstrations in Tompkins Square Park, and returning to set up the Good Fences Make Good Neighbors project across the city.

These candid, spontaneous conversations reveal why Ai Weiwei has become such a major force in contemporary art and political life.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist.

Cover design: Santiago da Silva

ISBN: 978-0-231-19738-0

Columbia University Press / New York cup.columbia.edu

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.