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To be sure, what he did also drew vehement opposition on the Web and not all of it masterminded by the government: opposition against his style of argument, for example, which was felt to be too confrontational, and certainly against his actions, which left those he attacked, usually the authorities, including the top echelons of government, no room for face-saving maneuvers—in a word, they were too un-Chinese. The most insightful commentators were probably those who focused on his destruction of ancient cultural assets, stoking a sense of incomprehension over how the West could possibly celebrate such a gesture. In fact, very few exceptions aside, WW’s art had never been on display in China—the country’s galleries and institutions had seen to that for a while, in preemptive obedience to the censors. Granted, his works initially demand too much of the perceptual apparatus of the untrained Chinese beholder, whose artistic understanding is solely attuned to the values of traditional Chinese art—most importantly, beauty and harmony. Other critics sought to dismiss him as a covert Westerner whose activism, they alleged, was designed to burnish his image and perhaps even to raise his market value in the West, if he wasn’t altogether a product, perhaps even a tool, of Western imperialism. So there had long been so much cause for conflict, so much potential for a political explosion, that the ideological cleaning staff of the Ministry of Culture had to hand over the matter to the internal security authorities.
Curiously enough, a delegation of the City of Beijing had approached him only weeks before his arrest to offer him a seat in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s second parliament after the legislative National People’s Congress. He asked for some time to consider. In the end, the border police resolved his dilemma when they hauled him in. We will probably never know who ordered the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau to arrest and interrogate him. True, domestically, a situation that was getting out of hand had been cleaned up. Internationally, however, the People’s Republic paid, and still pays, a horrendous price that those in charge had failed to anticipate: the collateral damage done to China’s image will not be repaired for a long time. And this very sequence of official measures taken against him over the last few years was what made WW the living Chinese person most widely known to Western media audiences. In some interviews, he courteously thanked the Chinese government that has just stepped down. Did they perhaps lay the groundwork for a Nobel Peace Prize? Will the new government—simply by being a little softer on him, or even instituting a policy of greater openness more generally—be able to remove his name from the hypothetical list of candidates? He knows that he couldn’t have achieved his global status on his own. He also owes gratitude to the global visual arts scene, which stood by him with unparalleled solidarity—and with much more leverage than, say, the literary world had in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. It’s not as though the world of contemporary art as such carried any weight in the eyes of Official China. But it is very adept at recruiting Western politicians for its purposes by building sufficient media pressure. WW had secured the highest possible degree of international visibility by role-playing with the international media—by adopting a stance of unrestrained openness, clever and naïve at once, sometimes at the risk of exposing himself as well, certainly at the price of losing all control over this immense media output—after all, there was no way he was going to get those who wrote about him to clear any quote
with him. The journalists, for their part, made the most out of the only Chinese person in China to open his mouth without reservations, by putting words in his mouth like you wouldn’t believe—that much he could bank on.
There is no doubt disagreement within Official China over how to cope with the WW phenomenon, with this guy whose defect is that he loves his country and not the Party. Who should take responsibility for him, at which level? And what is better for China’s image: keeping him on a short leash at home or putting him into storage abroad, where dissidents have always reliably marginalized themselves—but would it be the same with this one? Only, democracy will no longer turn people into heroes, because it doesn’t need them. But that’s a while off.
We have not talked this time about WW the architect—hundreds of well-intentioned copies of his architectural language all over China ought to be his pride, as well as the “Bird’s Nest” stadium. We have not talked about WW the archivist, who had the foresight to make a daily photographic or filmic record of the construction of secular undertakings such as the “Bird’s Nest,” Beijing’s new airport terminal, or the colossus of Beijing itself. We have not talked about WW the accumulator, with his little camera continuously molding a memory to be sunk into the hard drive of what his life is about. We have not talked about WW the cook, who can tirelessly prepare the most memorable dumplings. We have not talked about WW the child, whose playfulness and unadulterated sensitivity open up paths to seemingly inexplicable matters. We have not talked about WW the curator, WW the designer, WW the most generous of friends, and so on.
If the tall, white-haired man with the long beard would grant me a wish for a day, it would be to share just once all that sparkling in WW’s brain.
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