Page 23 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

time, we installed Rooted Upon, an installation of a hundred roots, on Soft Ground, a wool carpet covering the largest room of the museum. China has a long and very strong tradition of intellectuals appreciating nature; it could be a rock, a root, a piece of bamboo, or other elements, abandoned elements, which have a unique shape, or an unexplained, abstract condition. Very often in the West, these elements of nature are seen as imperfect or defective. That is not the case in China. The Chinese worship all these defects in nature. The Chinese have always thought that these elements carry special significance. They would be placed on a scholars’ desk as a model for studying nature.
It’s interesting also because you said that trees are intertwined, that they communicate through their roots, but of course the trees also have a memory, which can be read in the rings.
Yes, the rings clearly reflect the different years with all its sunshine and all its rain. The rings are like fingerprints.
Memory is a keyword in your work. We live in a digital age, with exponential growth of information. However maybe amnesia is somewhere at the very core of the digital age, because information does not necessarily mean more memory, which is why historians are concerned and they have told me that we need to protest against forgetting. You talk a lot about memory and I’ve found a quote here from our previous interview, where you say: “we are advancing so fast, that memory is a very rare thing, which we can still grasp. This is the easiest way to hang on when you move fast. The faster we move on and go to the future, the more we also turn to the past.” Can you say a little bit about what memory is? How do you define memory and what is the importance of memory in your work?
Very often we misunderstand memory. We think that memory is a record of our past, but memory is our interpretation of our past. Memory is never an honest record and we only recognize our present moment through the reflection in the mirror that we call memory. It is clearly a sad condition for humanity if we no longer have time to look in the mirror, to reflect on our past. That will drive humans crazy because we can no longer see our footsteps. We can no longer understand how we live, or recognize our logic, rationality, and dreams.
I never really understood the importance of memory until I became very old. I think it started in the ’90s, when I returned to China from New York. I was a so-called modernist and I went to New York to try to cut myself off from the past. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution. The main effort of the Communist Party, up until today, has been to cut off the past two or three thousand years, because it is necessary to cut off the past in order to start a revolution. The revolutionary rationality has to be based on so-called “new” conditions. We observe similar kinds of problems with modernism in the West. How much do we really know about our past? I think that is always questionable. When I went back to China, and luckily had nothing to do, my principal interest was in going to the antique market.
That’s when we met. I didn’t meet you in New York, but I met you in the ’90s, when I came to China to visit underground artists.
Yes, it was in 1996 and at that time, you didn’t pay attention to me because I was not an artist yet. I was one of the jury members examining Chinese contemporary art and giving awards to those artists. I remember you from that time. You were much younger, but you have not changed.
Yes, it was a long and short time ago! At that time, you were working a lot with antiquities. As you know, Cahiers d’Art has a strong connection to the past. Panofsky used to say, “The future is invented with fragments from the past” and so it has been for Cahiers d’Art, through Picasso and Matisse’s connection, but also through the rediscovery of very ancient art, even prehistoric art. When Staffan Ahrenberg revived Cahiers d’Art, in 2012, he asked Sam Keller, Isabela Mora, and I to work on the contents, and the first issue we did was the late Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly was also a big admirer of Niemeyer, like you. He loved the curves of his buildings. We went to see Ellsworth Kelly and he told us that his geometric art was very inspired by Romanesque churches from the Middle Ages, by old prehistoric findings in America, and also by indigenous cultures. This is of course very much connected to the history of Cahiers d’Art, because Cahiers d’Art always made this link between antiquity and contemporaneity. The other day, I interviewed Luchita Hurtado. She is a wonderful painter, ninety-nine years old and still very young, and she remembered the work with her ex-husband Wolfgang Paalen on Cahiers d’Art in 1952. She made photographs to illustrate a text by Wolfgang Paalen about the Olmec civilization, and she told me that they were very interested in connecting modern art movements— surrealism, for instance—to very old indigenous cultures in Mexico, in a similar way as what you did with Chinese art. Can you tell us a little bit about this investigation and research into antiquities, and the moment you began bringing them into your art?
I started to collect the day I went back to China. My brother brought me to an antique market because he worried that I would feel no connection to China. Before I left, I had said that this was a land I would never come back to. So he brought me to the market and I saw some pieces there that shocked me. It was just a bunch of old wood bars and I realized that they were elements to structure a stool, and the wood was a kind of ebony, a beautiful wood that is as solid as iron and as smooth as skin, or silk. I bought it for very little money and quickly put the stool back together at home. And I was so surprised! Chinese architecture and furniture do not need nails. It can be put back together very easily. It is the earliest modernist thinking.
Without nails? It’s not fixed?
Yes, you could take a building apart and put it back together.
Like a kit?
Yes, it’s like LEGO, but in a much more sophisticated and meaningful way. It’s functional, it’s not a toy, but it really reflects the aesthetic, the craftsmanship, and the understanding of the nature of materials all at once. So, for me this furniture was brilliant and I started my collection. I am probably the most significant collector of early Chinese jade, as well as furniture, silk, whatever I could see in the market. I made that my daily practice during the first six years, from 1993 to 2000. During this period, I probably looked at millions of objects.
And then you stopped?
I still do it, but collecting during those six years was a daily practice.
We met in the middle of that period.
Yes, I had to go to the market every day to look at every piece— even small or broken pieces—and expand my understanding. I had to figure out when the piece was from—what came before and after—
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