Ever since denouncing his own consultancy on China’s National Stadium as the “fake smile” of propaganda for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the artist Ai Weiwei has been having some problems with authority. Last year he was detained for nearly three months, then put under house arrest until just a couple of weeks ago, whereupon he wrote in London’s Guardian that “China has not established the rule of law and if there is a power above the law there is no social justice.” He still hasn’t got his passport back.
Of course this only stokes Ai’s celebrity, which has a lot to do with positioning himself as an artful antagonist to injustice. At heart he’s a concepts guy, and his biggest concepts — transparency and persistence — seem very useful to the study of an ascendant China at its historic crossroads between repressive hermeticism and gluttonous freedom. Fortunately Ai has been keeping videographers on hand to record his various agitations, and a handful of the resulting documentaries screen for four consecutive Sundays this month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Fairytale, courtesy Fake Design.
Tracking the legacy of a tragic rampage that left six security officers dead, One Recluse peers into a morass of highly dubious state-controlled jurisprudence. Disturbing the Peace, and its followup, So Sorry, involve a lawyer investigating the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which claimed hundreds of children’s lives because their school buildings weren’t safe. The lawyer’s quest for justice drew enmity from the state, which drew Ai’s documentary interest, which drew further enmity onto him, which drew further documentary interest. The measure of his tenacity isn’t that he recorded himself getting roughed up by cops; it’s that he recorded himself returning later to endure the bureaucratic tedium of filing official complaints.
Fairytale, courtesy Fake Design.
