‘You do not advise an artist. They advise you’: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei

WLid is the role of an creative person in coeval times?“As an creative person, as an single(a), you have to defend what you believe, right? Because that is exactly the kind of work that would help human society,” says Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist who has, through his works, addressed some of the most pressing issues of our times: the excesses of authoritarianism, the threats facing democracy, large-scale global migration caused by war, and more recently, artificial intelligence.Ai, 68, perhaps the best known contemporary Chinese artist -- and some would leave the word contemporary out of that description -- is in Delhi till Saturday to promote his first-ever exhibition in the country. His works range from films and performances to wall panels that employ toy bricks and resemble pointillistic paintings to neolithic pottery and stone tools which he reinterprets as installations. They not only pose discomfiting questions to its viewers but also challenge dominant narratives upheld by political regimes.“You don’t advise an artist. They advise you,” he says, when asked what he would like young artists of today to focus on. In the same breath, Ai laments the entitlement of the youth in Western countries. “They wish for freedom, but freedom to do what? They do not believe that they should fight and sacrifice for [any values]. If one or two generations do this, then this is a [society] that is in decline.” Ai is dressed in a pair of comfortable pedal pushers and a light jacket, and the interview is happening outside Nature Morte gallery in Dhan Mill, where his exhibition opened on January 15. Of the 14 works on display, one installation was made in the mid-1990s, while the others are more recent — three pieces replicate works by modernists VS Gaitonde and SH Raza as well as a Pichvai painting and were made last year. These works have been brought to India by Weiwei’s Italy-based gallerist, Maurizio Rigillo of Galleria Continua.It is clear what Ai values; his career reflects a deep engagement with the most pressing concerns of our times, often in ways that expose the hidden, inner workings of governance. The impact on human life remains the beating heart of his practice.For instance, his film Coronation (2020), edited remotely and in secret, used footage shot by volunteers from inside Wuhan (including the out-of-bounds labyrinthine medical centre that came up almost overnight) during the pandemic. Amidst the global refugee crisis in 2015 which resulted in migration of millions from West Asia to Europe, Ai’s focus remained unwaveringly on children who were forced to drop out of school, and the men and women who lost their lives in an attempt to reach safer shores. He made several works during this period, including the film, Human Flow, and an installation titled Porcelain Pillar with Refugee Motif (2017) depicting the themes of the refugee crisis — the latter is on display at Nature Morte till the exhibition ends on February 22.Ai first came into the crosshairs of his government — and shot to global fame — in 2008, when thousands of school-going children died after their buildings collapsed in an earthquake in Sichuan. The artist undertook a project to uncover the exact number of missing or dead and enlisted volunteers in a citizen investigation team to visit victims’ homes to collect data. Officials repeatedly thwarted the process, arresting the volunteers and destroying their notes. In 2009, Ai created a large-scale work titled Remembering. In it, hundreds of school bags of children spelt out a line uttered by the mother of one of the victims: “All I want is to let the world remember she had been living happily for seven years.”“If I hadn’t engaged with that tragedy, I would not be the artist I am today,” he would later write.The zeitgeist chased Ai Weiwei. In 2010, Tate Modern in London displayed his work titled Sunflower Seeds, in which thousands of porcelain sculptures that resembled the seeds of the sunflower were strewn over the ground. Ai invited the public to walk over these seeds — handmade by over 1,500 Chinese artisans — to make a clear statement on the suppression of the common man and woman. The work came at a time when the clouds of collective dissension were gathering globally, resulting in large-scale pro-democracy protests like the Arab Spring that spread across West Asia and Northern Africa within a short year.Ai is no stranger to protests seeking democratic values from an authoritarian communist state. As a student of the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. However, in his most recent book, On Censorship which was published on January 29, Ai muddies the picture.“The problems facing democracy are not new, but while democracy is a good idea, it’s never been really achieved, even in the West. [Was it Winston Churchill who said] democracy is not a good idea, but it’s still the best way of working? We know how billionaires and big money fund elections in the West. China is not even a democracy — but for the past 40 years, the system has worked very well. From the poorest country it has become the second largest economy in the world,” he told HT.That seems like high praise coming from a man whose father, famed poet Ai Qing, was forcefully relocated during China’s cultural revolution; whose own studio was razed to the ground on two separate occasions; and who was placed in detention for 81 days in 2011, and later put under house arrest before finally left his country of birth to live in Europe in 2015. Ai only just ended his exile and returned to Beijing last month.“I am not speaking for them, but China does not have a hundred military bases all over the world, or interfere with nations and overthrow their governments, arrest their presidents and kidnap them while other democracies continue to watch, and nobody says anything about it. So you see, [democracy] is really an act that they are doing all the time. It permits aggression toward weaker societies for the benefit of [the so-called democratic state],” he says. His next project is a film on Ukraine which his gallerist hopes will be ready by the fall of 2026. The artist is expected to visit the beleaguered state that has been under siege from Russia since 2022, later this month.The exhibition in Delhi also includes works that show Ai’s newfound focus on India, where a growing set of collectors have been viewing his works at the annual India Art Fair (this year’s edition is on now) for the past several editions. This time around, Neugerriemschneider, a Berlin-based gallery is showing Weiwei’s Butterfly (Red) (2022), which uses toy bricks to depict Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912).At Nature Morte, a massive 10-panel toy brick work depicts Ai’s take of French impressionist Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. His choice to use Indian modernists’ for his toy brick works came out of his desire to “relate to local culture” he says.“India and China need to have more communication, and think together about global challenges.”“Our decision to show Ai Weiwei is to present globally diverse voices and expressions, but one that is rooted in shared historical cultures. We have already sold from the show, and I believe Indians are now beginning to carve a niche [as collectors] in global art markets,” says Aparjita Jain, co-director of Nature Morte.