When Ai Weiwei Used His Power of Art the Internet Who Retaliated

April 30, 2022 Post a Comment

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August 15, 2011

Ai Weiwei recounts his experiences during 81 days' detention

Ai Weiwei during documenta 12 (2007), Wikimedia Commons This weekend the recently released, 54-twelvemonth-old Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recounted parts of his experiences during 81 days' detention which ended on June 22. His arrest was part of the largest crackdown on dissidents and intellectuals in many years, that was initiated in the first of 2011, notably against people who expressed a will to take their forms of protest from the net to the streets. Officially proclaimed by authorities to be a tax instance, also Ai Weiwei's detention is widely understood every bit a retaliation for political activism. Ai has been one of the most explicit critics of the Chinese Communist Party, and has amid other things claimed that government corruption played a office in the deaths of schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake due to the poor structure of schools. In 2010, he created an Internet audio project in which volunteers read the names of nearly 5,000 children who were killed during the earthquake, and too made an art installation composed of thousands of children's backpacks, in response to this. Ai has also been an agile supporter of Liu Xiaobo, the political prisoner who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

Ai's explicit opinions in two specific cases take been seen as the incitement Shanghai officials used to first tear down his studio (which was planned to become an education center and art residency), and then later detain him, members of his family and associates. The showtime case was that of Yang Jia, a Beijing resident who killed vi policemen in a Shanghai police station subsequently being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, and who was later executed. The second was the instance of Feng Zhenghu, nearly whom Ai Weiwei made a documentary. Zhenghu is a lawyer and activist who spent over iii months in Tokyo'due south Narita Airdrome afterwards Shanghai officials denied him entry.

"Performance art" is Ai'due south term for his ongoing conflict with government officials over the Communist Party'south authoritarian rule. This definition of functioning took a sinisterly unpremeditated class during a visit to an fine art exhibition in Munich in 2009, during which he had to be rushed to the infirmary, where surgeons drained a pool of blood from his brain. According to doctors he would have died without this emergency surgery. This happened 1 month later he had been assaulted by officers in his hotel room, in the middle of the night, equally he was preparing to testify at the trial of a young man dissident in Chengdu.

Well aware that his risk of farther prosecution depends on his public beliefs, on Twitter Ai last week turned the attending to other colleagues currently imprisoned, and who face greater danger than him considering of their lesser public stature: "If you don't speak for Wang Lihong, and don't speak for Ran Yunfei, you are non only a person who volition non stand out for fairness and justice; you do not take cocky-respect," he stated. Wang awaits trial to start inside weeks for "creating a disturbance" subsequently demonstrating in support of bloggers that take been accused of slander subsequently they wrote about a suspicious death. Ran, a loftier profile blogger, was detained in March and later formally charged with "inciting subversion of country power".

4 of Ai Weiwei's associates were likewise detained for two months and released soon after him: "Because of the connection with me, they were illegally detained. Liu Zhenggang, Hu Mingfen, Wen Tao and Zhang Jinsong innocently suffered immense mental devastation and physical torment."

On Baronial 12 Ai Weiwei described that during the three months he was detained and interrogated more than l times in total, he was kept in a tiny room, watched 24 hours a twenty-four hours past shifts of 2 uniformed military policemen who were never more than 30 inches from his side, sometimes just four inches away, and the same was the case as he slept, showered and used the bathroom. "It is designed as a kind of mental torture, and information technology works well," he explained.

The quotes in this article are taken from The New York times, August 12 and The Guardian, August nine.