Conversations

Conversations

Ai Weiwei

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2021 Ai Weiwei

Chapter 1 copyright © 2021 Andrew Solomon

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-55214-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ai, Weiwei, author.

Title: Conversations / Ai Weiwei.

Other titles: Interviews. Selections. English

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019058902 (print) | LCCN 2019058903 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231197380 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231197397 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231552141 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ai, Weiwei—Interviews. | Dissenters, Artistic—China—Interviews.

Classification: LCC N7349.A5 A35 2020 (print) | LCC N7349.A5 (ebook) | DDC 700.92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058902

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058903

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Contents

Preface

1   Conversation with Andrew Solomon

2   Conversation with Evan Osnos

3   Conversation with Tim Marlow

4   Conversation with Amale Andraos and Carol Becker

5   Conversation with Vivian Yee

6   Conversation with Nicholas Baume

Contributor Biographies

Preface

In 2017, I presented Good Fences Make Good Neighbors with the Public Art Fund in New York City. This multisite exhibition included more than three hundred works distributed throughout the city’s five boroughs. The works focused on the global refugee crisis, the greatest displacement of people since World War II. Filming my documentary, Human Flow, brought me face to face with the people and places impacted by this tragedy and directly inspired the exhibition.

Good Fences was also a homecoming of sorts. I was an art student during the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s. The political and social atmosphere became increasingly suffocating, and I decided to leave for the extreme opposite—New York City, the capital of individualism and capitalism. I lived in the city for a decade in the 1980s as an undocumented immigrant, college dropout, and artist. Back then, the opportunity to show my work to the public was unimaginable.

Conversations consists of six public discussions held in New York City during Good Fences. Such conversations involving academic, cultural, and journalistic institutions provided a platform to discuss the most crucial issues of our time: freedom of expression, human rights, and the idea that humanity is one. These conversations are necessary to continue the fight to maintain our shared values and freedoms.

Three years on, I am under self-quarantine due to the newest global phenomenon: an indiscriminate pandemic that knows no borders. At this time, it is more important than ever to be thoughtful and hopeful about our humanity—home or no home, crisis or no crisis—because this is worth striving for.

Ai Weiwei

1   Conversation with Andrew Solomon

Alexandra Munroe   Our speakers tonight hardly need an introduction. We know Weiwei as the world’s most famous artist and activist. He is also a curator of some of the most influential shows in the history of Chinese art; an architect of an entire art neighborhood in eastern Beijing; the first artist possibly anywhere in the world to see the internet as a space of free mobilization, as a forum for free expression—especially in China, where such mobilization and constellation convening of a forum were unprecedented in modern Chinese history. When Evan Osnos asked him why he spent eight hours a day blogging and on Twitter, before the Chinese government shut down his blog in 2009, Weiwei responded, “It’s no different than making art. My stance in life is my art.” Robert Bergold some years later asked him what advice he had for young artists; Weiwei responded, “Forget about art. Fight for freedom.”

Andrew Solomon is also someone who needs absolutely no introduction. His honors go on and on, but what they really recognize is Andrew’s influence and power as today’s most transformational public intellectual. He is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture, and psychology as a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and as the president of the beloved PEN America. Most important for us tonight, he is an activist on LGBT rights, mental health, and the arts. Andrew’s books, his essays, his TED talks, and his upcoming film Far from the Tree are connected by a deep humanity, a compassion so deep and so true that it can save—and actually has saved—hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

What Weiwei and Andrew share is a passionate belief in the rights and the dignity of each individual life. Whether you are a poet in jail somewhere in Xinjiang province or a manic-depressive in a psychiatric ward in Akron, Ohio, it is this alliance of mind and mission that brings the two together for this special PEN America evening. May I introduce Andrew Solomon and Ai Weiwei.

Andrew Solomon   Well, the thing about being introduced by Alexandra Munroe is that one hardly need say anything further. It’s a privilege and an honor for me to sit here with Ai Weiwei. As Alexandra mentioned, I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine. I went to China in 1992, persuaded that there must be interesting art happening there, but with no real access to what it was until I arrived.

It’s hard now, in this age of internationalism, to remember a time when people here insisted that if what was being made outside of the so-called Western developed world looked like what was being made here, then it was derivative. If it looked different, then it was provincial. It took a great shift in consciousness for us to arrive at the international art world that seems so obvious to us today. When I was doing my research in China, Ai Weiwei was in New York, but everyone in China talked about him. I came home with his number, but I was too overwhelmed and didn’t dial it. It’s a real privilege, finally, to be sitting here with you. Thank you so much for doing this.

I think I’ll begin by asking you to comment on the word dissident. I find, in having written a lot about art that falls outside of the so-called Western mainstream, that many artists resist the title of dissident. They say that it somehow trivializes the purity of their artistic expression. Others claim it as a banner. You have done more to work through what it means to be both a dissident and an artist, and indeed a dissident artist, than almost anyone else. Tell me how you feel about that word.

