Conversations 9780231552141

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Conversations

Conversations Ai Weiwei

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Ai Weiwei Chapter 1 copyright © 2021 Andrew Solomon All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ai, Weiwei, author. Title: Conversations / Ai Weiwei. Other titles: Interviews. Selections. English Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] ,GHQWLÀHUV/&&1SULQW _/&&1HERRN _,6%1 FORWK _,6%1SDSHUEDFN _,6%1 HERRN  6XEMHFWV/&6+$L:HLZHL³,QWHUYLHZV_'LVVHQWHUV Artistic—China—Interviews. &ODVVLÀFDWLRQ/&&1$$SULQW _/&&1$HERRN _ DDC 700.92—dc23 /&UHFRUGDYDLODEOHDWKWWSVOFFQORFJRY /&HERRNUHFRUGDYDLODEOHDWKWWSVOFFQORFJRY ’ Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Graphic design by Santiago da Silva Typesetting assistance by Veerle Vervliet 3KRWRFUHGLWVÀJXUHVDQG-DVRQ:\FKH

Contents

Preface

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1 2 3 4 5 6

1 19 47 67 91 111

Conversation with Andrew Solomon Conversation with Evan Osnos Conversation with Tim Marlow Conversation with Amale Andraos and Carol Becker Conversation with Vivian Yee Conversation with Nicholas Baume

Contributor Biographies

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Preface

In 2017, I presented Good Fences Make Good Neighbors with the Public Art Fund in New York City. This multisite exhibition included more than three hundred works distributed throughout the city’s five boroughs. The works focused on the global refugee crisis, the greatest displacement of people since World War II. Filming my documentary, Human Flow, brought me face to face with the people and places impacted by this tragedy and directly inspired the exhibition. Good Fences was also a homecoming of sorts. I was an art student during the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s. The political and social atmosphere became increasingly suffocating, and I decided to leave for the extreme opposite—New York City, the capital of individualism and capitalism. I lived in the city for a decade in the 1980s as an undocumented immigrant, college dropout, and artist. Back then, the opportunity to show my work to the public was unimaginable. Conversations consists of six public discussions held in New York City during Good Fences. Such conversations involving academic, cultural, and journalistic institutions provided a platform to discuss the most crucial issues of our time: freedom of expression, human rights, and the idea that humanity is one. These conversations are necessary to continue the fight to maintain our shared values and freedoms. Three years on, I am under self-quarantine due to the newest global phenomenon: an indiscriminate pandemic that knows no borders. At this time, it is more important than ever to be thoughtful and hopeful about our humanity—home or no home, crisis or no crisis—because this is worth striving for.

Ai Weiwei

Conversations

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 I think many people are trying to imagine China growing so fast, with its potential and power, and taking over the world. Very often, people ask this question. I think there’s no such question because China is never going to take over the world. If you talk about a world power, it’s not just numbers, but rather humanity. Chinese society has 1.3 billion people, and those people have to be rightly informed. They cannot be censored. They have to have a personality, individuality, and some creativity. They have to have imagination and passion. If all those things don’t exist, if the people, after sixty-some years or more, still don’t have the right to vote or have an independent judicial system or media, how can this kind of power make any meaningful contribution to our civilization? It’s not possible. They are not willing to make any kind of change. They’re not willing to have a discussion or try a little bit. No. It’s absolutely clear. This China doesn’t allow talk about so-called basic values. As one party controls the economy, all the power belongs to the party. It’s very easy for them to make a move and to make a deal with other powerful nations, like the United States, England, Germany, or )LJ%OHHGLQJSURWHVWRU7RPSNLQV6TXDUH3DUNULRW )LJ3ROLFHDW7RPSNLQV6TXDUH3DUN

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France. Those nations never met another dealmaker that can make deals so fast and so big. That’s why everybody loves China and hates China. I think really they love China because it provides the possibility for globalization and to exploit cheap labor slavery. No human rights. No freedom of speech. But at the same time, there’s a market there, which was built after decades without any materialism. With 1.3 billion people, that’s the kind of market companies in the United States can only dream of. That’s why you see all those big companies today having unspeakable deals with China. We all tolerate it because we think it will benefit us. It makes China a monster, and it’s quite arrogant. You can never really discuss anything related to human rights, and Western politicians are trained to say, “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t discuss it. When China becomes rich, they will change.” Forget about it. The United States became very rich. You have President Trump. Are you changing? No. You’re not changing, and you’re only changing in a bad way. Human rights require each individual to defend them, and you must do so in every generation, you have to defend them. Freedom is not given as a gift. There’s no way we can just give up our responsibility. That’s about China. So, second question. Andrew Solomon This question of human rights and openness and all you’ve just described as being the reason China can’t be a world power seems to have been fully on display here in our own jolly United States. Ai Weiwei If I’m here, China cannot be a world power. I will be the judge, like Trump says: You’re fired! Okay. The second question is about works being taken down from the Guggenheim Museum. How should I put it? There are always cases in art history of works being depicted as dangerous and not suitable to be shown. Those are from the times of dangerous tyrants, authoritarian societies that only want pureness of art. We want to have one idea dominate another. We don’t give enough space for freedom of speech, and we should remember those times. Those times happened in China, in North Korea, under the Nazis, in Soviet Russia, and it was harsh. My father attempted suicide three

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times, and it caused a lot of people to be silent because they could not simply trust their inner voice. They couldn’t reflect the reality, because some other voice could denounce them. That is why we have to leave some space for the artist to have some freedom. That freedom would make all of society much healthier. If we don’t have that freedom, society would become an unthinkable situation. Andrew Solomon I now have questions from the audience. I’ll read you the first of them, which does, in fact, continue on from that. It says, “What methods of resistance do you suggest ordinary American citizens use to fight today’s censorship and threats to free expression?” Ai Weiwei What method? I think the real method is, do you feel uncomfortable or comfortable when censorship happens? If you don’t feel comfortable about it, then you have to seek revenge. But revenge is not so easy. I see so many human rights organizations or animal rights organizations or whatever rights organizations. They’re very passionate, but very few of them, I find, have good language. Very often, they don’t have an interesting performance. Very often, they don’t even have humor. They can’t find the right language even to fight back. Those things are not so easy. Not everybody can cook a good dish. You have to eat enough to know the difference between different cultures or different possibilities, and then, maybe, you can cook. Yeah, I’ll let you talk. Andrew Solomon (Laughs) My talking is all done. I’m only now reading the words from our audience. Ron wants to know if you had one goal, with all of your current efforts, what is it? And what would success look like? Ai Weiwei My success maybe can be measured by my voice, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Everybody has their own forms of voice; they don’t have to listen to this Chinese guy talk. If you can make me disappear, you succeed, and I would also feel successful. Andrew Solomon What part of your art or activism keeps you from feeling overwhelmed and discouraged? I know so many activists who

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go to protests or run petition campaigns and go home and spend time depressed. What is the key to endurance and focus for your art and activism? Your focus and your ability to sustain this voice are quite astonishing, even to those of us who work in the field. Ai Weiwei I often surprise myself. I work with a lot of people, maybe sometimes forty, sometimes a thousand people. I think it’s very normal to work with them, but very often, I look at them, I see they’re terribly tired. I don’t take drugs. I’m a normal person, and so this is something I cannot explain. You need a passion, and you need a little bit of imagination. Also, you need good health. Andrew Solomon Well, good health leads to my favorite of this selection of questions. Here we go. What is your favorite food? Ai Weiwei It’s all about how hungry I am. Very often, I run to McDonald’s to have a milkshake or a hamburger. I know burgers are horrible, but I like the French fries. They have delicious French fries. It’s true. It’s not a joke. I feel ashamed. Andrew Solomon (Laughs) We’ll adjust the backstage catering for next time. Someone asks, somewhat curiously, “Why do you stay in China?” But you don’t actually stay in China. I think you now live in Berlin. But the question goes on, “Because it’s home? Defiance? Your mission as an activist? Or because everywhere else is equally shitty?” Ai Weiwei That’s a very profound question, why we are here or why we’re not there, or why I’m a male and not a female. I may become a female, but also, why won’t I do it? All those questions are too profound to answer here. Andrew Solomon (Laughs) If you do decide to become a female, we can have a whole other session here to talk about that. Ai Weiwei It’s true. It’s a very different feeling now. Andrew Solomon Right. And what is it like for you? Why Berlin?

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Ai Weiwei Yes. I can tell you this story. Every time when Germany had any kind of meeting with China or human rights delegation going on, the German ambassador always came to my home. My home in China had twenty-five surveillance cameras and always had secret police around it. He would come in and sit down with me to tell me what they did or what they were prepared to do. I was so impressed. He’s the only ambassador among the hundreds of ambassadors in China who would do that. It was very, very impressive. You’re being depicted as an enemy of the state, but this ambassador from Germany would come to your house and describe exactly what happened in the last meeting between the chancellor and your president. This is the reason I have my passport. They really cared about me. That’s the very simple answer. Funny enough, the day I got my passport, I got a call from the American embassy saying, “You have to come to the American embassy.” I said, “Tomorrow I’m leaving.” They said, “Yes. But the ambassador wants to see you.” The ambassador is a very respectful man, and I went to see him, and he asked me the first question, “Why Germany?” I said, “Well.” I think that’s a very profound question. Andrew Solomon (Laughs) Why Germany and why not … Ai Weiwei Yeah, it’s true. (Takes a selfie with Andrew) Andrew Solomon political?

(Laughs) Can and should art try to transcend the

Ai Weiwei Yes. I think we are living in a moment when anything can transcend anything. Andrew Solomon Is anything hopeful happening in China now? Ai Weiwei When you say “hopeful,” all I can say is that they let me out. It’s true. I still cannot figure out why they let me out. I mean, it’s such a painful condition even to imagine why they let me out.

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Andrew Solomon Do you feel, in coming out, like you’ve become sort of the voice of China in the West, and how is that different from being a voice in China itself? Ai Weiwei I never think I can represent either the Chinese or the Chinese nationality. I like Chinese food, speak the Chinese language, but have never been accepted by the society. But it’s fine because I’m already sixty years old. I don’t feel I belong anywhere. There is no sense of home or sense of nationality for me, which also is fine. What’s the question? Andrew Solomon The question is lost and gone, but tell us about the backpacks. Ai Weiwei Backpacks. Oh yes. Andrew Solomon Tell us about the quake in Sichuan. Tell us about how you and the government first came to be so distinctly at odds. Ai Weiwei The earthquake happened in 2008 and was devastating. We all know they have earthquakes in Mexico and earthquakes in Italy. Yes, the school collapsed. In many locations, strangely enough, the schools that collapse are often built by the state and should be the safest areas. In Japan, when an earthquake happens, people will use that kind of school as a shelter because it will never collapse. It’s built so well. In China, when an earthquake happens, seventy to eighty thousand people vanish. People automatically accept this. If a farmer’s house collapsed, it is because they are farmers. They know nothing, and they built their houses by themselves. They’re responsible for their own deaths, so nobody makes any argument. When a school collapses and when five thousand people disappear, I ask, “How does that happen?” I ask a simple question: how and who and how many and which school and how old are they? And nobody answers. At that time, I kind of carried out an internet investigation. I thought, “This is easy. I can do this.” I called it a citizen investigation. Actually, in China, there’s no such thing as a citizen because you don’t vote. There is no way you can exercise any opinion in public.

