Ai Weiwei

Aaron 23

Any thoughts on Ai Weiwei's recent arrest or his supposed confessions to the Chinese govt? For those unfamiliar with Weiwei, he is a Chinese artist and activist.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1862488102

There were supposed to be protests today outside of Chinese embassies demanding his release.

Smellyman

I was aware of him, but hadn't seen that video yet.

He is a pimp, he's a real hero.

zarocat

He's a brilliant human being. To be conscious of the fact that you can take the sorrow, injustices, inequity etc., of your surroundings, of your government, of your people and express them the way he does is a true gift in the direction of freedom,

Byrnzie

Are there any articles on this?

Byrnzie

I hope the people of China get their act together soon and overthrow these control-freaks, though I won't hold my breath. China is effectively a police state, and most people are completely indifferent to, and ignorant of politics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ap ... -disappear

Crackdown on dissent continues with apparent detention by authorities in China of two more associates of activist-artist


Tania Branigan in Beijing
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 April 2011


A lawyer linked to Ai Weiwei went missing on Thursday night and a designer from the company handling the artist's affairs was taken by police six days ago, according to supporters.

Friends have not been able to reach Liu Xiaoyuan for almost 24 hours. The rights lawyer posted a message on a microblog at 8pm on Thursday saying he was being "followed by identified people". His phone is switched off.

Last week he said he would "of course" act for Ai if requested. He spent several hours at a police station on the day Ai disappeared, although his brief detention did not appear to relate to the artist. It occurred after he requested to visit a female activist and officers reportedly berated him for tweeting about another missing lawyer.

Separately, a letter issued online on Friday said plainclothes police seized designer Liu Zhenggang, 49, at his home in Beijing on 9 April and no one had been able to reach him since. Liu worked for FAKE, the design and architecture firm that handles Ai's affairs and belongs to the artist's wife.

Police did not respond to queries about the two men.

Ai's detention has sparked an international outcry, and his case is far from alone. The last two months have seen dozens of lawyers, dissidents and activists being criminally detained and arrested or simply going missing in one of the toughest crackdowns for years. It appears to have been sparked by anonymous calls on websites overseas for "jasmine revolution" protests inspired by the Middle East uprisings.

Ai was stopped at Beijing airport on 3 April and has been incommunicado ever since. Officials have said he is under investigation for economic crimes but police have still not informed his family that he is detained.

Also missing are his friend Wen Tao, 38; driver and cousin Zhang Jinsong, also known as Xiao Pang, 43; and accountant Hu Mingfen, 55.

An open letter to the ministry of public security and Beijing police, signed by Ai's wife, Lu Qing, as well as colleagues and relatives of the missing, urged an investigation into the disappearances. The Guardian was unable to reach Lu but a friend of Ai's posted a link to the letter and a studio assistant confirmed it was genuine.

"The people ... all disappeared or got kidnapped in a very short period of time and we request that the public security bureau investigate the matter. We are deeply concerned about the situation Ai Weiwei and his colleagues are in now," the letter said.

"Kidnapping citizens or making them disappear is a severe crime and it immensely hurts people, relatives and friends around them.

"We believe justice can only exist if every administrative procedure is carried out in accordance with the law. Otherwise any conclusion or result that's been drawn does not hold water ... We hope that the public security bureau can act according to the law and protect people's rights."

Reuters reported that a third person had been sent to re-education through labour after taking pictures of police officers at a site proposed for a "jasmine revolution" protest on 6 March.

Wang Yuqin said her husband Yang Qiuyu, 48, a campaigner for the rights of petitioners, was seized by police at Xidan in Beijing.

She said she would hire a lawyer and sue authorities for sending him to a labour camp without trial. "They want to use labour camps to crush dissent," she said.

Rights groups say that lawyer Ni Yulan, who was taken by police a few days ago, has been criminally detained for "creating a disturbance". A person close to her, who did not want to be named, told Reuters: "She has nothing to do with it [the "jasmine revolution" call] ... She was very careful about not getting involved.

"The innocent are being taken away. It's getting more and more terrifying out there."

