Remember Ai Weiwei

Our incredible west coast sales rep, Patricia Nelson, pulled together this fantastic roundup of coverage that encourages us to Remember Ai Weiwei.

Global attention is mounting over the imprisonment of artist and dissident Ai Weiwei.

Terry Teachout chided the art establishment for abandoning Ai Weiwei in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Have Our Cultural Stewards Abandoned One of Their Own?”, especially taking to task the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as they prepare to open exhibitions of Chinese art organized in cooperation with the Chinese government.

Wall Street Journal blog “Speakeasy” reports on massive protest for human rights in Hong Kong where Cuban artist Geandy Pavon projected an image Ai Weiwei’s face onto the Chinese consulate building. Another WSJ blog, “Scene,” reports British Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor has dedicated his biggest-ever sculpture, Leviathan, to Ai Weiwei, who was detained by Chinese authorities in April.

CNA English News reports that an installation of a thousand chairs awaits Ai Weiwei in Taipei. CBC News announced that Ai Weiwei has been made an honorary member of Britain's Royal Academy of Art, the latest effort by the international arts community to keep the spotlight on his detention. China Digital Times published a moving article, “Ai Weiwei Is a Creative Artist” by Li Xianting and Zhang Yihe.

On May 16th, The Guardian reported that Ai Weiwei’s wife, Lu Qing, was briefly allowed to visit with her husband for 20 minutes—the first time she has seen him since his April 3rd arrest.

Alison Klayman, director of the documentary film on Ai Weiwei, “NEVER SORRY,” appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss her experiences with Weiwei. Here is a clip of Klayman’s film. Financial Times wrote a long piece on Klayman on Friday, June 3.

Ai Weiwei’s Blog was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times on May 31st:

The softer and sillier side of the imprisoned artist is in evidence in a new book, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, published in April by MIT Press. The collection, edited by Beijing-based art critic Lee Ambrozy, is the first major translation of Ai's writings into English. It came out about the same time that Ai was being whisked out of the Beijing airport by military police to an unknown location to face unknown charges.

Yesterday, The Observer reviewed Ai Weiwei’s Blog:

This collection of blog posts, put out with superb coincidental timing, makes plain that Ai is much more than the playful, somewhat exhibitionist dilettante of Chinese art he sometimes seems. His posts go to the heart of moral and ethical fault lines running through his country, raising issues that China boosters in the west prefer to sidestep. The People's Republic, he suggests, is like a runner surging ahead, but with a heart condition. His blogs are a call not for political change, as such, but for a cleaner morality in the last major state ruled by a communist party. He homes in on the scandals and disasters that victimise ordinary citizens but leave the officials responsible largely unscathed, such as the many children buried alive in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 because their schools were made of substandard materials (known in China as “tofu” buildings), the funds having been creamed off by local bureaucrats.

“They close their mouths and do not discuss corruption, they avoid the tofu-dregs construction,” he writes of the official attitude to the disaster that killed some 80,000 people in all. “They conceal the facts, and in the name of ‘stability’ they persecute, threaten and imprison the parents of the deceased children who are demanding to know the truth.”

The Observer review concludes, “At the opening of Circle of Animals in Manhattan, Michael Bloomberg, the New York mayor, linked Ai's detention to ‘the billions of people who do not have the most fundamental of all human rights… free expression.’” The current literature on China, dissent, and free speech, along with Ai Weiwei’s Blog, serves as a reminder to not only “Remember Ai Weiwei,” but also to remember what freedom of expression means.

 

Comments

[Private Investigator NYC]

So what is the real meaning of freedom of expression? I think it is all about showing our thoughts and feelings without any risk and worries.