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So I organized on the internet. A lot of people and young people said they wanted to join, so we said, “Let’s go to those locations and find out.” It is a very remote area in Sichuan. Also, a lot of people don’t understand their language. We managed to go village to village, door to door, and find the five thousand students’ names. We were arrested over a few thousand times, but still, it gave us great joy. Even with such a tragedy, we really found the names and birthdays and the parents of the dead bodies. Each day, I put those findings on the internet, which generated a lot of attention. People said, “This guy, he’s just an individual. He can’t make this happen.” The state was completely arrogant and said it’s a state secret. You’re not supposed to do it. At that time, they did not yet have this severe censorship of the internet. Before my name disappeared, I made them really understand how dangerous the internet can be. Every day, I would cause a riot on the internet. My writings the next morning would be reposted by as many as two hundred thousand people. I said, “This could be almost a revolution if they let me do it for a few more months.” But of course I was followed, and I disappeared. I was beaten and all those things, but that was an extremely memorable experience. Andrew Solomon But do you think that the work that you’ve done, that work and other work, actually is bringing about change? I mean, it’s very inspiring, and it helps people who are already persuaded that there’s a great evil in the world to stand up against that evil with greater ammunition. But do you think the Chinese government was embarrassed to the point of actually making safer schools when they rebuilt in Chengdu? Do you think it has concrete effects, or do you think it’s about keeping a spirit of revolution alive, even when the institutions remain resistant to it? Ai Weiwei But institutions are extremely big because it’s a system. A system doesn’t have good intentions or bad intentions. You cannot teach a donkey to climb a tree because it simply doesn’t have that structure. China has eighty million Communist Party members, which is already one in every fifteen Chinese. So why does such a powerful state not let a film be shown? Why do so many words have to be censored

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from writings or from newspapers? Why do they feel so scared? They have no reason to be afraid. People just want to be independent. But they are scared. They are scared about even a very small fire or a spark that can cause the whole nation to burn, so they become more and more tough on ideas. Andrew Solomon The suppression of freedom and of expression often serves to strengthen the very things it attempts to close down because you’re left to think, “But what is it about this art that is so frightening to these people? It must be very powerful, this thing of which they’re so afraid.” You’ve done a remarkable job of embodying that freedom and that openness of expression. You’ve done a very good job of frightening the Chinese government, which is no small task. Ai Weiwei I hope I can do the same job in the United States. It’s not easy.

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2 Conversation with Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos I want to take a moment to talk about this extraordinary person whom we have on his way up to the stage: the artist, the activist, the Instagrammer, the filmmaker, the occasional nudist—my friend, Ai Weiwei. It was seven years ago this year that I was living in Beijing, and I traveled out to the outskirts of the city, where Weiwei was living and working in his studio complex. One of his friends had described his place as a cross between a monastery and a crime family. He had designed the building from scratch, with no training as an architect. It became an instant icon. Over the course of five or six years, Ai Weiwei developed eighty buildings and then said, “I’m done with being an architect. It’s not what I want to do.” His studio was this hive of extraordinary and very eccentric activity. It was as close as China had come to Warhol’s Factory. It was filled with artists, one particularly ancient cocker spaniel, and a tribe of semiferal cats that would occasionally tear apart his architectural models. Sometimes when that happened, he would say, “I sort of like it better this way. Let’s see if we can do something with that.” When I said hello to Weiwei, his face was buried in a big bowl of noodles. Off to his left was a poster that he had made by altering a government poster, such that the hand was a single middle finger outstretched, flipping the viewer the bird. As I discovered, that was a gesture that resonated with Weiwei on a cosmic level. This was a philosophy of a particular kind. We all know his famous series of images with the Museum of Modern Art, the Eiffel Tower, Tiananmen Square, the White House—all of them with his finger in the foreground. It’s a series that’s known as Study of Perspective, and that title makes more and more sense to me every year. Over the years, he’s produced at least two or three lifetimes worth of work: installations, photographs, furniture, paintings, buildings, books, and films. His audacity and his imagination have made him the leading innovator of provocation in China and beyond. In 2011, he was detained by the military police. He was held for eighty-one days, and then for the next four years, he was unable to travel. He was prevented from going abroad. The Chinese government held onto his passport, and when I visited him under house arrest, he said that fighting with an opaque authoritarian state was an extraordinary

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experience, because the state doesn’t have to follow the rules. He said it was like playing chess with a person from outer space. Since 2015, Ai Weiwei has worked from a studio in Berlin. He has received too many honors to name tonight. At the moment, his work is on display at twelve museums and gallery exhibitions around the world, including eight solo shows. Next week he’ll debut his largest public art installation right here in New York City, with thanks to Robert Frost, called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. Today, we’re going to talk about art. We’re going to talk about China. We’re going to talk about New York City, a place you know quite well. However, I want to talk about Human Flow. This is an extraordinary film. There were many subjects you could have made movies about, and there are many things you could have focused on. Why is this the one subject that has grabbed you? Ai Weiwei It’s a tough question to answer. A lot of my work is concerned with human rights, human dignity, and freedom of speech. Two years ago, I gained my right to travel, and I moved to Berlin, Germany. While there, I heard a lot about the refugee crisis and the 1.2 million people fleeing to Germany. It was such an unthinkable situation that I realized I should pay more attention. It always happens this way when you

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Fig. 2.1: Study of Perspective—White House, Washington, D.C., USA, 

want to understand something. You have to get yourself involved, as I did with the Sichuan earthquake. I had to visit the ruins. In this case, I decided to go to Lesbos. Evan Osnos In Greece. Ai Weiwei Yes, with my son and my girlfriend. In Lesbos, we met refugees who had just come ashore on a boat. I still remember how shocking it was for me to realize that these are real people. Evan Osnos These were the boats that were coming one after another ashore. Ai Weiwei Yes, and sometimes you could see thirty boats on the ocean. Each of them had seventy to a hundred people, squeezed on these very tiny dinghies. When they sink, often half of the drownings are kids. You also have babies with no adults attending to them. The adults cannot pay smugglers the money, so they let the children go ahead alone. When you see these situations, it’s hard to understand why people have to give up everything to go through such a dangerous journey. Also, you realize that there’s not much help coming from Europe. I followed them to the camps, and basically, no one was helping them. Only some volunteers or NGOs are helping. It’s an extreme and almost surreal situation. It still doesn’t look real, even after making this film. Evan Osnos It doesn’t. There are parts of it that feel lunar. It feels like you’re on another planet. Ai Weiwei Yes. Evan Osnos The scale of the camps is so big, and the landscape is so desiccated, that I wonder when you realized that this needed to be a film. When did you know that you needed to start traveling to place after place? Ai Weiwei I have a habit of filming things, so I often use my iPhone when filming. I realized, to understand this topic, it would take a lot

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of research. It was essential to go to Greece, but also to Turkey and areas in the Middle East like Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Gaza. Evan Osnos Had you been to any of these places before? Ai Weiwei No, I never imagined I would go to these locations. I also set up a team to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Evan Osnos How many places did your team go to in the end? Ai Weiwei They went to about twenty-three nations, forty camps, and interviewed about six hundred people. Evan Osnos You have a line in this movie which is very powerful. This is not a film about numbers and statistics. It’s really about faces, but you do have some numbers that will blow the viewer away—one of which is that in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the number of countries with border walls and fences has grown from eleven to seventy. That’s what your film is about, in a sense: the age of barriers and the age of people coming up against them. Have you formed a theory in your mind about why it is that these fences have gone up? Ai Weiwei Yes, the fences have gone up, but those are just details on the physical map. After globalization, the new political and economic structures reach beyond these fences. We can never know who is doing what with whom. All those interests are so different from the physical map. These maps and fences are just there to stop the poorest people who are in crisis. Evan Osnos You are now living in Germany, and here in the United States; both countries have had this rise of a particular type of nationalism. In China, they’ve had it too. Why is this happening? Ai Weiwei This question is quite profound. One has to ask all those professors.

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Evan Osnos You are a professor at the University of Arts in Berlin. Ai Weiwei I have a theory. I think that after globalization, the powerful have become more powerful. Many people are being left with no space or no chance in life, and many areas have become unstable. Also, with many environmental changes and problems, the refugee numbers are going to go up even higher than today. Evan Osnos In a sense, you are one of the people who has been dislocated from your home. After all, in 2015, the Chinese government gave you your passport back and said, “You can go,” and you left. Are you able to go back now? Ai Weiwei I think I’m still able to go back because the only passport I have is a Chinese passport. However, two of my lawyers are still in jail. One served five years, and one served over ten years. Evan Osnos Why are they in jail? Ai Weiwei They are in jail for the reason that maybe they posted some tweets. One was on trial for twenty-five tweets—very peaceful tweets, I should say. They are not as vocal as I am, and I have been quite ruthless in my critique of the government. These lawyers are much more rational and softer. I think the Chinese government is just trying to teach the people that it can do anything. If you want to raise your voice or question its authority, then you will go to jail. Evan Osnos When you left, did they say to you, “Look, you have to stop doing anything to criticize China,” or did they put any conditions on your departure? Ai Weiwei They always put conditions not only on me, but on everybody else as well. Even today in China, a large number of specific words can’t be used on the internet. It would be the size of a dictionary, the list of words you can’t use. Evan Osnos Is that number growing?

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Ai Weiwei Yes, it’s growing more rapidly now, especially today after this so-called Nineteenth Party Congress. Evan Osnos They seem to get very nervous about any big political event in China. Is the name Ai Weiwei searchable today in China? Can I post it on Chinese social media networks? Ai Weiwei Not on Chinese media, but of course foreign media cannot even be accessed in China. Some say Ai Weiwei doesn’t exist. Evan Osnos Now that you are in exile, this presents challenges of its own, regarding staying connected to your own country. Do you feel a sense that you’re pulling apart from China and that you’re interested in other things? Does it make you feel a sense of possibility to talk about China in new ways because you’re living outside of China? Ai Weiwei Since leaving, I am less interested in talking about China. I was very active there because I was facing that reality every day, so I had to speak out. Now that I’m not there, of course, on principle I criticize it. I never changed that. However, now it’s less because there are so many other topics to talk about. I think all human rights issues are the same around the world; it’s not only China’s problem. Evan Osnos We have a few images that I want to talk about today because I think they might give us a sense of your experience. Who is this? Ai Weiwei It’s my father, who held me in front of Tiananmen Square. My father was a poet, and he was exiled for twenty years. That was the year he came back to Beijing and brought me to the exile location, which was northwest China. Evan Osnos Out in Xinjiang Province. Ai Weiwei Yes. Evan Osnos He was China’s most celebrated poet at the time. He was a loyal member of the [Communist] Party but was accused of disloyalty

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and treated quite terribly. He was eventually sent out even farther afield during the Cultural Revolution. You grew up partly out there. I interviewed your brother once a few years ago, and he said to me that he thought you were primarily affected by the experience because you were a smart and sensitive kid. You saw and heard more than other people. Ai Weiwei He thinks I’m oversensitive about the whole situation. He’s a writer, but he has quit writing and drinks two bottles of whiskey a day. I think he’s oversensitive. Evan Osnos I’ll let him know you said that. You came to New York City in 1983, and you painted portraits on the sidewalk. You also went everywhere and to every gallery you could. How did New York affect you? Ai Weiwei I was a person coming from a communist society, so everything in New York was incredibly stimulating and had an enormous impact on me. I spent twelve years in the United States, so I learned all my bad habits from here. It victimized me.