The International Bar Association's Human Rights Institution warned in a statement: "An expanding catalogue of abductions by the Chinese authorities [is creating] a climate of fear. The IBAHRI calls on the Chinese government to release all illegally detained human rights lawyers; cease all forms of harassment of the same; and to make a public statement on the whereabouts of 'disappeared' lawyers, the reasons for their arrest and their treatment in detention."

Smellyman

The Chinese government is like the US Guantanamo. Detain whoever you want with no recourse.

I fear we will soon forget about Ai Weiwei and all the others and this too will fade in the background.

Byrnzie

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... exhibition

Where is Ai Weiwei?

Detained for over a month by Beijing police, fears are growing for the safety of the Chinese artist. As two exhibitions of his work open in the UK, Adrian Searle reports


Adrian Searle
guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 May 2011


It is, as I write, 37 days since Ai Weiwei disappeared, arrested by the Chinese police on 3 April in Beijing as he was about to board a scheduled flight for Hong Kong. He has not been seen or heard from since. He has not had access to a lawyer (Ai's own lawyer disappeared for five days following the artist's arrest), and despite persistent enquiries his family do not know where he is.


Another question. Who is Ai Weiwei? As well as an artist, Ai is an architect, designer, activist, iconoclast, blogger, sometime antiques dealer and expert blackjack player. If the Chinese authorities who have arrested him and engineered his disappearance are right, this creative, complicated man is also a bigamist, involved in tax fraud, the distribution of pornography, and – laughably – a plagiarist.

There is no currently no news on Ai's condition, only rumour, including an unconfirmed and appalling graphic report, by a disaffected Xinhua journalist writing under a pseudonym, that Ai has been tortured, and has begun to confess to his supposed crimes. Meanwhile, his art has been shipped abroad, to London and New York and Switzerland. Two exhibitions of his work open in London this week. Twelve zodiac animal heads will be unveiled in the Somerset House courtyard tomorrow; these are oversized bronze replicas of figures originally sculpted by the Italian Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) as a water clock for the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan, Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong's summer retreat. In 1860, the palace was ransacked by French and British troops, and the heads were pillaged. Two ended up in the collection of Yves Saint Laurent; the current Chinese government has been trying to retrieve them. What goes around comes around. A second show of Ai's sculptures and videos opens on Thursday at the Lisson Gallery.

Meanwhile, there have been protests by the German, American, British and other governments. There are petitions and protests and a Free Ai Weiwei website, where information is gathered. A young woman in Hong Kong has been spraying "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" on the city's buildings, risking a punitive jail sentence. Tate Modern has "Release Ai Weiwei" written in huge letters along its exterior. Anish Kapoor has dedicated his Monumenta exhibition, which opens tomorrow at Paris's Grande Palais, to Ai. There have been moments of silence and noisy demonstrations, letters to the press from Salman Rushdie and a long interview in Germany with the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, who said that on his most recent visit to Beijing he had urged Ai to keep his head down or to leave the country.

Ai did neither. "What can they do to me? Nothing more than to banish, kidnap or imprison me. Perhaps they could fabricate my disappearance into thin air, but they don't have any creativity or imagination, and they lack both joy and the ability to fly," he wrote on his blog in November 2009, when he was already being harassed and having his bank accounts investigated. CCTV cameras mounted by the authorities outside his Beijing studio had monitored his comings and goings for years. He even made a sculpture of one such camera, a replica carved from a single piece of marble. "I believe," the artist continued on his blog, "that no matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy."

In Ai's Remembering (2009), 9,000 children's backpacks mounted on the exterior wall of the Haus der Kunst in Munich spell out the sentence: "She lived happily for seven years in this world." The idea came from the artist's visit to Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake. Seeing the collapsed school buildings, Ai said: "You could see bags and study materials everywhere . . . The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything." In 1995, he had himself photographed dropping an ancient Han Dynasty urn, smashing it on the floor. He had a similarly ancient vessel decorated with the Coca Cola logo. Both works speak of the disregard paid to history during China's recent past, and of the selling of the past as though it were a brand. Questions of value – of unique and irreplacable artefacts, and of individual human lives – are recurrent themes. What at first appeared as acts of cultural, bad-boy vandalism have turned out to be bitter statements about the state of things.

