Ai Weiwei, Artist & Lightening Rod

Ai Weiwei. Chinese digital dissident, is featured in the May/June issue of Utne Reader. His artwork and his story captivated me. The interview originally appeared in Index on Censorship and was conducted by Simon Kirby.

 

He participated in creating The Bird’s Nest Stadium we witnessed nightly during the Olympics in Beijing, and then he withdrew his support from the project. He’s outspoken about his government, and the government doesn’t silence him—or it hasn’t yet. In fact, by his own report, his greatest fear is silence.

 

In speaking about China, he says, “The basic value of contemporary thought has to be established in China. We need to create a sense of right and wrong, to learn to face ourselves and our history, to discuss what kind of nation and what kind of government we should create. These are essential questions and they need to be addressed. Without this, no solution can ever really reach the real root problem.”

 

I’d say the same is true all over the world, not just in China. It’s also true for every individual everywhere.

 

Ai goes on, “In fact, it is not only China that is facing these new kinds of difficulties—the whole world is facing them. But the difference here is that the old political structure remains fully intact.”

 

Sounds like the usual party-line bickering in the U. S. to me.

 

“I believe that the primary concern and main struggle within that structure is to stay in control and everything done within that structure is related to this mission.”

 

Dems? Reps? Control issues, anyone?

 

“The problem is that the whole society is dying through lack of responsibility or involvement.”

 

Yes, oh yes. The punditry has repeatedly remarked on President Obama’s stance of taking responsibility, and his continued urging of his vast constituency to get involved.

 

Ai calls it “active responsibility.”

 

If we continue to refuse to take responsibility for our own world, continue to assign that responsibility to government or politicians or officials of one stripe or another, it should not surprise us when Responsibility itself comes calling and insists we take her in.

The people who, I believe, have taken responsibility for millennia are always and forever the artists. They mirror our experience in a way that no other group even approaches. Ai is a blogger in China. There is no other way to put forward a dissenting opinion. All media are controlled by the state.

 

As an artist, he is able to see conditions in his own country so clearly that he diagnoses the problem and prescribes a cure for it in one sentence, “We need a very simple solution.”

 

Don’t we all? Artists in our world show us the problem and the solution every time they sing, dance, write, perform. They are the lightening rods of our time. Thematically, all over the world at this time, they point to the famed wasteland of Arthurian legend, and that fact that if we spot it, we got it. In the next leap, stroke, breath, we are enjoined to take responsibility for our own one small part of it. To bring greening, luxury, abundance and fertility back to our world one artistic outrage at a time.