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Evan Osnos Victimized. Ai Weiwei It’s true. When I was in detention, and after fifty interrogations, a very high-level secret police officer sitting in front of me said, “Ai Weiwei, you have been watching too many Hollywood movies.” He couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. He thought that maybe I was brainwashed. Evan Osnos What kinds of things were you talking about that made him say that? Ai Weiwei I talked about freedom of speech, individual rights, liberty, and all those things. The police thought it was ridiculous for a guy like me to be talking about such things. Evan Osnos You also went and saw protests in Tompkins Square Park. Ai Weiwei Yes. Evan Osnos You sold some photographs to the New York Times. I think you missed out on an opportunity to be a print journalist. It would have been a very lucrative opportunity for you. Do you believe that it shaped your sense of what dissent could be? Ai Weiwei Yes, at that time I was quite naïve. I believed an individual could exercise his or her rights and make their voice heard. Evan Osnos There was a time that the idea of Chinese art was a very exotic notion in New York City. I remember Joan Cohen, who’s an art historian and has collected your early work, tried to put on a show of Chinese art and was told, “We don’t show Third World art.” She contacted the Guggenheim and told me, “Not only would the curator not see me, but his secretary wouldn’t see me.” Now, there’s a big show at the Guggenheim on contemporary Chinese art. Ai Weiwei Yes, I wonder if that secretary still wouldn’t see me.

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Evan Osnos What do you think about the subject of the Guggenheim show, where there has been some talk about a couple of pieces being withdrawn shortly before its opening? There was a petition against sections involving animals and some threats against the museum. What do you think about the idea that they withdrew those pieces? Was it the right thing to do? Ai Weiwei A society that does not allow freedom of speech, to show something which is undesirable or unsuitable, would be much more dangerous. People who see art as degenerate or not fitting into a perfect image of society can spur on horrible things, like what we saw in the years leading up to the Second World War. Evan Osnos It is one thing if the state censors your work, but it’s something else entirely if the people begin to censor our work. Ai Weiwei I think this argument is profound. Art is the area in which one has the right to explore, not necessarily the idea of right and wrong, but to raise questions and present different possibilities. The art shouldn’t have been withdrawn from the show. Evan Osnos In 1993, you moved back to China. Everything you’ve just been talking about—developing the ability to hear different voices and the power of dissent—began to be the central concept of your work, from 1993 all the way through the next decade. You completed several famous works: The Black Cover Book, The White Cover Book, and a renowned exhibition called Fuck Off in English. It had a more genteel name in Chinese: A Non-Cooperative Approach. Ai Weiwei It’s true. Evan Osnos I’m curious what you were learning about yourself and the Chinese art world during that period? Ai Weiwei The Chinese art world has always been underground. Sometimes it’s underground only because the government thinks it is dangerous and sees it as the West’s spiritual pollution, with the

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intention to subvert communist power. Still, it’s not like art in the West. There is no real contemporary art practice in China because it doesn’t affect Chinese society and never becomes part of China’s intellectual discussions. Evan Osnos Did you feel that fellow Chinese artists were getting involved enough in politics and social issues, or did you want them to say more? Ai Weiwei I would say there is a slight intention to create art as an aesthetic, moral argument in society. Most artists can be very skillful and very smart, but concerning freedom of speech issues or defending human rights, it’s almost nonexistent. Yes, there is art that has some attitude, but there’s virtually no open discussion on these political matters. Evan Osnos One of the things that became recognizable about your work is that you deal with the idea of scale. Everything became large. Why does scale matter? Why does size have such an effect and such an essential role in your work? Ai Weiwei Scale only shows how small we are. As humans, we are just this small. Scale often tells us about our size, and it’s not very large. If you look within one kilometer from above, you can’t see it. It’s not big. It’s only our museums that are built so small, and anything in nature is bigger than this. Evan Osnos You’ve also done a very prominent piece that has traveled around the world. These are the faces of political prisoners and exiles made out of Legos. Ai Weiwei Yes, it’s made up of 176 political prisoners. I think one of them is in our audience. Chelsea Manning is here somewhere. I’m so happy she’s been released. Obama made the right decision. Evan Osnos How did you choose the people you represented in that piece?

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Ai Weiwei We worked with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They helped select these people. Evan Osnos Why Legos? Ai Weiwei Why not Legos? Legos are something everybody plays with. Adults and children would love to see a Lego structure and something besides Star Wars. For these dissidents, most of their photos were terrible quality, and Lego was the perfect medium to show this. Evan Osnos Pixelated pictures work out well. Ai Weiwei Yes, it makes them very sharp and clean, and the color is unbelievable. Some photos are so sorry that you couldn’t recognize them, but when you create them in Legos, they stand out. Evan Osnos This is your son. You should recognize him better than I could actually. Ai Weiwei Sometimes it takes me a few seconds.

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Evan Osnos He’s changing fast. This is a still from a movie, Berlin, I Love You, which you made while you were still in China and he was in Berlin. Ai Weiwei Yes, he is still in Berlin. Evan Osnos How did you make a movie when you were in China and he was in Berlin? Ai Weiwei Through Skype. We can use it quickly to direct anything now. I can make a revolution through Skype. Of course, I can make a movie through it! Evan Osnos I think that’s precisely what they’re afraid of. You once said to me, when he was very little, that you didn’t intend to be a father, but it had turned out to be much better than you predicted. You said, “So-called human intelligence, we shouldn’t overestimate it.” I wonder, since you’ve become a father, how do you think it has affected your work? Ai Weiwei First, I think we all learn from our mistakes. I’ve become more human and more caring. Without him, I would not have made this film. Evan Osnos Why wouldn’t you have made this film, do you think, before you became a father? Ai Weiwei I was ruthless. I was thinking only about myself. Now I have so many other things to worry about. It slows me down, and so I became a filmmaker. Evan Osnos You did a solo exhibition in Beijing in June of 2015. This was right before you were able to leave China. I wonder if you would help us understand what the boundaries are today and what an artist can or can’t do in China. We know some of the old ones. They used to say the three T’s: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen. What else can’t you do today?

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Ai Weiwei People always ask this question. The power of the state can never really be figured out. The state changes the rules all the time, every day. In the morning or evening, there can be very different rules. That is the core of this power, where only one player makes all the rules. You can never really win, and the state will make sure you can't win. There is no way you can understand what you can do or what you can't do. Evan Osnos Keeps you uncertain. Ai Weiwei Yes, the uncertainty is so powerful. It makes most people very nervous and very careful. Evan Osnos Do they self-censor? Ai Weiwei Of course, everybody self-censors. Self-censoring is the only way you can survive if you’re a writer, filmmaker, or artist. Evan Osnos You didn’t self-censor as much as some other people. Ai Weiwei But I still strategically self-censor more or less. Evan Osnos There’s a piece that probably everybody recognizes: the sunflower seeds. These seeds are all handcrafted by artisans, and each one is different. They’re made of porcelain. You’ve made millions of them over the years. Ai Weiwei One hundred million. It is only less than one-tenth of the Chinese population. You can’t believe it. You look at it, and it’s like an ocean. It’s endless. Evan Osnos I have to tell you that you once gave me a few of these seeds when you were first starting on this project. I brought them home, and I put them in a bowl. Then the housekeeper threw them away. I have only one left, and I plan to pay for my child’s college education with it. Ai Weiwei (Laughs)

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Evan Osnos I’m curious about the seeds. When you started on them, one of the things that was happening was the rise of social media. It was like each seed was an identity. It was as if a person out there was saying something distinct and different. Today, it’s a little different. Social media in China is more tightly controlled than it was back then. It feels as if it is. Ai Weiwei It is true. It is much tighter now, and even the Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp is being heavily censored. I don’t know why they’re so scared about people just chatting or gossiping. Evan Osnos Do you feel as if that period has ended when it was possible for you to go online and say anything you wanted and develop this enormous following? You have hundreds of thousands of people every day in China following you. Ai Weiwei That moment made me a bit crazy. I thought, “I can win this battle within years,” and I had this illusion at that time. Then I ended up in jail and I thought, “How silly can I be?” This just isn't possible.

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)LJ6XQÀRZHU6HHGV, 2010. Detail.

Evan Osnos But were you wrong? Ai Weiwei I was wrong. I made a wrong judgment. If the state has the military, or the judicial system, they have all the control, and there’s no space for freedom of speech. Most of my friends and all my colleagues used to have a good time on the internet, but now some of them are in jail or are being held without trial. Nobody even knows where they are. Evan Osnos Do you think that this will change in our lifetimes? Do you think that the struggle for freedom of expression, the struggle for justice and individual rights in China, will that be winnable in your lifetime? Ai Weiwei This only depends on how long we’re going to live. We all could have a very long life. Evan Osnos Let’s hope. Social media has been such a big part of your work. One of the things that we’ve felt over the course of the past few years in the United States is that social media has created such a hopeful phenomenon. In some ways that is still true today, but there is a dark side to it, as we now know. It can transmit hatred. It can convey the kind of instincts to build borders in the way that you have fought against with this film. What do you think is going to happen? Is social media going to continue? Does it remain something that you still practice and love today? Do you worry about the downside of it? Ai Weiwei I only stand on the sunny side of social media. There’s a lot of bright light and beautiful, positive things there. Of course, there’s a dark shadowy area, but you can choose to stay in the sunny part. Only social media gives this choice. In the days of old media, you didn’t have this choice, so I still appreciate living in this time. If I see a few Chinese standing around and they all are looking at their iPhones, this is like a window where they can see the whole world. They can associate with anybody. They can make a sentence just like poetry and send an image. This is beyond a miracle because it’s never happened like this before. I think it does so much good to the human brain and the way we look at the world.

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Evan Osnos You say it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the absence of it. Ai Weiwei I think if it becomes perfect, it will become dangerous. It’s nice if it is not perfect. Evan Osnos When you’re thinking about taking pictures and circulating them, is there always something that’s on your mind? How do you decide when you’re going to take out your camera? Why do you do it? Ai Weiwei I think it’s nice in life when you don’t have to decide everything, and you do it automatically. A great deal of pressure comes from that, and if you have to be so conscious of this, then you’re victimized by your logical rationality. You can be carried away when you feel the most comfortable and in the moment. It’s like you are freeing up some of your consciousness. Evan Osnos Do you feel in life that there is a barrier between you and the people when you bring out your camera? Your brother once said to me that your beard was your makeup. Ai Weiwei I don’t care that much. It’s not about a look. If I look at myself, it’s kind of scary, but I try. Evan Osnos If you sometimes stand next to people who don’t make you look as beautiful as you might otherwise be, I think it’s … Ai Weiwei It’s true. Evan Osnos This is part of the new show that you have opening up. Do I have that right? This is an image that I don’t recognize. Ai Weiwei New York.

Yes. This is one of the images from a park in Queens,

Evan Osnos This is part of the show that goes up next week, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. What is it going to involve? It’s got three hundred different sites around the city?