Starving cats and haircuts

There are those, even within the art world, who have viewed Ai with suspicion and regarded him as an opportunist. If anyone doubts his seriousness and sincerity, I suggest they read the English translations of the blogs he posted between 2006 and 2009, when his site was closed down by the Chinese authorities and its contents deleted from cyberspace. Many of these 2,700 posts have now been retrieved and translated into English, in a fascinating and frequently very moving book just published by MIT.

I can think of no equivalent recent writing by an artist in the west, none that confronts political and social realities so eloquently or with such passion and controlled rage. Thoughtful, acerbic, angry, increasingly outspoken, the blogs cover innumerable subjects, from attempts to rescue the cats rounded up and left to starve in warehouses in the clean-up campaign before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to architecture and design. He writes about Andy Warhol, about the destruction of China's heritage and the unthinking cynicism and idiocies of city planners and cultural officialdom. He documents the Chinese government's handling of the 2003 Sars epidemic, the contaminated milk scandal, the "tofu-dregs" construction of the schools that collapsed during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. He damns the mendacity of the Chinese media ("To call them whores would be to degrade sex workers. To call them beasts of burden would humiliate the animal kingdom"), and the hypocrisy of some Chinese public intellectuals. But there are also lighter essays on haircuts, humour, creativity and much more besides. After the closure of his blog, Ai turned to Twitter, saying that in Chinese the 140-character brevity of the form almost amounted to a novella.

Individuals lead complicated and messy lives, artists no more or less than anyone else. Ai's personal history – growing up with his exiled family in a labour camp from the age of one, his years in New York, his return to China and his pivotal role in the Chinese art world, his growing national and international fame – is all of a piece with the art he has made. His apparently iconoclastic appropriations of ancient artefacts and reworkings of antique furniture have a relationship to China's history and its social realities, as much as they do to Marcel Duchamp or Warhol. His blackjack playing on the tables of New Jersey in the 1980s has been used against him by the Chinese media (though blackjack websites in the US are calling for Ai's release, such is his renown); such activities would be almost unremarkable if the gambler in question were Francis Bacon. In his blog, Ai never presents himself as better than anyone else, even if he has campaigned at great personal risk for justice in China.

Diplomacy by stealth

As Ai was being led away at Beijing airport, German politicians and museum directors were flying home after the official opening of The Art of the Enlightenment, a €10m (£8.8m) exhibition at the new National Museum of China, the largest museum in the world. Housed in a building in Tiananmen Square designed by German architects GMP, and the summation of a Chinese and German cultural accord, the exhibition is scheduled to run for a year. In the light of Ai's arrest there have been calls, even within the German government, to close it now. The show's programme of talks and salons is being poorly attended by the Beijing audience. People are afraid. The Enlightenment does not seem to have enlightened the Chinese authorities.

Other big international projects that may go on hold include a festival organised by the British Council, the highpoint of which is meant to be an exhibition of ceramics from the V&A and the British Museum at the China National Museum next year. The former chairman of the Museums Association's ethics committee, Tristram Besterman, has called for a rethink. The Chinese government sees shows such as these – as well as a massive building program, up to 100 new museums a year – as a useful exercise in soft power. The detention of Ai Weiwei does such canny cultural diplomacy no good at all. "If a famous figure like Ai Weiwei can be so blatantly abused in the glare of publicity, what protections do ordinary Chinese citizens receive from their police?" wrote Jerome A Cohen in the South China Post last month. A world expert in Chinese law at New York University, Cohen has pointed out that Ai's detention is illegal even under Chinese law. Where is Ai Weiwei?

satansbed

i heard an interesting arguement that china needs to be a totalitarian state in order to prevent the various ethnic groups from clashing, i havn't done alot of reading on this topic but its an interesting argument at least

Byrnzie

satansbed wrote:

i heard an interesting arguement that china needs to be a totalitarian state in order to prevent the various ethnic groups from clashing, i havn't done alot of reading on this topic but its an interesting argument at least

