HERE IS SOMETHING TO SEE: AN INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI by Zandie Brockett | 张桂才

HERE IS SOMETHING TO SEE: AN INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI

ZANDIE BROCKETT | 张桂才

In the Western world today, we are bombarded by harrowing images and stories of wars, poverty, climate change, natural disaster, food insecurity, financial meltdowns, and authoritarian governments — the kinds of crises that force tens of millions of people from their homes in search of sustenance, shelter, and security. These are gruesome and tragic events and yet, they remain neatly contained and removed from our daily lives in the developed world. It's a paradox that underscores the realities of Western life, particularly in the United States, where we often forget that all but one group of our forefathers sought refuge in this country for similar reasons. They sought respite and the freedom to control and express their own narratives, futures, and identities, all of which created an embodied knowledge of the tradition and ritual of immigration. Their memories of hardship, discovery and rebirth give depth and texture to our nation. While these crises have been steadily increasing in the post-Industrial era, they seem more extreme than ever in the globalized, post-internet world in which we now live.

Over the past 18 months, artist and Chinese political dissident, Ai Weiwei has traversed the globe — 23 countries to be precise — to give us an inside look at the many narratives of the global refugee crisis. Throughout Human Flow, his first Hollywood-produced feature film, Ai illuminates 60 untold stories of the 65 million families and lone travelers — children and elders alike — crisscrossing the Eurasian continent and the US-Mexico border wall. Humanizing the apparent pain and occasional hidden humor of refugee life, he turns a steadied lens on the determined minds of millions seeking a better future. In addition to exposing the urgency, fear, and occasional boredom of migratory life, he creates a critical record of the humanitarian crisis at hand. The film doesn’t just raise awareness, but inspires an emotional and intellectual call to action.

Human Flow is not a surprising work for Ai, who clearly identifies with the people depicted in his film. Ai himself has been on the move most of his life. Born in Beijing, Ai was the refugee child of an exiled literary father. He and his family were forced out of the city during the Cultural Revolution and into manual labor in China’s remote and harsh westerly province of Xinjiang. Ai eventually returned to the capital, where he enrolled in Beijing’s Film Academy, and established himself as the youngest member of the dissident Xing Xing (“Stars”) art group. The rise of “contemporary Chinese art” as a genre however, was slow, and it took nearly two decades before it registered any market demand or institutional support.

In 1983, Ai traveled to New York, where he lived as an expatriate, studying briefly at Berkeley, Penn, and Parsons, before dropping out. In her book, Notes on a Foreign Country, the journalist Suzy Hansen described living abroad in vivid terms: “My brain experienced the acquisition of such knowledge like a cavity filling: something drilled out, something shoved in, and afterward, a persistent, dull ache and a tooth that would never be the same.” It seems like Ai might have experienced something similar in leaving China. The Chinese narrative to which Ai Weiwei was born — a relatively new nation under the helm of the Chinese Communist Party and at odds with the civilization’s five millennia-old history — was suddenly ripped away. Indeed, it was in New York that he honed his photographic, installation, and quasi-performative practice, also documented through photos. The influence of his early migratory days and early photographic

work can still be seen today in his compulsive admiration of the digital photographic medium; Ai is an avid taker of selfies — this is obvious from his many social media platforms, which faithfully archive all of his documented moments.

In 2011, nearly 20 years after his ’93 return to China, Ai was famously detained by the Chinese government and spent a number of months in prison, under house arrest and without a passport. He now resides in Berlin, where he joined his family in 2015, after Chinese authorities finally released his passport. His scholarly promise earned him a fellowship studying abroad — a privilege not granted to many refugees or exiles — but the pain of unraveling a national identity from one's own doesn't discriminate according to privilege and opportunity. The process remains fraught with a profound sense of emotional, intellectual and social displacement.

As we see in this film, Ai is carefully attuned to this process as well as its flip side: the myth of nation-building and national identity. At one point in the movie, a Palestinian man acknowledges, “When you grow up not seeing, touching or knowing the other side, but rather only hear about them, you start to develop a stereotype.” Americans should know this well — these false constructs and labels are built out of fear and are often heavily defended, just like a nation’s “protective” walls. Ai Weiwei seems to be paying particular attention to the construction of these walls. His other recent project was a piece commissioned by the Public Art Fund. “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” a title borrowed from a colonial proverb and appropriated by Robert Frost, also opened this past October 2017. It is a series of fences installed throughout New York City, highlighting the preposterousness and conundrum of borders. As we build walls to demarcate our territories and “preserve” our liberties, we also enclose ourselves. The walled city becomes an echo chamber of paranoia and fear.