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Ai Weiwei banners.

That large number comes from posters and light pole

Evan Osnos There will be small things on lampposts? Ai Weiwei Yes, many small things and five to ten large structures. Evan Osnos You’ve been to Washington recently with your show, and I’m curious about your impression. Some of us who live in Washington feel as if we’re in a bizarre place to be because of a particular occupant of the White House. Ai Weiwei Washington is still a refined city compared to the past. It used to be worse, I think. Evan Osnos Well, this is the problem, in some sense: it’s so comfortable now that one can deceive oneself into thinking that everything is just fine. Ai Weiwei Yes, basically our life is always like that. If you always have food on the table, then you'll feel happy. Of course, if you start to cook )LJCircle Fence, 2017.

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or wash those vegetables, you feel a little bit different. We always have a dish at the table for too long. Evan Osnos In a few minutes, we’re going to open this up to questions from everybody. I know some people have questions that they want to ask, but before we do, there are a couple of things I want to mention. You just recently turned sixty. What do you want to do that you haven’t had a chance to do yet, as an artist or as an activist? Ai Weiwei My life serves no purpose. I try to appreciate all the opportunities given to me. Also, I want to see how far I can push or make some statement. However, I know that time is short. After thirty-one minutes, thirty-three seconds, thirty-two seconds, we’re going to be off the stage, and I will be thinking of something else. Evan Osnos Do you think that you will stay in Germany, or do you plan to move elsewhere? Do you have an idea about where you want to be and where you want to base yourself? Ai Weiwei I now think more about temperature. Germany has a long winter and at 4 p.m., the sky gets dark. I may move to a place that has more sunshine. I’m just like any animal. My cat’s always sleeping under the sun, and it’s very comfortable, which one can see. Evan Osnos A lot of us here in this room are going to be surrounded by some of your work over the course of the next few months because this project is going to open, the Good Fences Make Good Neighbors piece. What do you want people to take from that? What sort of message are you hoping that the world will gain? Ai Weiwei I think this city is so great. You have a lot of art here. However, I think people may pay little attention to it, and I don’t think people will care about it that much. For artists, it’s an excellent opportunity to make something and make the city look a little different. Evan Osnos Well, you could have made a single piece. I think we have an image here of this. What are we looking at here?

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Ai Weiwei This one has already been there for two days. It’s a golden cage, and it’s two blocks away from Trump Tower. I try to please both the neighbors and people there. It looks much more golden than this. Evan Osnos Gold is a color that’s popular around that neighborhood, I gather. Ai Weiwei Yes, so true. Evan Osnos I have to admit, you’ve left me with mixed feelings about how you look at the future, whether you’re optimistic or not. You’ve been traveling around the world over the past couple of years. You’ve probably been more places than any of us here. I wonder whether you’re feeling, as you begin this next chapter in your life, that the world is moving into a better place or not? In the past, some of your work has been driven by a kind of elemental optimism, a belief that perhaps the world, if you shout loudly enough, could be made into a better place. Ai Weiwei You’re talking about humanity’s future. I think if we look at the past, there’s always struggle. Today, I think the potential for danger is stronger than at any other time because we are so much more Fig. 2.6: Gilded Cage , 2017.

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potent than before. Any mistakes can cause significant disasters. That is what I feel. Evan Osnos We talked backstage about the environment. Is that something you may be doing work on? Ai Weiwei Yes, we are part of this environment, and there are some huge factors concerning environmental change. The Earth’s ecological condition is very fragile. It’s our place on our planet to have humans and all of life’s species coexist. Now it’s quite fragile. Evan Osnos Before we turn it over to this audience, I have one question that I’ve been thinking about, which is something you mentioned to me years ago. When you were under house arrest, you were thinking about how you were going to explain this to your son—he was only two years old at that point, and now he’s eight. How do you explain to him why you live where you live? How do you talk about China with him? Ai Weiwei I try not to talk to him about this because there are so many other things that can be more interesting, profound, and joyful for him. Evan Osnos Do you want him to feel Chinese? Ai Weiwei I don’t want him even to remember those things. I did write everything in a book, and it’s my responsibility to write down what has happened, but he doesn’t necessarily need to read it. Evan Osnos He doesn’t have to know all of the details of what happened to you in that period. Ai Weiwei He only should have the possibility, if he wants, to know where to find what I wrote. Evan Osnos I think if we have microphones ready, we’ll ask people to offer up a question rather than a comment or a story. Audience member One thing that you’re notable for on social media is

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your preference for selfies. What do you feel are the elements of taking a good picture of yourself? Evan Osnos How do you take a good selfie? He’s admiring your ability to take a selfie. Ai Weiwei It’s a very complicated issue, it’s true. You have to think about this phone we have in our hands. It’s unthinkable to know that if Rembrandt had this, we would never see those paintings hanging in those museums. It took humans a long time to create this tool. It’s nice that in the same moment you take it, you can put it up on social media. I appreciate these possibilities. Evan Osnos What makes a bad selfie? Ai Weiwei There’s no bad selfie. Evan Osnos I hope somebody’s making a T-shirt with that right now. Audience member When I was looking at the work that you’re exhibiting now in New York, I noticed that it’s very fragile looking, very delicate and different from some of your other work. Can you talk about that? A type of fragility seems to be in the pieces that we saw today. Ai Weiwei You want me to tell you the truth? Audience member Yes. Ai Weiwei Each of them is already over ten tons, and shipping those structures and putting them together in a short time was so expensive. That’s the only answer. Evan Osnos Are you talking about the steel structures? Ai Weiwei All those works. To shape them or to store them afterward is always something you have to think about. I’m sorry if this answer is disappointing to you.

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Audience member No, no, no. Ai Weiwei But that’s the truth. Audience member When I say fragile, I mean they have very, very thin lines and all are very delicate and very lacy. That sign of fragility. Ai Weiwei Once I said, “Maybe being powerful means being fragile.” Sound a little bit better? Audience member Thank you. Audience member Well, obviously you’re very inspiring as an artist and an activist. I just wanted to ask you, who currently inspires you? Ai Weiwei Myself. Evan Osnos That was a selfie of a different kind. Audience member I have a quick question about self-censorship. You mentioned that this is something that comes up in your work a lot. Have you ever thought about doing something like Duchamp and creating an alias for yourself? Duchamp had his alias Rrose Sélavy and R. Mutt. Do you have any thought of maybe having a pseudonym, where you could perhaps not self-censor or say other things that you couldn’t tell in your own voice? Evan Osnos Would you ever do work under a pseudonym or a secret identity of any kind? Ai Weiwei Almost all my work is done that way. Evan Osnos In what sense? Ai Weiwei People always ask, “What do you mean by this?” Even if you try to be very frank and direct, people still think this has some hidden meaning, which is true.

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Evan Osnos Is there a public Ai Weiwei and a private Ai Weiwei? Do you ever feel as if the person who people think you are, or want you to be, is different from who you are? Ai Weiwei real one?

You think this person, this Ai Weiwei sitting here, is the

Evan Osnos I suspect so, but maybe I’m wrong. Do you think you are different? Ai Weiwei I wouldn’t tell you. Audience member How do you navigate the art world with its expensiveness, exclusivity, and everything that comes with that? How do you navigate that with the message that you bring forward? Ai Weiwei First, I am an individual. I’m not responsible for the art world. It’s a world beyond my understanding. Why people collect art or why the prices are so high or why some young artists will never make it or how I became what I am today, I still don’t understand. Honestly, it’s tough for even somebody as smart as I am to understand this kind of question. Audience member Do you feel conflicted about it? Ai Weiwei I feel guilty about it. Evan Osnos Why? Ai Weiwei You spend your lifetime doing something, but you still end up not understanding it. You’re also sending out a lot of wrong illusions about things you’re not exactly responsible for, but of course you’re the one that should be blamed for it. Get it? Evan Osnos Not entirely. Ai Weiwei We have seventeen minutes.

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Evan Osnos (Laughs) Audience member Quick question: How can we have Americans and the Western world better understand China? Ai Weiwei Not possible. Audience member It’s not possible? Ai Weiwei It’s not possible. You see this global situation? Here we have sunshine today, and now it’s night over in China. It’s just not possible. It’s never the same time. Here it’s winter, and over there it’s summer. Evan Osnos I think you have spent a lot of your time recently trying to explain other countries to viewers, through this new film, and trying to make people in that film look like human beings. Is there a way that people in the United States can begin to look at people in China with greater depth and understanding? Ai Weiwei These misunderstandings, and don’t take me seriously, make life so much more interesting because we spend more time thinking about what other people are thinking about. Sometimes you feel you know it, but years later you think, “Oh, that’s wrong. It’s not really what it’s about.” We should first recognize that our intelligence is so limited, or so conditioned, by many other factors. Audience member It seems like you feel that, since the rise of globalization, physical borders on the map are the only obvious borders, and you allude to a potential new agenda driving us beyond nation-states. What do you think is the driving underlying trend in a postglobalization world? Ai Weiwei There’s a movie called All the President’s Men, and it has a very famous line, “Follow the money.” Audience member My heart is beating very fast. I feel like a tiny porcelain sunflower seed standing here, talking to you. The picture with your

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father made me think about what I believe is traditional in Chinese culture: the revering of wisdom and experience. Do you think that this is somewhat incongruous with social media? That people, specifically young people, feel like they already have a voice? If you like something, then all of a sudden you have power and wisdom. Are the values that come from knowledge and experience somehow getting lost today? Ai Weiwei This is a real problem. Young people are so quick to grab all the information without spending the time to digest it. All this knowledge and information may not have emotion or experience attached to it. This new generation or new human being will have a profoundly different view from the older generation’s way of thinking. I don’t know if this will be good or bad, but it indeed will be a new character. If you see students in universities today, I rarely see anybody working hard or writing or reading as before. It is just so easy for people to get any information they desire without the time to develop any deeper thoughts. Audience member I think one of the reasons everyone’s here is because you possess something that is amazing. You’re a leader, and you don’t stand for just standing there. Ai Weiwei I wish somebody could vote me in as a president, but I know it’s not going to happen. But, please go on and try. Audience member Young or old, some things happen here that make people stand and watch. I’m curious if there’s some advice that you would give to people that could help increase the type of leaders that don’t stand around and watch? Ai Weiwei I think this is a complicated question because we are all a product of our environment. If we always have a comfortable life, or the family has no problems for generations, then we become so disconnected from other types of reality. This is a problem. I think humans can only learn or gain new ideas from tragedies and difficulties in life, because if you don’t have those problems, you will never know the kind of suffering that brings out this kind of intelligence. For example, you need a specific temperature for high-quality porcelain. You cannot just

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have 50 degrees. You need 1,250 degrees. It’s under these different kinds of conditions that different materials come out. It doesn’t matter what type of education system you have if you’re so disconnected from reality. That’s the problem. Audience member Thank you for the very deep discussion. You’ve mentioned that globalization and social media have brought so much good to the world and so much awareness to so many people. However, as you said in the introduction, there are many more borders today than there were before: U.S. / Mexico, Spain / Morocco / Europe, India / Bangladesh. I think that’s distressing, given all the information we have today that we didn’t have before. How do individuals in society bridge those gaps that are starting to form that didn’t exist before? It’s one of the most vexing things that I think has happened as a result of globalization. Evan Osnos Selfie? Ai Weiwei Certainly selfies are one answer, but it’s not enough. I think the political and civil systems all need to change in this global situation, and this takes time. You already see the struggle for change in current political structures. What is happening in the United States and in England, Germany, and Spain is the same “something”: a sign of struggle for a different kind of system. I think there is going to be a more dramatic change, but of course these changes require all individuals to be involved. This is a democratic society. Your voice needs to be heard, and you have to find your language and your expression. If you don’t have that expression, it just doesn’t work. You must create your own image, just as this stupid Chinese artist did. There is no other way. The only way to bear some responsibility is to find yourself.

