Page 145 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

One day, in a hopefully distant future, God will inevitably appear in front of WW (God is this tall, white-haired man with a long beard— this info is for WW, who, in his life, political and otherwise, has ignored any self-appointed authority). And He will say unto WW: “By now your art has confused everyone—your time is up!”1
In April 2011, the police then beat Him to it—using exactly the same reasoning as a pretext to lock WW up for three months. But more about that later.2
While WW will delight in leaving us confused, this artist’s mind is anything but confused. Razor-sharp, it cut through the many sediments the art world has layered over the past hundred years of modernism and postmodernism. And while living in New York, he made his choices: instinct may have led him to stop painting, or as he says somewhere, a studio overflowing with unwanted paintings, and made him turn away from a two-dimensional finished product to the ever-expanding universe of conceptual art. He swallowed Duchamp, Picabia, Warhol, and the other masters—he can quote their key lines anytime, he digested them, shit some of it out in his early works, and then orbited off completely on his own [...].
Exactly: digesting Duchamp, that was the foundational experience. Because the twenty-three-year-old who left for the US was still a self-declared “post-impressionist” painter: he’d gotten his hands on a book about impressionism and a monograph on van Gogh, which had left him in awe—by contrast, he’d thrown out a second monograph, about Jasper Johns and his unintelligible daubs. Painting had offered him a way to escape this Chinese variant of communism that presented itself as an ongoing disaster: first his father had been stamped a “right-wing deviationist” and enemy of the state for incomprehensible reasons; major and even very minor decisions in Chinese everyday life invariably ran counter to the official propaganda and defied any attempt to understand them based on reason or human sentiment—on the contrary, one must never trust either of those two. The only escape into empathetic feeling, into emotion and passion, was through painting, where he alone was responsible for his choices of line and shading and color. His brief enrolment at the Parsons School of Design, New York, in 1982, then brought his first exposure to the ideas of Duchamp and Warhol. He observed his American fellow students, who took to painting with unrestrained and ferocious energy—but focused entirely on the what and had no regard for the why, which was, to his mind, now the very central question: why should someone express himself as an artist? He gradually realized that using the medium of painting, or a physically real, material product more generally, to convey his frame of mind was no longer his thing. The most important attribute of the artist’s existence as a whole, he now thought, was the intellect, which had been able to illuminate so little in the China of the Cultural Revolution in which he had come of age—which is probably why he’s been practicing its exercise so relentlessly ever since. Duchamp’s ideas about the artist’s existence as an attitude, a lifestyle, helped him find his own identity. Exposure to Duchamp’s work had dealt a lethal blow to his inner post-impressionist—and more than that, in the late 1980s, it freed him from the need to produce works of art at all. He didn’t feel compelled to make art again until 1999, when Harald Szeemann nominated him for that year’s Venice Biennale and he had to live up to the expectations that
entailed. Neither the Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1994) nor the photographic series Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) nor even the first compositions made of deconstructed furniture he made starting in 1996 had been things he’d wanted to perceive as art. He considered them mere diversions.
But if he had thus reached a distinctive orbit all his own, he was not to be found in it after April 2011, when he was arrested, kept in prison for three months, and placed under house arrest for another year. The authorities are still withholding his passport, illegally depriving him of his freedom of movement.
Find him? A person who jets around the world a few times a year; a person who is finally getting in overdose what he would have deserved long ago: worldwide acclaim, interviews, invitations to exhibit, to realize projects, to teach, to design myriad buildings in China and other parts of the world, to spend time with established dignitaries, to shed some of his ample charisma on them and others, and so on. What kind of persona does it take to trigger all this?
Some things we can tell from looking at his art. Seen with a Western eye, his approach deliberately favours ambiguity, a tangible ambiguity: there is hardware there, and software can be assumed. We can sense a person who has a very distinct view about what art is and what it is not; and what it takes to grab or compose a thing and move it from one sphere to the other. But what is this distinct view, especially where we lack contextual knowledge of Chinese things and thoughts? Is a cubic meter of tea the same thing here and there (Ton of Tea, 2006)? If not, does WW care?
Watch WW give a presentation about his art: having preserved that same modesty about himself as when he was living in New York, where he could not even think of a reason to get up in the morning, he will rush his audience through fifty images for seconds each, just long enough for each image to sink in with powerful visual impact and as a question mark. Yet he does not intend to issue any explanations, to fill in the gaps, or to alleviate any resulting sense of confusion. He neither contends nor fails to contend. Of course he knows it all, knows exactly what he is doing, but also knows about the power of his own myth. We should be aware that he is very, very clever. And may just be enjoying himself ...
With a more encompassing gaze, now inclusive of Chinese characteristics, we may find another complexity. It is rooted in a specific strength inherent in Chinese culture: the capacity to fuse contradictions into one single proposition. To put it simply: while in a Western mind, according to our Cartesian binary logic, a thing is either this or that, in a Chinese mind, that same thing may well be this and that at the same time. Take WW’s work Whitewash—132 Neolithic vases, each one a beautiful piece of art and a relic, but one-fourth of them completely covered or destroyed by white industrial paint. The work fuses two contradictory paradigms of art creation: the Western paradigm of “avant-garde” art, which refers to a radical destruction of tradition, breaking with the past to make way for entirely new thinking; and the classic Chinese paradigm of great respect for tradition and therefore of art creation as an evolving continuum drawing from the wealth of Chinese culture. Square this with a most sophisticated understanding of conceptual art. Then add scale and Chinese production methods, where factor costs are so low that they enable a bold artist such as WW to think big. That is as close as you may ever get to his formula. And
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