Life outside those walls is of course, much worse. The nationless bodies Ai follows are painfully vulnerable. These refugess are hungry; they are subject to the elements, battered by rain, cold, wind, sand. They rarely have walls or roofs to protect them. And while Ai is not as physically vulnerable as they are, they do however, have one thing in common: their identities are at the mercy of external institutional bodies. In both of their cases, the contentious question of national and personal identity not only depends on the governments these people abandoned and the larger systems that run this globe, but also Western news and social media. In Ai Weiwei’s case, his identity as an artist has largely been shaped by the West's need for a tidy narrative: he is a lone soldier fighting China’s injustices. And yet, if you think about it, why is Ai Weiwei still considered a “contemporary Chinese artist”? He has lived abroad for 10 years, and had his passport revoked by his own country; he and his family live in Germany, and he doesn’t currently make art about China. Certainly this isn’t because of his Chinese blood.

Ai seems to be actively responding to the narrative built around him. In an interview with the LA Review of Books Radio Hour, Ai said: “My existence really is a product of social media. I’ve been an artist for a quite a long time […] as well as an architect and curator, but none of these things could give me a platform to speak my opinion or to associate with the people whose voices I identified with.” Ai is also not above admitting how this battle has shaped him. In the same interview he said: “Right before the secret police gave me back my passport, they said, ‘Weiwei, we have one question. Someone said you’ve only become so well-known because of us.’ I replied, ‘It takes a powerful nation to make a great artist. Without my struggle [as a result] of you guys, I could never become the Ai Weiwei that you see today.’”

This should, in part, explain his fascination with the selfie and the distributive possibilities of social media. They both allow for a measure of narrative control, otherwise unavailable to Ai. He is taking the picture himself, framing himself in it. Likewise, social media allows him to convey an identity that might more accurately depict his own understanding of himself. In these realms, both visually and verbally, Ai is no longer the construct of someone else.

I spoke with Ai Weiwei in Los Angeles, shortly before the release of his film. At the end of our interview, he slumped over as the PR woman whirled her finger, indicating that we wrap it up before his next appointment. He seemed tired and ready to be done with his 10th interview of the day, somewhere halfway through the 165 that had been scheduled for his Toronto – Los Angeles – San Francisco – New York promotional tour.

Tis grueling schedule certainly could not be fun. Perhaps it is the privileged form of sufering that indicates his active attempt to do his part. It is with his voice that he brings awareness to the millions of lives that are left without one. perhaps this continuous movement is what he too, must do to survive.

ZANDIE BROCKETT: Can you share your motivations for making this film and the reasons why the refugee

crisis has been at the crux of your artwork since your immigration to Europe?

AI WEIWEI: Truthfully, in my recollection, I’ve never felt safe or like there was one place I could really call home. I was born to a father who was a serious enemy of the State, and who was exiled the year I was born. For over 10 years, he lived with this humiliation, discrimination, danger, and all kinds of inhumane treatment. I grew up in these conditions. Of course, when looking back, you realize how harsh and bad it was, but when you’re young, you don't know anything else. It's like standing in the rain and everything is wet. Te only diference is that when you look back, you realize that it has been raining constantly for 20 years.

I understand the people we documented, who have been pushed away from their homes, and for safety reasons have had to fnd other locations to shelter their children. It’s absolutely natural and it’s the reason why we named the flm Human Flow. Since the beginning of the civilization, this migratory movement has always been part of humanity. We’ve always been on the move to avoid danger and to adjust to a more suitable situation. It doesn’t matter for what reason or at what cost, it’s just human nature.

What was it like growing up in exile? Did exposure to your father’s poetry or ways of thinking prime you to express yourself artistically?

Looking back, the whole of society was in that same condition, so you can’t automatically conclude that. Very few people spoke out, you know.

While yes, I did sufer through it, [that experience] doesn’t automatically make me an artist. Yes, my father was an intellectual, but that also doesn’t automatically make me an activist. My father could not be an activist himself. He was silenced and before he died, he never had the opportunity to speak the truth, to speak what was in his mind or in his heart. It hurt me a lot because a father is one of the most intimate human beings in your life — you know, he’s a blood relative, but I didn’t even know him.

Yes, I’m an artist, and people have called me an activist. But if I had to guess what caused me to make my art, it’s really a combination of things: my childhood experience, growing up in these conditions and my family. And also the fact that I went to the United States for 10 years, which exposed me to a diferent value system — I now know capitalist and socialist societies, authoritarian and democratic states...but still, those things alone didn’t make me an activist because I simply didn’t have a channel in China or the United States to become an active voice. After leaving the US, I totally felt like I was a failure of all things challenging. I went back to China for over 10 years. From ’93 to 2004 or 2005, I had nothing to do there. Of course, I made underground books and opened the frst art space — China Art Archives & Warehouse — and promoted this kind of subculture but still, that didn’t make enough noise because the scale was very small.

What enabled the amplification of your voice?

Te internet suddenly gave me a tool or platform to make my arguments. It allowed me to give structure to my knowledge and experiences and express them and myself through a series of pictures. Ironically, a state-run internet company (民人博客 minren boke, “Sina Blog”) forced me to open my frst social media account. Before that I never touched a computer, I never even knew how to type. So the government said, “Don’t worry, we’ll help you.” I said, “Okay.”