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3 Conversation with Tim Marlow

Chase Robinson I now have the pleasure of welcoming the Royal Academy’s director of artistic programs, Tim Marlow. Tim is an art historian, a lecturer, a writer, and an arts broadcaster whose credits include the series Great Artists with Tim Marlow and podcasts with leading contemporary artists for the BBC World Service. The Guardian has called his current position at the Royal Academy “one of the most coveted visual arts jobs in the UK.” In 2015, the Royal Academy mounted a major retrospective of the work of Ai Weiwei, describing him as a visionary and radical provocateur. The exhibit chronicles his work of more than twenty years, beginning in 1993 when he returned to China from the United States, where he had lived for more than a decade. The work drew on his vision of creative freedom, censorship, and human rights and his examination of contemporary Chinese art in society. He was able to attend the exhibit only because the Chinese government decided to return his passport eight weeks before the show. Ai Weiwei currently lives in Berlin and has exhibited his works all over the world. He continues to use a range of media, from architecture and installations to documentaries, all in the service of exploring society and its values. Among his many honors is the Human Rights Foundation’s Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent, the Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International, and an honorary RA from the Royal Academy itself. Recently, Chinese authorities, without warning, demolished one of his studios, just days after a new sculpture of a refugee boat was shipped to a show in Los Angeles. Commenting on an earlier destruction of artist neighborhoods and free expression in China, Ai Weiwei said, “If you are being treated unfairly, you have to let your voice out, and let other people know it. You cannot just be silent.” That’s a powerful phrase. Nevertheless, he persists. Please join me in welcoming Tim Marlow and Ai Weiwei. Tim Marlow I want to start with what Chase has just told everyone, about the demolition of your studio in Beijing. Your studio in Shanghai was demolished by the Chinese authorities in 2011 and now, in 2018, the studio in Beijing has been demolished. The first question is, does this cut, for the moment, your formal ties with China? Is there

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anywhere for you to go back to now in Beijing? Do you see this as an end of a particular chapter in your relationship with making work in China? Ai Weiwei Thank you. I wouldn’t say that it ends my relationship with China, because that relationship is beyond my understanding. I’m Chinese, my father was Chinese, and all the people before me were Chinese. At this moment, my son is in my studio in Beijing, and I just received a little video piece from him. He is collecting some earth, and he’s going to bring it back to me. He’s ten years old, and he’s really acting on his own. He says, “I cannot go back.” Actually, my brother took him to a hot spring. Normally you don’t take a child there, but in Beijing it’s another kind of thing. An old man sat next to my ten-year-old son and asked, “This guy next to you is your father?” My son said, “No, he isn't my father. My father cannot come back.” The old man asked, “Why can't he come back?” He replied, “Because it’s not safe for him.” The old man felt very strange and said, “Why is it not safe?” My son surprisingly told him, “His name is Ai Weiwei, don’t you think it’s not safe?” The man said, “No, I don’t know the guy.” He then said, “He’s the son of Ai Qing, do you know Ai Qing? Ai Qing is my grandfather, and he’s a writer. Everybody knows him.” The old man said, “Yes, I know Ai Qing.” Then they started to talk with each other. He told the man that because Ai Weiwei is like Ai Qing and he has those ideas and the state simply thinks this guy is dangerous, he cannot come back. My son is almost ten years old, and he starts to say that he’s worried, and he wants to bring something back to me. He started to save my cats. I have about forty cats in my studio in Beijing, and I feel very proud of young kids like that. I started to think, what does China mean to him? When he was one year old, I was detained. Then, after I was released, I’d take him every day to the park. There were secret police taking photos from behind the bushes. If we went to a restaurant, at the next table, there would be secret police. They were always next to us. He grew up in that society, and he still wants to go back. He feels so much better when he’s there. English is his first language, and German is his second language. He lives in Berlin, but he still wants to go back. I don’t understand it.

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Tim Marlow That’s beautiful. I remember you made a piece about the surveillance of your son, and you made a marble pushchair or stroller. I remember you telling us again, in 2015, that it was the discovery of all the photographs that the secret police had been taking that meant you wanted to get your son Ai Lao out of China, and here he is going back. It’s very touching. You brilliantly avoided the question about whether your own connection with China is cut, and I’ll come back to that. Let’s go back to your relationship with your own father. John Tancock has written a beautiful essay about it called “Born Radical.” He says that because of the experience you had as a consequence of the Cultural Revolution, being exiled to northwestern China, you were radical from the beginning. Is that a fair observation? Were you always someone who felt the need to speak up? Ai Weiwei I guess when your child is being treated very unfairly, you don’t even know it. It’s like if you stand in the rain, you get wet. When the conditions are like that, you feel it’s the nature of society, so you accept it. But when I left China and came to the United States in the 1980s, I gradually understood that there can be another way of living and another kind of society. Still, I couldn’t find the right moment for me to express myself. Even when I understood everything, still my expression didn’t exist. I couldn’t find the right medium until I got on the internet. Then I realized, “Oh, this is fantastic. You can write down whatever you think about.” I started to use it to express things directly. I feel this is a miracle for somebody in China because everything is censored and there’s no way to express yourself. But then, soon after, I was put in jail and put in all kinds of strange conditions. To answer you, it was really through my writings that I realized I was quite radical. Later, I read through some of my writings and thought, “This guy is pretty crazy.” Tim Marlow When did you realize that you wanted to be an artist? Ai Weiwei I still struggle to ask myself that. Do I really want to be an artist? It’s really a tough job for me now. I’m still undecided.

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Tim Marlow That’s interesting. Because of the range of materials that you use, in certain regards, it seems that it’s a genuine discovery. There is a richness in the found object, in the objects that you’ve collected and worked with, and you’ve worked with everything from wood to stone to Legos, and so on. Hearing you say, slightly disingenuously, that you’re still working out if you’re an artist or not is profound too. It makes me think that, even in the way you use materials, it’s still a search for what you want to do or what you want to be. Do you think there’s a poetic aspect to what you do that comes from your father and his being a poet? Is that too glib of a way of seeing the way you use materials? Do you think you’re your father’s son in that way? Ai Weiwei My father is a poet, and if I look at his way of making art, he totally opens his senses to any kind of condition. When I use materials, it is not very often I choose the materials, but rather I think the materials start to talk to me. These are always difficult conversations. It is very hard to find out how to deal with such materials because then you have to study history, how those materials have been used before, in what kind of context, and what kind of form can come out of work from these materials. Then you start to feel, “This is not enough,” because we are living in this very modern society, and basically any material has equal potential. How much can you know about it, and what kind of possibilities can you give it in order to create a new language? Tim Marlow Do you still feel the compulsion to work with objects that you’ve collected from China? Have you got material in your studio in Berlin that you will eventually work with? Or is the Chinese material, from the pots that you’ve collected to the material from the Sichuan earthquake, still in Beijing? Ai Weiwei I have had a habit of collecting ever since I went back to China in 1993. It’s basically because at that time I had nothing to do. I spent every day going to the market. It was a golden time for collecting things, and it was a very cheap place for materials. Not everybody understood what those materials really meant because China had been cut off from its own cultural heritage for too long. Very few people un-

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derstood how valuable those materials were, so you could really spend very little money to get them. I started collecting and gradually, after maybe six years, concentrated on studying these materials from the earliest findings to the Qing dynasty. That covers about six to seven thousand years of material culture. I do have a very large collection. Most of it is in China. Tim Marlow An articulately framed question: so you’re still very connected to those Chinese traditions of making, and of craftsmanship, and that will still be a continuing strand in your own work? You’ll still work with some of those materials? That will still be part of what you do? Ai Weiwei No, I’m already very bored with it. Six years is quite a long time. You basically touch every material from silk to porcelain to bronze. For craftsmanship, you only have, maybe, twenty dynasties with materials that are not difficult for you to get hold of and to understand. Now I’ve stopped collecting because it’s kind of boring. You repeat yourself. Tim Marlow Let’s try to go back to that issue of Beijing and the studio ending. There was speculation in the New York Times recently that you might be moving to New York. We know your main studio now is in Berlin. The studio in Beijing has gone. Do you have a sense of where you’re going to be in the next two, three, four years? Or is the nomadic life that you seem to have had in the past three or four years, which we’ll come to in a minute—the traveling around the world, particularly engaging with the refugee crisis—the model for the next few years? Ai Weiwei It’s kind of funny. I gradually realized I never had a place I could call home, and I have no one location I would be so emotionally attached to and say, “Okay, I want to stay here forever.” There’s no such place. I relate to my father’s generation’s being refugees and later becoming political dissidents, so it’s very normal to me. Today, I still have a studio in Berlin, but my Beijing studio is destroyed, so I think it’s the moment I should move because it’s always good to be able to select another place before my Berlin studio is destroyed.

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Tim Marlow I remember talking to you about the loss of your Shanghai studio, and you made a piece, Souvenir from Shanghai, in which the fragments of the studio were constructed into a three-dimensional rectangular structure of an old Qing dynasty bed. I thought then how you had turned something violent into something creative and memorializing, and you didn’t seem angry. I know that you always expect the unexpected, but do you feel a certain anger or frustration that your Beijing studio is destroyed? This was a place where you worked for a long time. Extraordinary work came out of it, and a lot of people were employed in the studio itself. It was the studio where a lot of large-scale work was fabricated and stored. Did that generate anger? Ai Weiwei It should have, but it didn't, because in my life I have seen generations being destroyed. My father’s whole generation, three hundred thousand intellectuals, just vanished in one year, and then in the Cultural Revolution, all those old things were destroyed—temples, Buddhist statues, and anything relating to the past. The finest of porcelains, calligraphy, and paintings were all being destroyed right in front of the public. Recently in China, with houses being torn down and migrants being kicked around, it’s all very common and it happens every second. With my art studio being destroyed, of course it’s affected me, because in the past twelve years most of my major works were made there, but I don’t feel that sad about it. It’s just one of the places being destroyed. Tim Marlow The idea that you’re not sure where you feel at home, I think, is a very powerful one. The idea that your son—who has experience in Beijing but has grown up in the past five years or more in Berlin—wants to go back is interesting too. Do you think that you will ever put down roots? Or are you saying that it really does seem that for the next decade or two, or three, of your life, you have no sense of wanting to be rooted somewhere? Ai Weiwei Well, I never had the experience of being rooted. I am always being rerooted and being pulled, and sometimes thrown to dry land, and sometimes you survive well. I’m always ready to be pulled out.

