Chinese Artist/Activist Ai Weiwei Detained

Memo #71

Alison Bailey – abailey [at] exchange.ubc.ca

Famous artist, tweeter, and critic of the Chinese authorities Ai Weiwei (艾未未) disappeared on April 3rd, 2011. This marks the latest in a series of arrests and detentions of human rights activists, bloggers, and lawyers in the Chinese government’s crackdown in response to fears of a jasmine revolution in China. Yet rather than having links to a ‘colour’ revolution, it is Ai’s self-assigned role as memory-keeper for the child victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and obsessive recorder of state-sanctioned acts of violence and surveillance that has led to his detention. Ai Weiwei has taken on the time-honoured task of Confucian historian, allocating praise or blame or imperial censor critiquing a ruler’s shortcomings. His is a modern take on ancient roles: documenting abuses and criticizing injustices by using the internet and social media.

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake marked a turning point for Ai, the son of revolutionary poet Ai Qing (艾靑) and member of China’s cultural elite. As an artist, he created moving monuments in memory of the dead children crushed by shoddily constructed schools. As an activist, he mobilized large numbers of ordinary citizens to gather and record the names of the dead at a time when the Chinese authorities were reluctant to do so. Ai Weiwei’s provocative documentary “Disturbing the Peace” (Laoma Tihua 老媽蹄花) records the treatment meted out to him and his associates during the trial in Chengdu for earthquake victims’ advocate Tan Zuoren (譚作人). This film is a forceful statement of the imperative to remember what authorities would prefer forgotten. However, while the formal channels of criticism open to imperial censors were legally enshrined, victim advocacy in China is now often labeled as criminally subversive.

As a new-style historian and critical advocate, Ai has documented himself, his art, and acts of state harassment through his constant use of cameras. In so doing, he has subverted the unswerving camera surveillance fixed upon him. He is perhaps the most famous of a growing number of independent Chinese documentary filmmakers, artists, and writers who are the new historians of China’s forgotten stories, uneven development, and ensuing social problems. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The unofficial historians of new China, like Ai Weiwei, insist that we remember.