There's probably a degree of truth to this, but it's certainly not the whole picture. The various ethnic groups were under China's control long before 1949. I think the control freaks in Beijing are more concerned with protecting their own personal power and privelege.
To be honest, I have no idea what the future holds for the politics of China. The situation has no precedent, and the Chinese are a tough nut to crack - not easy to understand, and full of contradictions.
So I really don't know.
But I'll keep trying to figure it out when I get back there next month.

satansbed

Byrnzie wrote:

satansbed wrote:

i heard an interesting arguement that china needs to be a totalitarian state in order to prevent the various ethnic groups from clashing, i havn't done alot of reading on this topic but its an interesting argument at least

There's probably a degree of truth to this, but it's certainly not the whole picture. The various ethnic groups were under China's control long before 1949. I think the control freaks in Beijing are more concerned with protecting their own personal power and privelege.
To be honest, I have no idea what the future holds for the politics of China. The situation has no precedent, and the Chinese are a tough nut to crack - not easy to understand, and full of contradictions.
So I really don't know.
But I'll keep trying to figure it out when I get back there next month.

what do you do there can i ask

Byrnzie

satansbed wrote:

what do you do there can i ask

Teach English.

satansbed

Byrnzie wrote:

satansbed wrote:

what do you do there can i ask

Teach English.

thats pretty cool, my dads aunt was over in afghanistan teaching english over christmas, she is close to 80 and still going, although she hadn;t though for nearly 40 years she used be on contracts in places like bangledesh and jordan trying to sort out there education system

china has always been a place that fasinates me, i would love to visit because the culture seems almost alien to western culture

Byrnzie

satansbed wrote:

thats pretty cool, my dads aunt was over in afghanistan teaching english over christmas, she is close to 80 and still going, although she hadn;t though for nearly 40 years she used be on contracts in places like bangledesh and jordan trying to sort out there education system

china has always been a place that fasinates me, i would love to visit because the culture seems almost alien to western culture

I bet she has some stories to tell.

China did take me a while to get used to, but I've been back in England 3 weeks and still haven't readjusted.
England's weird. I feel more at home in China now than I do in England.

zarocat

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia- ... 45645.html

Chinese authorities have allowed the wife of detained artist and activist Ai Weiwei to meet him, breaking six weeks of isolation from his family, the artist's mother says.

Gao Ying said Ai's wife, Lu Qing, was contacted by police officers and taken to meet her spouse "for a short while" on Sunday.

She said her son had not been mistreated or tortured.

"The fact that Lu Qing could see him was already a very merciful act by the authorities," Gao said, adding that Ai did not go into details about his charge, except that "he did not understand it".

"The rumours that we've heard about him being tortured have been too much for us to take, but now seeing is believing. His condition is good."

Lu did not meet with Ai at a police station, but rather at a location that she was not familiar with, Gao said. The couple sat across a table, with police officers watching them.

"He was especially worried about my health, and of course she had to tell him that I'm doing well and not that I'm at home crying every day," Gao said.

"Lu Qing told him the family is fine and told him not to worry. He was very moved and tears welled up in his eyes."

Gao said Ai, dressed in white, looked healthy and had not lost much weight.

"His face was still red and he still has his beard. He didn't look too skinny," Gao said, adding that Ai had told Lu he exercised by walking.

The couple's brief meeting on Sunday afternoon followed weeks of international controversy about the artist since his detention at Beijing's international airport on April 3.

Ai, 53, is being investigated on suspicion of economic crimes, which his family has said are an unfounded excuse to silence his criticism of the government.

Ai's detention has sparked a barrage of criticism in the West, where Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council - representing EU governments - is expected to raise the 27-nation bloc's concerns in Beijing this week.

Last month, protesters in Hong Kong staged a demonstration against Ai's detention and called for his immediate release.

The burly, bearded and blunt sculptor is one of China's best-recognised contemporary artists.

His career encompasses protests for artistic freedom in 1979, provocative works in the 1990s and a role in designing the Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Ai has produced work spanning porcelain sunflower seeds to names of earthquake victims scrolling on a computer screen.

Unlike many of his peers, he has waded deep into political territory, speaking out on everything from last year's award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo to curbs on the internet.