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Tim Marlow Let’s talk a little bit about the refugee crisis, because there was kind of coincidence of your getting a passport back in 2015, coming to Europe, coming to Berlin to see your son and the studio that had been set up there in your absence, and coming to London for the London Academy show. Then I remember there was a walk across London that you did with Anish Kapoor in support of the refugees. Then, I’m summarizing, off you went eventually to Lesbos, where you set up a studio and started to engage with that crisis. Was this something that you had been aware of from China over the previous three, four, or five years? Or was it only by leaving China that you suddenly became aware of what was going on, and this became something that fueled your art? Ai Weiwei We made the refugee film in 2015 and 2016, but in 2014, I was still in China in detention. We sent our studio colleagues to a refugee camp in Iraq to find out who the refugees were, and made hundreds of interviews, long videos, and portraits. We were trying to find out who those people were, and why they had become refugees in crappy northern Iraq. It was purely for my political curiosity. What was the future of these people? Not too long after that, I got my passport and I could )LJ$L:HLZHL·V=XR\RXVWXGLRLQ%HLMLQJGHPROLVKHG by the Chinese authorities, 2018.

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travel. So I just continuously try to find out what is really happening in the world. I need to know. Tim Marlow What have you learned from those travels? What have you learned from making Human Flow? Ai Weiwei At the beginning, I brought my son with me. We traveled to Lesbos, to the beach, and I told him it was a vacation. And it is a beautiful place for a vacation, because around Christmastime, Germany is pretty dark and cold. It was a very beautiful sunny day, and the ocean was so blue. Then suddenly I saw a boat approaching us. The people on the boat wore orange life jackets. I was kind of shocked, even though that’s what I came for, to see how they arrived. I used to say that to hear about a snake is very different from seeing a snake. I was totally shocked. At that second, I decided I should move my studio to Lesbos, because the people were coming in, boat after boat, especially after midnight. Sometimes you could see thirty boats approaching, with all those women and the babies crying. They were all wet. They all came from a very unfamiliar culture and religion, and they were just trying to escape. You know, so many people died on that journey. I said this has to be recorded. I started recording it on my iPhone, and I called my studio because we have a tradition of documenting things. That’s when we started to make the film. But of course, I soon realized the problem is much larger than just the Syrian refugees. You have a history of refugees. You have refugees in the world for very different reasons. We went to twenty-three nations, including in Africa, Bangladesh, Iraq, Pakistan, the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. That brought me to forty different camps, and I interviewed six hundred people. That’s the price you pay for trying to satisfy your curiosity. Tim Marlow Does it feel overwhelming and futile to encounter the scale of the refugee problem? Or do you have enough optimism and hope in human nature, having met these people? Many of them, individual people—you were constantly talking about understanding and hearing individual voices, not seeing them lumped together as a mass. Do you see a glimmer of hope for humanity? Because of their fortitude? Does it

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make everything seem rather futile when you encounter the scale of the refugee crisis? Does art seem futile? Ai Weiwei My approach is quite selfish and is for my personal learning. I have to have my understanding and perspective about what kind of world we live in, so it’s really about how I understand the situation. It’s very simple. If you are not there facing these people and you’re not staying a period of time to see how they pass the night, how they stand in the rain, how they make their food, how the children and women can go to the bathroom or take a shower, and all those very simple things, then you will never understand the situation. Not until you’re facing them do you realize they are just like you, or your sister, or your baby. There is a very raw humanity there at the camps. Then you start to question who put them in that kind of condition? Why can't people accept them? Why do people discriminate against them and give all kinds of dirty names to those who are already vulnerable victims? There are about seventy million people being forced out of their homes. They all had a home before. Nobody wants to go to another place; it’s almost impossible for people, even escaping, to have a real life in a new location. Tim Marlow There was a moment when, on the shores of Lesbos, you had yourself photographed in the pose of Alan Kurdi, a young Kurdish boy who drowned. There was a lot of controversy over that. You, I think quite rightly, said you were empathizing, you were trying to engage with something and actually trying to put yourself in that position. Are you surprised by the public reaction to some of the things you do? What I’m really getting at is that you’re now a celebrated international artist, an activist. Do you have to think about the way things will play out publicly? Ai Weiwei Do you think if I cared about those kinds of outcries I could become an artist like I am today? Do you think I could survive? I don’t give a damn shit about those things. Tim Marlow Yeah, I think that’s borne out by most of your career. Let’s talk about what you do care about, which is this ongoing explora-

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tion of trying to understand. I certainly would never expect you to come up with an answer to how we might solve the problems of the global refugee crisis. I’m curious as to what you’ve learned, having experienced the scale of the problem. We talked a bit about it earlier. Do you think it is possible for a global solution, given the rise of nationalism, xenophobia, and suspicion? Do you still believe humanity can sort this problem out? Ai Weiwei This is very simple and it always comes to these kinds of questions. How do we solve it? We are a society that always believes we can solve things. We’re scientifically developed, and we have had so much potential in the past hundred years to push us to believe we can solve things. Problems created by humans are really humanity’s tragic condition, and they can be completely solved by ourselves. The question, rather, is do we really want to solve them? As you know, the United States is still pushing to sell 110 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to the Saudis, and the British also sold at least five billion dollars’ worth of weapons to the Saudis. When Germany says, “Let’s stop selling these weapons,” Britain, France, and the United States disagreed. It’s so obvious that this makes us feel stupid even to talk about it on a stage like this. Everybody knows what the problem is. Everybody knows weapons are made for killing, and everybody knows those weapons should not be sold to those kinds of societies. I think it’s an insult to our public and our intellect to think we don’t understand this, or we are just pretending not to understand this. We just pretend that the consequences have nothing to do with us. They have been selfish, narrow-minded, and so corrupt. The whole society is corrupted. They just pretend we’re not a part of it. Come on. I don’t think we even need to talk about it. We’re all in deep shame. Tim Marlow Who have you learned most from? Let’s talk artists first, but let’s talk others as well. Which artist have you learned most from? Ai Weiwei You… . You’re laughing. Tim Marlow I am. I don’t think you’ve learned anything from me. I’ve certainly learned from you. Sean Scully was your teacher at Parsons for

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a time, and he played a certain role, but he’s very funny about it too. He was one of your teachers. You also said that Duchamp, although he wasn’t alive at the time, was perhaps someone you learned a vast amount from, and Jasper Johns, actually. They would have been two possible artists. Do you learn, still, from the art that you encounter around the world? Or does your activism and the experiences—say, the refugee crisis we’ve just been talking about—mean that you’re not looking so much at art anymore? Ai Weiwei Around 1993, I moved back to China and spent more than six years looking back at what humans have created in different periods. Since then, I haven’t looked at contemporary art. I have enough knowledge about contemporary art, actually, and waste too much time on contemporary art. I pay a lot of attention to other things, like architecture, art, design, life, cooking, or just cutting people’s hair, or things like that. I no longer go to galleries. Tim Marlow But you’re very much a part of the art world, as well as being outside of it. You’ve shown in thirty-five major museums or institutions in the past five years, and a hundred or so before that. Is the art world a means to an end for you? Ai Weiwei Well, it is existing institutions, just as you walk down a road and the road is already there. You cross a river, and the bridge is already there. It’s not that I imagine how the bridge is. It’s just a bridge and you don’t want to get wet, so you just cross it. Tim Marlow There’s still something about the context in which museums and institutions frame art, and in which artists can critique or reframe art, that potentially makes people see things in slightly different ways. Presumably, that still appeals to you. It’s not just a bridge, or a means to something else? Ai Weiwei Not so much, because life itself is so fresh. If you grow vegetables, you are not so concerned about selling at the supermarket, because you are in the field. You can just grow those vegetables from the earth. That gives me so much joy.

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Tim Marlow What about the art market? Is that a means for you to actually be able to fund the projects you want to do? It sustains you, and it’s a way of earning a living. Ai Weiwei The art market is very—and I should say very—strange, because you really realize when a piece sells. It could be on paper, it could be on canvas, and of course it could have a very strong spiritual value, but to sell at a price can be kind of erratic. Still, it provides for me. I’m not against it, because I profit from it. It gives me the possibility to make more so-called “ambitious work.” It’s not really ambitious. I just make it big or have more people get involved, but I should stop somewhere, because it’s not really interesting. Tim Marlow I think I’ll be the judge of that, or we will. I think it is interesting. You said earlier that in Beijing, Ai Lao, your son, met a man who didn’t know who you were. I’m certain that there are plenty of people in China who don’t know who you are, but I haven’t been to China with you or gone for meals or drinks. There are a lot of people who do know who you are—who did know who you were and who know who you are

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now. Do you think that your work has made a difference in any significant way to the way people are or how they perceive human rights or freedom of speech in China? Ai Weiwei Yes, I do. I often get stopped by a vendor or taxi driver and he will say, “Okay, I like your work.” I say, “Oh, why do you like my work?” He says, “You keep doing good work because you speak out for us.” I’m always very surprised to hear things like that. Yesterday in SoHo, I saw a carpenter, a young man, his whole outfit was full of paint, or was just very dirty. He wanted to take a selfie, and he said, “I like your work.” I’m always touched by people who speak their mind or heart. I think that’s very important, and just making all this work for that person is already worth something. Tim Marlow It’s interesting. Take Straight, which is the piece you made from the debris of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It’s seventy-five tons of rebar straightened out in this amazing wavelike pattern in this minimalistic grid, and when it was shown at the Royal Academy, there were people in tears at the exhibition. It was partly the naming of the children on the wall, but it was also the power of this material that they felt somehow had borne witness to a tragedy, and this was an extraordinary memorial. That work, I know, you just installed in São Paulo, but it’s also been shown in Brooklyn, it’s been shown in Washington, you told me, and in Tokyo. Does that work in particular, and your work in general, have a kind of universal resonance? Or do different countries, different cities, react differently to that piece? Ai Weiwei I think that certain works can really survive in very different cultures, like the Sunflower Seeds made in China and shown in the Tate. When I showed it in Israel, the people started to pick them up. I said, “No, you cannot touch it.” Since then, we measured that five hundred kilos have disappeared. They really thought that they were their sunflower seeds. Israeli people think that way. “Those are my sunflower seeds,” I said. “Okay, those are your sunflower seeds.” Then it showed in Turkey, and the Turkish people said, “These are our sunflower seeds. We love sunflower seeds.” Okay. Now we are showing in Brazil, so we have this kind of civilian sensor, and if you go close to it, it will make

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a “beep, beep” sound. I guess Brazilians think that the work is their sunflower seeds too. This iron rebar came from one badly built high school that collapsed, and 1,700 students lost their lives. It took us about two years to separate the rebar. In the beginning, we didn’t know what we could do with 150 tons of rebar, but we did know we should collect it as evidence, because it would be melted down in the factory and then the people would forget about those things. Since those 1,700 students would not exist, the memory of them would not exist. So I had this internet moment: to record and respect life, to never forget. To never forget, we needed a form, we needed evidence. We needed a clear accounting of their names, birthdays,and which schools collapsed. We did all that. When I looked at those rebars, I thought, “Why don’t we just straighten them out?” It was a huge, huge amount. After I was detained, I came back to my studio and realized people were still working there, making a very beautiful sound, trying to straighten those rebars so that they would appear as though I did nothing to them. Like almost new from the factory, just like that. Tim Marlow There are questions from the floor. I’m going to go through some of these because there are some interesting ones. Do you have any religious practices, or do you believe in some kind of God? Ai Weiwei I definitely believe in some kind of God, but I still don’t know what kind. Tim Marlow Is art a surrogate religion? Not for you, but for many, do you think? Ai Weiwei I think for many it is, or they pretend it is. Very often I see they pretend it is, but it should be. Tim Marlow It should be? Should be religious? Ai Weiwei Any best moment in art or in poetry has got some religious feeling in it.

