‘Joys and Sorrows’ with Ai Weiwei in Berlin
"(A)ll the tyrants in history, the traitors of various dynasties...in order to steal wealth...try every means to imprison the light, because the light can awaken people." -- Ai Qing
BERLIN (Saturday, November 25, 2023) — Our host is Bard College in Berlin (BCB), a young, wonderfully Berlin-international organization with just a few hundred students, a good many of whom are there on scholarship. These young people arrive in Berlin from more than 60 different countries, too many of which now see war, political crises, environmental turmoils, or some awful combination of these.
“It isn’t safe to go back,” another writer tells me. Under a government or system run by despots, he says, an exile must constantly re-reckon the safety of returning, because “what’s 'forbidden' can change from one day to the next.”
“That’s the hard part,” he said. “The not-knowing….”
The well-crafted lines of Ai Weiwei’s father — poet Aì Qīng (1910-1996) — are still counted among the classics in China. An often-exiled writer and global scholar, Aì Qīng was generally able to summon his own sense of freedom, if not always express it, or “let it ring.” It isn’t easy, of course, to hold onto one’s sense of genuine freedom while facing others who oppose your even thinking the word, much less expressing it aloud for all to see and hear. Such suppression — or attempted suppression — is costly to a life. Further, it tends to transform all lives within a society into lives of solitary internal struggle.
Such was the struggle of the poet-philosopher Aì Qīng; and, now, it is also the work of his son, just as it is the struggle of so many surrounding us — the writer sitting (working) next to me, the young artists who are about to talk with Ai Weiwei. Perhaps, it is the struggle for all writers, all artists, working anywhere today….
The artist enters the small meeting room. With him comes a panel of scholars and students with- and for-whom he will think and talk about his work. Today’s immediate subject is “Know Thyself,” a recently-opened exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s constructed images. Responding to questions and comments from the panelists, he easily discusses his creative work, his “success” (together with its ongoing costs) and, toward the end, what — to him — constitutes “beauty.”
On this last: A young person raises the question of how Ai understands “beauty.” (The panelists commonly agree to using their informal, single/first names.) Immediately Ai cites a text from Andy Warhol, whose writing inspired him as a newly arrived artist in New York City. Warhol once suggested that “everything is beautiful,” the artist recalls.
“(Beauty) is just how we think of things,” he says, adding that his own sense of beauty in artwork “co-exists with the meaning and function” of a particular piece. “We cannot separate it.”
Ai Weiwei’s marriage of beauty to “function” within his own intellectual work (geistige Arbeit) brings to mind a German predecessor of Bard College’s, the Bauhaus State School of Weimar (1919-24). There, at this nascent revolutionary school, young “radical” and multi-lingual East- and Western European students held lively debates about design-versus-function as part of a new, progressive revolution.
Having experienced the decades-long evolution of their Bauhaus-schooling — having learned from Warhol and other US artists and thinkers of the 1980s — Ai Weiwei was able to participate in some sixty building projects around the globe. Because he’s never formally trained to build buildings, this fact seems surprising to him.
“I never thought I wanted to be architect….,” he muses.
He’s come to this point by engaging himself with the process of making art, the crafting of it, perhaps starting with the initial form of an idea — or idea of form — in one’s head. The artist once conceived a gallery-sized “sandbox,” holding a hundred million painted sunflower seeds, each little piece, hand-made. The principal work was executed by 1,600 craftsman, “mostly women” in China, helping Ai to make a statement that was, in part, about mass production.
“It is not industrially made,” he tells us. “It’s made by the people. I love the ordinary craftsman….”
He emphasizes the word “craft” as a verb: “It’s about the making,” he says. “The artist, in the original meaning, is the craftsman.”
True to his own craftsmanship, Ai Weiwei comes up with fascinating and appropriate choices of materials — ceramic, wood, or plastic life-vests to convey his important messages. He remembers innovating new materials for another sort of “building project,” the 2014 installation of 175 portraits in the abandoned 20th-century iron-and-concrete prison on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay (California, USA).
“That show was dedicated to freedom,” the artist tells us, describing how he wondered just how to render these portraits — scores of men and women, all known for taking spirited positions against repressive oligarchies in their homelands, all around the world.
“I wanted to make all of them look equally good,” he says. “And, suddenly, I thought that LEGO (plastic toy building-bricks) can help me do that.”
He designed the work, in part, while living under home-detention in China, which allowed him to create a computer/digitized map for each image, ultimately transmitting them to the across-the-world crafting crew, on Alcatraz.
“It turned out well,” he says.
Sticking with LEGOS as his medium-of-choice, the works in today’s “Know Thyself” exhibit are all based upon paintings by other visual artists who, in one way or another, have touched Ai personally. Prominent in the exhibition is a giant, 650,000-piece LEGO re-interpretation of Monet’s oil-painting triptych “Water Lilies.” Asked about his LEGO “Water Lilies #1,” Ai reminds us that “all my work has a personal story.”
His father, Aì Qīng, had studied art in Paris from 1929 to 1932, when he attended the discussions of an “independent salon created by Monet.” Ai Weiwei was just about twelve years old when his father told him about the French painter. At the time, during the 1960s, Ai and his father were living together in Xinjiang province, his father having been sentenced to “internal exile,” scratching out life in a rustic, hillside dugout, literally underground.
“We spent about five years underground,” says Ai, explaining the image of the black doorway, in the midst of his colorful “Water Lilies #1.”
I asked him about his sense of place — whether it was easier/better for him to work in a place like New York, or Berlin, or Portugal…. Why had he left Berlin a couple of years ago, I wondered?
“The reason to leave it is to come back,” says Ai. “As long as I am not in China, I am a traveler….”
Berlin, he notes, “is more like Beijing” than New York City, because of their similar character challenges — their historic struggles “of ideology.” When in Berlin, he often works in his basement studio. “Mostly, I stay in my studio,” he says.
Perhaps understandably, Ai Weiwei gets many questions about how one might interpret his art, questions about possible “meanings” of his work and words. Our local questioners go so far as to ask for his definitions of “artist” and “art” itself. While acknowledging that each person defines “art” on his/her own, Ai Weiwei says that, for himself, art has been a means of “escape.” Art “can protect you,” he adds, possibly offering art as a global refugee’s “safe haven,” of sorts.
“Ironically,” says Ai, one’s work “can become popular…. And, then, there is no escape.”
He draws some laughter with this….