Page 44 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

All these people, Romans, Red Guards, and Vandals alike, grew skilled in the art of devastation, but inevitably they had to reckon with the fact that their vandalism remained an inferior, dependent skill: no Roman could ever resuscitate a lion (though like Sennacherib’s Assyrians they could carve them beautifully in stone), any more than a Vandal could repair a cut aqueduct or right a toppled column. So, too, the Cultural Revolution laid waste to the age-old, intricate systems of Chinese culture, but like a tsunami it receded almost as quickly as it broke, leaving, aside from an infinity of blighted lives and wasted cities, only the slightest of traces: the ballet (ballet!) Red Detachment of Women (ironically shaped by Western choreography and Western musical instruments), the Gang of Four, Jiang Qing’s collection of pleated skirts.6
Although the most familiar, romantic version of archaeology occurs among ruins, where the present scarcely interferes with the work of exhuming the past, a significant aspect of archaeological investigation, from the very beginnings of the discipline in the Italian Renaissance, occurs on construction sites, in places where past and present collide, when foundation trenches, wine cellars, wells, and basements have suddenly revealed buried secrets, and new buildings, in all their optimism, threaten to become the chief agent of “the injury of time.” If the Cultural Revolution’s assault on old China was brief and savage, the transformations wrought in subsequent decades by the country’s headlong modern development have been much more extensive, and more permanent. As we learn how voraciously hunger for the future can devour connections with what has gone before, salvage archaeology, quick and relatively unglamorous, has become as crucial to investigating—and sometimes transforming—the history of layered cities like Rome, Athens, Alexandria, or Mexico City as epic excavations, and the same is true today in China. For every field of buried warriors in the fields beyond Xi’an, there are thousands of places where traditional brick and wooden buildings, along with the ways of life they foster, are falling to gigantic constructions in glass and steel-reinforced concrete, where social interactions inevitably change, shaped by entirely different senses of scale, space, and community.
Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist turn at the end of the Cultural Revolution also meant that Chinese artifacts began entering the international art market in increasing numbers: remnants of the Red Guards’ depredations, objects revealed in the course of new building, objects no longer wanted as the Cultural Revolution’s campaign against the “Four Olds” shifted from communist austerity to capitalistic pursuit of the new. The prices these relics command have sometimes been as changeable as taste itself, but robbing temples, tombs, and archaeological sites is normally a fairly lucrative business, to the point that looting has become as fearsome an enemy to China’s archaeological past as development.
Furthermore, because imitation is such an essential part of learning any traditional craft, the modern Chinese masters and mistresses of the manual arts have acquired a remarkable level of skill. Contemporary ceramic artists can produce a convincing replica of pottery from any era: a Neolithic bowl, a Tang Dynasty horse, a Ming vase. The world’s auction houses and flea markets are therefore flooded with fakes as well as loot (just as market stalls the world over are filled with Chinese-made replicas of traditional
local crafts, from Maltese embroidery to Venetian glass).
To contemporary China’s bristling tensions between old and new, Ai Weiwei has responded with extraordinary inventive energy, a contemporary artist who is nonetheless deeply, and knowledgeably, rooted in the “Four Olds” of tradition. From his notorious Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995, see p. 34), a series of three photographs that show Weiwei holding, and then releasing, a two-thousand-year- old Han urn to shatter on the floor, he has developed into a much more complex creative force, part of an international generation of artists, like Olafur Eliasson (with whom he has collaborated), who use new forms and definitions of art to call attention to the vulnerable physical legacy of the human past, and ultimately of the earth itself.7 He has shown, moreover, that although the archaeological record can extend back to the very origins of Chinese culture, it can also, as in the case of the people and objects buried by the Sichuan earthquake, reach no further back than yesterday. Even an individual human soul, in his view, can produce its own kind of archaeological stratigraphy: “If you cut into a tree and look at its rings,” Weiwei told The Guardian in a 2018 podcast, “you can see certain years have left more of a mark in the wood. That’s what the
Sichuan earthquake did to me.”
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In 1975, an ailing Ai Qing was allowed to return to Beijing for medical treatment. He never returned to Xinjiang. Weiwei, who was still in school, returned the following year. From cleaning latrines, Ai Qing was rehabilitated and became the vice chairman of the Chinese Writers Association. His son enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, but grew more interested in the Stars, the first avant- garde group of artists to follow up on the Cultural Revolution. Closely aligned with the democracy movement, the Stars held both formal and informal exhibitions until the government crackdown on the Democracy Wall induced many of them to leave China for Europe or the United States. Like many of Beijing’s young artists and writers, Weiwei began to frequent the suggestive ruins of the Yuanmingyuan, the sprawling, luxurious imperial palace built as an alternative to the Forbidden City over the course of the eighteenth century. With a name that means “Gardens of Perfect Brightness;” the complex is also known commonly, if inaccurately, as the Old Summer Palace—far from being a summer retreat, it was a favorite palace of many of the Qing emperors who ruled Beijing from 1644 to 1912. A photograph from 1977 shows Ai Weiwei standing in the ruined gardens before a series of derelict stone arches, sketchbook in hand, a reminder that he began his artistic life as an aspiring painter. The arches behind him belong to the Yuanmingyuan’s most exotic feature: a set of pavilions called the Xiyang Lou, the “Western Mansions,” designed in a hybrid Sino-European style by the Italian Jesuit court painter Giuseppe Castiglione, with stone construction predominating over traditional wood. A French Jesuit, Michel Benoist, contributed a series of ingenious waterworks, including fountains and an elaborate water clock that would eventually play an important role in Ai Weiwei’s artistic career. By the nineteenth century the Yuanmingyuan had already fallen into disrepair, but in October of 1860 it was brutally sacked and plundered by French
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