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Tim Marlow What advice would you have for young activists who want to use art to reimagine how people could live without oppression? Ai Weiwei I can’t answer it. It’s not something I can answer. Tim Marlow To follow their own research, to find out more for themselves, to be brave? Ai Weiwei I think they should not really just work for ideology. They should work for themselves. They should work to question what their life will be like if they don’t fight for the very basic dignity of life, or they will forget about the very essential feelings of happiness or sadness and what kind of human being they will be. I think it’s very sad if you already think you are an activist or an artist. I think very often it’s just a persona, and you cannot think you are just an artist or an activist. Tim Marlow I can see how the two are inextricably linked for you. You’ve been quite critical of certain artists and writers in China who haven’t been politically engaged, or those who have been outed by the authorities for being complicit in oppression. Do you still feel strongly that more artists should speak out in oppressive societies? Ai Weiwei It’s a disappointment if you think writers or artists are not protecting the most important quality of their life, which is the search for truth and for a language to express it. This is already a very difficult job, but people are just giving this up and pretending they are writers or artists. What a shame. Today’s world can be very dramatic. While visiting for a short time in China, this actress, who knows nothing about the political situation, was secretly detained. She is a famous Chinese actress, although I never watched her movies. Also recently, the head of public security was called back from Paris and has been secretly detained. There is also news of a journalist being called into the Saudi embassy. The rest everybody knows. They’re still asking, “Who did it?” Nobody asks, “Where is the body?” It doesn’t matter who did it, where’s the body? Just tell us, where is the body? The world is like that. It’s a very strange world.

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Tim Marlow I remember reading an interview in the Art Newspaper in which they pointed out that you’d shown recently in Doha, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. These are three countries where the attitude toward human rights have been questioned and where there have been crackdowns. Did you feel compromised showing there? You gave a very interesting answer. Ai Weiwei I think you’ll feel compromised by not showing there and saying, “I’m out of it.” I think it is important to really be there, to let your voice be heard, to trust the people, trust humanity, and still make an effort in a difficult situation. I tried to communicate with the secret police who detained me. They visited me every day, and we had to have a conversation. I always gave them a very sincere conversation, even more sincere than I do here. It’s true, because I believe they understand my language, and they should. Why shouldn’t they? Or do I become shy about my feelings? Do I have any excuse not to say what is deeply in my heart to another human being? I think, for me, this is success. Tim Marlow Are there countries in the world that, on principle, you wouldn’t show in? Ai Weiwei United States, Britain. Tim Marlow Yeah. Ai Weiwei If I can’t show in Israel, why show in the United States? Why do I show in Britain? Those nations don’t do much better than other places. Tim Marlow You included scenes of solitary animals in Human Flow. What drew you to those animals and to film them? Ai Weiwei First, my next film is about animals. I really think it is so tragic when women, children, and animals are the most victimized. They have nothing to do with politics or our ambitious ideology, but they’re always being victimized. Now I’m making another film about animals’ relationship to humans. What are the true relationships

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throughout history? Through different religions, different cultures, how do we see ourselves and our relationship to animals? It’s all very, very fascinating. Tim Marlow Is this global? Will you be traveling? Ai Weiwei Same scale as Human Flow, maybe even bigger. Tim Marlow Okay. Last question from the floor. Two parts: How many languages do you speak, and what language do you dream in? Ai Weiwei I’m speechless. Tim Marlow Very good. No, you’re not getting off yet. I have one more question to ask you. You’re doing a new film, there’s a book to be published, and I know there are many museum and institutional shows that have been lined up for you. Do you see your career in … Ai Weiwei (Takes out cell phone) I always record the last question. Tim Marlow You could see your career in terms of certain sections and certain moments. Have you finished Human Flow? Do you see yourself entering a new phase of your career, or is it going to be, for the next few years, a continuation of what you’re doing now? More filming, more museum projects? Ai Weiwei This is a very typical Western question. You cut it up: salad, main course, and dessert. For the Chinese, we eat all the time. We don’t have that kind of problem. Tim Marlow On a gnomic, humorous, and absurd note, but very profound too, we should end. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, Ai Weiwei. Thank you very much indeed.

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4 Conversation with Amale Andraos and Carol Becker

Amale Andraos I first met Ai Weiwei in the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia in China. Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron had invited one hundred young architects from around the world to each propose a villa for a residential development within this new Chinese city. Though the villas were never built, Ordos 100 represents a network of lifelong friendships and collaborations that are single-handedly upending canonical narratives about architecture, decentering its European hegemony, and most important, searching for ways to engage the potential and challenges that global urbanization, migration, real estate development, and climate change present. These opportunities and challenges crystallized for many of us in Ordos with great intensity and urgency, so I wanted to personally thank Ai Weiwei for enabling that experience for all of us. Preparing for today’s conversation was no small feat, so I’m also delighted that Carol Becker, dean of the School of the Arts, has agreed to share the stage with us this evening. Diving together over the past few weeks into Ai Weiwei’s more recent work has given us some precious time to connect a flurry of thoughts and to share old and new experiences. This is maybe how the encounter with Ai Weiwei’s work happens: Whether experienced directly or through media, a constant unfolding, layering, and expansion occurs. You see the piece, always beautiful and beautifully crafted, then you realize its scale—whether literally, in terms of its physical presence, or as a result of the narratives around it, such as the labor it took to make it, the stories embedded in the materials it is made of, the references it brings to life, the disconnected threads it draws together, the mediatic scaling up from smartphone to smartphone, courageously, provocatively, and generously blurring intensely and often violently lived moments with their instant broadcast. Ai Weiwei’s work is bound to touch all of us. It is at once deeply personal and able to reach across differences in time, space, experience, and knowledge to render whatever is left of our shared humanity viscerally tangible and present, opening up within the thick walls of his own beautiful buildings small yet powerful windows, frames to look out and imagine a different world but also to look in, to transform ourselves and our gaze. Ai Weiwei’s work is a constant register of our times. It makes visible what we refuse to see, or invites us to consider what we think we know differently.

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It appropriates everyday objects and materials and transforms them across mediums with great intensity of labor and care. As new juxtapositions converge, new aesthetic experiences are created, new meanings are produced, and new associations are made possible; old boundaries are erased, walls crumble, and limits are recast. It is not only the work that expands and is expansive; it is also the person and his practice—more than an artist, more than an architect, more than a writer, a filmmaker, or an activist. Ai Weiwei’s expanded practice is opening up for all of us—and certainly, I suspect, for many students in this room—new possibilities for knowledge, for engagement, and for action. Carol Becker Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is an incredible project that tries to bring the stories of immigrants and refugees right into the heart of the city. You are coming back to New York with memories of what Washington Square Park was like when you were first here. I wanted to start by hearing about your experiences then and about how it feels to return to this city now. Ai Weiwei Thank you for the very long introduction you gave me. I always think, is that really me? I am very happy to have a chance to be with you. I practice architecture and art, and as you see, I’m in love with both practices. It’s about having a fantasy and the skill to have rational practical thinking. Also, it is very important to make things happen and to add something to our life. For Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, it happened a few years ago when the Public Art Fund invited me to do a project. First, I was hesitant. I thought, New York City is such a beautiful city, and it doesn’t really need public art. Very often I see something there and always think, “Oh, it’s too much, it shouldn’t be there.” But nevertheless, I ended up having a project in the city. I spent about ten years here, between 1982 and 1993. During that time, I was a student just like most of you here. I considered myself a student, but I actually only studied for about a year, or less than a year. Carol Becker Don’t tell our students that.

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Ai Weiwei I dropped out of Parsons. It’s a nice school but very expensive, and it was like a kindergarten for me. I came from a communist society, and my parents couldn’t support me. I never told them how expensive it was. It would have given them a heart attack. It was not possible for them to understand tuition. Here you have to pay so much, and I still don’t understand it. In many countries you don’t have to pay, but why does this country have you pay? I guess some kind of magic psychological thing will be set up with young people. They’re conscious about money and later have to make money to pay back all those things. I never understood all this because I never finished school. I just dropped out. By dropping out, I became an illegal person in New York, but that wasn’t a problem. A lot of illegal aliens live here. It didn’t make me feel bad. I felt liberated because I wasn’t part of this capitalist machine. Carol Becker You could drop out because you still were able to continue as an artist without those structures. Ai Weiwei You can always call yourself an artist if you drop out. Carol Becker Right. But architects … Ai Weiwei You tell people you’re an artist, people will not even ask you the second question. It’s not polite to ask somebody who’s already said he’s an artist. I spent about ten years wandering around and pretending to go to all those galleries and museums and standing in front of paintings for like maybe ten minutes without knowing what they were. I cannot understand it, but this wall is so beautiful, the lighting is amazing, but why do they hang this art here? I have no idea. When you’re twenty-four, you really think the world is so profound, and there’s no possibility to really penetrate our assumptions. Let’s talk about this project. Public Art Fund invited me to do this, and it was a bit difficult because I love the city but I didn’t want to make a sculpture in the city. I have concerns about borders, territory, and immigration, and then I got the opportunity to make something about current issues. I think it’s interesting to do something with architecture. An idea with fences, in relation to building facades or objects that are ready-made with their own history, could work well in the city.

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Our parents are all immigrants to this city, as refugees or otherwise, so it wasn’t a difficult matter to discuss this idea. Public Art Fund liked this concept, so we started to work. I decided to work on many layers, from a bus stop to subway posters to light banners. Carol Becker Laser-cut banners. Ai Weiwei Yes. Laser-cut is the technique we used, and we made faces from prominent refugees like Kandinsky and Einstein, poets, musicians, and also images I took in refugee camps. Amale Andraos What you’re seeing here is one of them in the arch at Washington Square Park. Carol and I were there, and we were saying it was already very beautiful; as the light went through, you could read the gate in various ways with these cutouts. Carol Becker You can walk through the figures. Ai Weiwei Yes, because I am an architect. Amale Andraos It’s clear, yes.