I fell in love with it. Now, I spend all my time on the internet — 90 percent of my energy is focused online. I started by writing, on average, three articles a day. I wrote all kinds of political, cultural, and judicial posts. I started to investigate, to organize online activities, to do research, to fnd the death toll of the Sichuan earthquake. You know, sensitive matters. I did so much and worked in every direction — I put my flms, my interviews, all kind of research as well as lots of silly and funny happenings onto the internet. Everyday people expected this guy to do something, and I never failed them. I always surprised them. And then the time came when I didn’t even know how to handle the situation. It clearly was not political, but it was so subversive and I didn’t really know how to stop it.

What is your fascination with the selfie and how have you used social media to explore your persona as an artist and activist? How do you feel about the rise of the artist as celebrity?

When I started to use social media, I didn’t know where it would lead. I just followed my instincts, out of pleasure and curiosity. As an artist I’m always interested in how to set up these communication systems.

Artists have always been so fascinated with exploring themselves — Van Gogh and Rembrandt both made so many self-portraits. Why did they do that? Why do you refect yourself in a mirror in order to create an image that satisfes your own sense of self? Because it allows your inner world to be refected onto another surface, and it introduces you to a recognizable image, to which you say, “Okay, I’m satisfed with that image.” But you see, the struggle is endless. Today we’re in a very diferent society — information and the image is abusively faunted. Everybody posts images of their lunch, their jewelry, their friends and celebrative moment …

But for me, it’s more of a diary to record my activities and to observe my life with an indiferent eye. To be able to say, “Oh, this is your behavior.” It’s not a form of celebration, but more like a board for posting notes.

What is a handshake? What is a hug? What is a selfe? I think people maybe unconsciously want to say, “Okay, at this moment I was here with this guy. Tis is an image you can see, this is proof.” [Simultaneously Ai took a photo of me listening to his response; he posted it on Instagram almost immediately after our conversation.] Tat moment in his or her life has been somehow identifed with some value. Tis value could be associated with someone who is an artist or an activist or someone who is recognizable, like a celebrity. You think you’ll never really achieve that moment of success or meet that celebrity, but I think it’s all relative. Tey’re all interesting human value judgments, but they don’t really mean anything — after all, it’s just accumulation of images.

What are your thoughts on “Socially Engaged Art” (SEA), a genre that sits at the confluence of performance and theater, activism and education? Do you think SEA is a form of art that enables gradual social change through civic participation or awareness, or might it be a genre that disillusions us from the practicalities of social change as enacted by NGOs and policy?

I think artists make eforts in all directions to illustrate their own relationship with the world. Some artists are more conscious about political and social environments, but some refuse to be engaged, and their work can’t really ofer a language to deal with social struggles. But still, without announcing that work is intended to be politically or socially engaging, the act of making it remains a very political position. But, since art is for us to look at, it always has to ofer us some kind of aesthetic judgment. It’s like a mirror that refects something we would never see otherwise.

It’s very hard to evaluate what poetry or art can really do for so-called social change. We only know that it’s profound in dealing with human emotion and humans’ understanding of themselves. But it’s not going to make people politically engaged; it will only make the artist himself politically engaged.

Do you think art can shift collective behavior?

I don’t really know if art can shift that, you know? If you see a child being killed, or a woman being raped, or some houses being burned down … the whole city being burned down … I don’t think we can exaggerate the power of art.

DIRECTOR AI WEIWEI IN GREECE DURING THE FILMING OF HUMAN FLOW, COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS.

What kind of world do you think we would live in if global governance was dominated by women?

I don’t know … women can also lean quite far to the right. It’s very hard to say and too general to talk about, but certainly more women in [office to] defend their own rights would make society a better place.

Poetically speaking, we all come from women and from their “motherly spirit” that holds so much love and admiration. For men, women are so mysterious and hard to describe, but women bear, teach, and influence children, so they definitely have an effect on our future. The liberation and education of women would absolutely make our world a safer and more reliable place.

How do you maintain hope and positivity to persevere with your work after seeing so much violence, hatred, and injustice?

If I accept what I’ve seen, I would be totally disappointed when looking at humanity. Without knowing that I might have a special purpose, my emotions and feelings remain attached to a very essential struggle — one that is connected to freedom of speech, basic human rights, and the recognition of human dignities. I simply see hope because I’m also just one of them. That feeling of trying to be nice toward life can be extended to being nice toward our neighbors and our environment. It’s a very general condition, I think.

After watching Human Flow, I was filled with an unbelievable sense of loss but also unease as to how I could actually help. How do you hope your film will motivate the average person?

I did my duty to present what I’ve seen, to show some kind of truth about the crisis from both an artistic and journalistic perspective.

But what will it achieve? I don’t really know. I try to convince people to watch this film, because film, as a medium, still matters — it’s impactful because you have to spend two hours to sit and watch it. How do you convince people to watch it? I don’t know. I have to do all these interviews, make appearances, and say, “Hey, this is an artist begging you guys to see this film.” At some point, people make a judgment — some will think I’m a failure, but some will think I made something that touches them. Something that’s worthwhile to watch.