He made the Birds Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing so he'll be brought up forever.
I was introduced to his work as a kid and people seem to always mention him and his work just to say "China bad." Everytime I try to listen to why it just sounds like grey unlistenable sludge. Partially because I don't know much about history in general so I don't know what the mentioned parts of Chinese history are about. My final reason to give up is because I know much/all of what I hear is probably whitewashed propaganda. If he indeed has good criticism, I don't trust Western media to not twist his words out of their original meaning.
I need to start with a I love China and have lived there.
Ai is like Adam Curtis. Anti-power and for the individual. The stadium he designed had a big nationalistic showing and then China increased its censorship on the internet soon after the Olympics.
The internet issue is probably the thing that made him more outwardly critical. This man was exploding globally and he couldn’t have an instagram. This led to all forms of issues coming up in 2010-2011 and he ended up in jail.
In his head he is an artist who wanted to share his work with the world. In CCP eyes the internet issue is far more complex than “I want to share my art with the world”, and I think the CCP is right, but the guy went to jail over it.
Would you be a little kooky for a decade or so if you went to jail for posting?
In all seriousness he had been more critical of the west since his ‘exile’ and this year said Western censorship is worse.
Ai Wei Wei destroyed a 2000 year old artefact for backpats from some whites. CPC should've executed him. CPC has an issue of being soft on xenophile compradors.
I think that’s probably an extreme reaction, they let him design their Olympic stadium after that event so they didn’t really care at all.
Any sources saying why he landed in jail for posting on Instagram? I was an apolitical lib when I saw his Instagram video where he wouldn't open the door for Chinese cops and they came in anyways. All in Chinese so I had no idea why.
It’s not as simple as I made it sound. He was just highly critical of the entire project of the “Great Firewall” and really of any failure of the Chinese government. At the same time he was opening a studio in the most “Western city” of Shanghai, and had parties, and western expats would go because they knew of him.
The Chinese government was just really nervous that this was going to blow up their entire attempt at staving off western cultural domination on the internet. And China has been proven right over the last 15 years about the absolute chaos western internet could bring to a country.
The individualist spirit of the modern art world (specifically Brooklyn, NY’s) just wasn’t compatible to what China was trying to do.