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Ai Weiwei It’s clear, and it’s easy for me to make this. If anything goes wrong with architecture, I can tell them: I’m an artist. I have really profited by doing both architecture and art. Carol Becker I was particularly struck by the gates you put up at Cooper Union. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, Cooper Union was the place where immigrants who wanted to study art, architecture, or engineering got to go to school for free. It was designed for the immigrant populations of New York. Ai Weiwei Oh? Carol Becker It was Peter Cooper’s vision that it would be a school for people who would never get to go to school because he never got to go to school. So he built Cooper Union with that idea that it would be a school immigrants could attend. It was always the most open place, and I thought it was very interesting to see a very different kind of fence being installed at Cooper Union, as if that possibility no longer exists. You really have to think about what Cooper Union has been and relook at it with this notion that you can’t get in with the gates up now, since it has always been the school that you could go to and you could go to for free. Ai Weiwei I like Cooper Union only for the reason I heard they used to have a very tough architecture program. By the second year, if you’re not good, the professor could just destroy your models and say, “Get out of here.” Somehow I liked that, and I thought this must be a good school. Amale Andraos We don’t do that anymore. Ai Weiwei I’m teaching art in Berlin now. I have to be very courteous to my students because they’re more like professors, and if you push too hard they start to cry. What is happening to students today? They say, “Oh, you know, students are very liberal.” I looked in the dictionary and liberal doesn’t mean lazy, but they are really lazy, these students today. How can you meet a real challenge? Maybe there’s no challenge in lat-

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er life? I think it’s very difficult for a professor to teach today because you cannot push too hard, and without pushing hard why would you become a professor? It’s tough. Carol Becker What do you think students, in both art and architecture, need to know to go into this world, the way it is now? Ai Weiwei First, I think the whole education system is unbelievably long. Some students at twenty-five or in their thirties are still trying to get a degree, and I think you spend the best years of your life in school. There are better places to learn than in a school. Even a school in Manhattan does not offer enough information for young people to structure knowledge around what real life is all about. I think that teaching is for me, but schooling is too long. Amale Andraos I think this is one of the things that we talk about a lot, actually, within the school of the arts and the school of architecture. Today, I think architects and artists need to work across disciplines and in many different mediums. It’s not so linear anymore. It’s something that we try to teach. You’re right that you have to engage with life. Ai Weiwei It’s as though life has become slow motion. When you’re in school, it is so different from real life. My situation, of course, may not be a good example. I never learned architecture and I never learned filmmaking, but it does not take so long to learn those things—maybe three months or something. Architecture and filmmaking are somehow related. Filmmaking is very much like architecture, where everything’s predesigned. You’re collaborating, because you have a cameraman, lighting, makeup person, actor, and actresses—all predesigned—and architecture also works this way. I think if you’re an architect already, you should be a filmmaker at the same time. Amale Andraos One part that I think is really interesting regarding your crossover as an artist and an architect is how you deal with the question of scale and the individual. We had a fantastic lecture last week at GSAPP by Rosanne Haggerty, who’s developing housing for homeless people. She found out, after a number of years, that the only way to start

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opening up that problem is actually to know the name of every person who is homeless. It’s the specificity of the narrative and the granular scale that can allow us to deal with larger-scale issues. In your work, it’s always the singular part that makes up these very large-scale projects. As architects, we still struggle to make those bridges, right? I mean, we’re building these huge cities that often lack humanity. Ai Weiwei Exactly! You might know the measurements, the proportions, and how people use it, but if it’s lacking humanity, then nothing’s going to work. That’s the problem with architecture education. You have a lot of people who understand those physical qualities, rather than understanding human life. If you talk about refugees, they have been through war zones and famine. When they come to Europe, all they need is some attention paid to them rather than being put in camps or waiting for policy to design their future. Give them some recognition as human beings. They’re people with strong dignity, and they’re also quite proud, and to take the chance of going through this journey is extremely difficult. I see many of them in Europe; even after they are accepted, people still look at them very differently. This is not only unpleasant but also very dangerous because you’re really going to push away those people by saying they’re very different. Carol Becker These images are of the work you made from the life jackets saved from Lesbos after Syrian refugees arrived. When I first saw these pieces, I thought, only an artist would think this way. Ai Weiwei (Laughs) Carol Becker All these abandoned life preservers are here used to communicate as both image and metaphor. To Amale’s point, you have tried to keep to the particularity, to the specificity, to try to make the enormity of the refugee situation real to people. I think you’ve struggled to find a form and made so many different pieces about this issue, all trying to get at its scale but also keep the humanity of its breadth intact. Is Human Flow in some way a resolution for you? Being able to bring together all the elements that need to be talked about?

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Ai Weiwei Well, those projects did just pop into my mind like in a second. When you look at a building from the Renaissance, you know it carries all kinds of meanings. Why are those things designed like that, and why does it dominate our understanding about a building? We have this culture of conflicts—religious conflicts and aesthetic conflicts. If I can call something ugly, I would say those life jackets are very ugly. I usually don’t use that word, but you know, because so many people drowned in this ocean, because many of the jackets were fake and didn’t float. How can you illustrate all those feelings? It’s very hard. You’re not decorating life, but you are instead saying, “Hey, this is it.” I feel quite ashamed when I look at those images because it says so much about today’s humanity, with no solution in sight for those people. Amale Andraos One of the things that I know from our students is that they want to find a new way to engage. I do think that this is an interesting time. If I think about the past decades in architectural education, there was a division between form and content, especially in America, and between meaning and medium. It was frowned upon if you brought a political or activist narrative to architectural practice. And yet of course architecture is completely embedded in power, right? How do architects and artists find a way to engage?

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Ai Weiwei I became an architect because of one incident. I moved back to China in 1993 after being in the United States for twelve years. I tried to be a good boy and spend more time with my mom after my father passed away. Basically, I had nothing to do as someone coming back from New York. I still had that liberal tradition in me and felt very comfortable doing nothing and just staying home. My mom is a typical Chinese, and she’s always been proud of me because I was always good at school. She never understood why I came back and never graduated, never got a diploma or had many things. I didn’t even have an American green card or passport. One day she got angry and said I needed to move out. I thought this would give me an opportunity to build a house of my own. At that time, to build a house was quite cheap, and the building you are seeing here was made from a simple drawing. It took about thirty days to build it. It cost about $30,000; that’s less than one year’s tuition at your school. It is really beautiful inside, and I tried to make just one window and one door. It’s like a child making a little building, but inside it’s much better looking with very nice lighting. It became a model in China because at that time all the developers were trying to copy the Western style. The style they were doing was more like from the Renaissance time because I think architects can ask for more money by doing those designs. If you made a drawing like this, maybe they would kick you out and say, “What is this drawing?” )LJ6WXGLR+RXVH

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So I started to build for many people and had about sixty projects. Later I quit because I had had enough of it. So if you want to be an architect, first you have to be kicked out by your mom. You either become homeless or you build something. Carol Becker I think probably for all of us to come into our own, in any form of adultness, we need to be kicked out by our parents, not only those who will become architects. I want to go back to this notion of action. Hannah Arendt talks about speech as action. This idea seems similar to what Amale was saying about architects and their gestures, and I see it with young artists. There is a growing new trend and desire to work in the public sphere, to work in new, unexpected forms. I was really taken with the story of what happened during the Sichuan earthquake. As an artist, you moved into a situation and actually took over a role that the government was refusing to play, which was to articulate the names and the number of children in particular who died from these faultily built buildings. There were 5,335 children, and you started a citizen’s investigation to find out the name of each of those children. It seemed to be—at least looking at your life—a very crucial and pivotal moment when things turned for you, and your purpose also became apparent. I would love for you to talk about that because there are many young artists and architects in the room, and the notion that artists could be useful in a different and important way is very interesting to me and perhaps to them. Ai Weiwei Yes, I think this all comes from how you deal with events in your life. Today’s teaching is like having a good car that you drive fast on the highway, and everything is quite safe, but you don’t know by driving fast on this highway that you miss so much. You can see so much without having a car or without being on this highway. Life is not just about reaching another point, because once you are on this highway you cannot even drive off, and the next exit will be very far away. I think this kind of design is really problematic. Since I never finished school, my life is full of wonder and I can always decide what I will do tomorrow. At the moment, I don’t have this liberty because in the next two months my life is pretty much designed. I’ve never experienced life that way, but right now I have a lot of engagements. In the

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past fifty-some years I could do anything the next day if I wanted to because I didn’t have any obligations. I don’t know why I started to talk about this. Carol Becker Because you were going to explain this piece. … Ai Weiwei Yes. I have to give some explanation about this. By 2005, I became a spokesperson for a new lifestyle because of my building designs. People said, “Oh, you have some kind of aesthetics we never knew,” and I really liked to talk about it all, so people realized all these new things. China suddenly had a hundred different kinds of fashion magazines, so they all wanted to find someone who could speak to something that could catch young people’s minds. I started to talk about my mind, my feelings, so they all felt something new was there. I became very well known in talking about architecture, interior design, and lifestyle aesthetics in relating to those things. In China, the internet had just started, and they said they had to open a blog for me. It was a blog for wellknown individuals. It was challenging because I had never touched a computer and didn’t know how to type. Sina, which is a Chinese company, said they would send an assistant to help me type. I was a bit embarrassed, but I said okay because I wanted to see what was possible. In the beginning, I put a few words on the computer and posted them. Then I realized it was not so exciting, so I started to involve myself every day sitting in front of the computer and writing articles. I would just open a newspaper to find any topic. I’m full of opinions and criticism. Each day I would put around three articles on the internet, and the next morning I would see my articles being reposted or retweeted three hundred thousand or so times. That really shocked me because this was a nation where nobody had ever experienced freedom of speech. There was no such platform. The internet gave me power, so for the next three years, from 2005 onward, I was completely involved in this. By 2008, China had the Olympics and at the same time had this earthquake. So I thought, if the government doesn’t cover how many people died in the quake, I can do it. I can just do the investigation myself, and it’s not going to be difficult. I called it a citizens' investigation and, on the internet, we had a hundred volunteers and young students. They didn’t

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know how dangerous it was going to be to get involved. We went to the earthquake area to teach them how to investigate and do research. We basically knocked on the doors of all those people whose children had lost their lives in those villages to find a little over five thousand names, but of course we got arrested about a few dozen times by the police. The police would just erase our findings and delete our photos, and I even ended up being beaten by police. Then I wrote a lot and I also made a lot of artworks in relation to this event. I felt very emotionally involved, and I think when you are so involved you forget about all your education, which for me is very easy since I never had much education. I came out with some witty works, one of which was quite powerful, called Straight. It’s about one high school in Wenchuan where the earthquake caused more than 1,700 students to go missing under the rubble. This is really a very sad story. After almost two years, I located those rebars from the quake. They were all these broken rebars, all very twisted. The local people were reselling the rebars; they would break down the concrete and take them out. The rebars were made of metal, so you could make a few hundred dollars a ton. By that time, my name was already very sensitive, so I had to use people from my studio to buy all that rebar. We just

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paid more to the local people for the rebars, took them to Beijing, and started to straighten them out one by one. It takes about two hundred hammer strokes to straighten one rebar, and there were about 150 tons of rebar to work on. After two years, they were all straightened. It’s a form, so it doesn’t really need that much creativity, and it bears a lot of meaning and struggle. It has strength in itself. That’s a photo in the Brooklyn Museum. Carol Becker It’s the same with the Laundromat project, where all the clothes left by the refugees were washed and ironed. This is at Jeffrey Deitch, but there really is something so contemplative and almost devotional about taking each piece individually and treating it with care. In each of the two hundred hammerings of the individual rods of rebar, there is also so much intensity and meaning to the gesture. The more we focus on these processes, the more the layers of your life and work reveal themselves as well. Ai Weiwei You make me think, because very often art school teaches students to be creative. Everybody is so afraid to create whatever they like that even when I was at Parsons I realized you have all the freedom, )LJLaundromat, ,QVWDOODWLRQDW-HIIUH\'HLWFK1HZ