Ai Weiwei   Dissident means very different things in different societies. I only can speak about what a dissident is in China, which is just having different opinions and different expressions. Expression can easily become very different if you don’t self-censor, you don’t recognize the totalitarian’s power, and you don’t see that power having any legitimacy. If you think you have the right to vote or the right to write down your ideas or to put them on the internet, you become a dissident. It doesn’t take too much effort.

It’s very hard to imagine that, among 1.4 billion people, there are very few people who can be called dissidents. It’s not that they are not smart or that they don’t have different opinions, but there’s no way to carry out an idea, to write down a clear sentence, to state your mind, or to talk to the public. In most times, this is not possible. Today, it’s even harder in China. The internet is a regional internet there, and still it’s dangerous to have any original thinking about social or political topics.

Andrew Solomon   Do you think there is a conflict, as some artists maintain there is, between adhering to the nuance integral to a work of art and adhering to the kind of broad strokes that are often required to support a revolution? How do you manage to combine in your own work that feeling of nuance and the energy and the emphasis on freedom that suffuses everything you do?

Ai Weiwei   I think you need character. That means you need to be a bit stubborn, and you have to believe what you do is right or what you believe is right. It is quite simple because I’ve never been very well educated. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and my father was a writer. He spent time in the 1930s in Paris learning art and then, right after he came back to China, he was put in jail by the nationalists. Later he became a refugee and part of the revolution. He established the new nation with that first generation of revolutionary leaders.

Also, he was quite recognized, the best-known poet in China, but after eight years, China changed. He became one among 350,000– 500,000 Chinese intellectuals who were punished as rightists. I grew up in that kind of family, which was called antirevolutionary or anti–the people. They always told me that I’m the kind of person who can be educated. That means you come from bad blood, but you can be reeducated, which is true. Since then, I have hated any kind of education. I never finished my university degree, even though I got into several universities. I was quite capable of studying, but I just hated school.

Andrew Solomon   Talk a little bit about the role that your father and your father’s reeducation played in your emerging sense of self. He was put through really quite serious privations, and you were witness to some of those privations. Did that set you in your determination as an artist?

Ai Weiwei   I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and everybody was in bad shape except Chairman Mao. Everybody had been put in jail, even his colleagues and his comrades. Many of them committed suicide or were killed. You can’t even find their tombs with their real names. People just disappeared. My family had a tough situation. As a child, I often thought it’s like you’re standing in the rain. You accept the situation. You know you’re going to get wet because everybody’s getting wet. No single person can be exempt from these kinds of conditions. So, I was taken away by the secret police in a kidnapping-type fashion and had a black hood put on my head and was brought from the airport to an unknown secret location. During those days, I basically had nothing to do—only to sit there. Two soldiers were sitting in front of me, and they would stare at me but would not blink. They would just stare at me. I also tried just to look at them without blinking for quite a long time. When they felt you could really win this staring game, they’d start to become a little bit more relaxed because these soldiers were only nineteen years old. Coming from the poorest locations in China, they were happy to be soldiers only because they were served three meals a day. These soldiers didn’t know who I was. They couldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t make a move. I couldn’t put my foot like this, but I had to do this. My hand had to be placed here. I would ask permission to scratch my head. I would say, “Can I scratch my head?” They would say, “Yes.” They didn’t know how to say no or yes, except yes is the only answer they gave, so I had to do it. I said, “Can I go to the toilet?” They would say yes. They would accompany me to the toilet, and I would do whatever I wanted to do in the bathroom. Then I would ask if I could go back.

It’s a kind of training. I think it’s a strong psychological training about human behavior. Since I’m an artist, I can easily get used to counting all the tiles on the ground or looking at all the details in the room even though there are not many details. Everything’s covered by this kind of soft cushion. I imagine they were afraid that I would commit suicide. I’m not going to commit suicide. I think they should commit suicide.

You cannot let your brain just be empty, so I started to memorize all the details in my life—all the details since I was born and for as long as I could remember. I only really remember from about ten years old. I don’t have much to remember. In about one week, I memorized everything that happened to me, every event I could remember, every person, every location, and every incident.

Then I felt I had nothing to be or to remember anymore—completely empty.

The only thing that came to me was that I felt sorry I’d never asked my father about his feelings in life. How did he think about his revolutionary life? Or why did he stop writing poetry for twenty years? What did he think of Mao Zedong and all those leaders? The Communist Party? I never asked anything. This is probably the biggest regret I have.

Then I realized this person really influenced me so much. I thought about the hard labor he was doing. He was forced to clean the public toilet in this very primitive village. It was dug into the ground, and there were thirteen of them. There were about two hundred people in the village. Every day he had to go to do this job. He never stopped for one day. If he stopped for one day, the next day was unbearable. It doubled the whole work. He said, “I cannot rest for five years.” Sometimes I would go with him when he cleaned those toilets. I was ten years old. He was fifty-eight. We were quite apart in age, but I watched how he would do it because those areas you cannot even step in. It was dirty with all these flies. It was not a covered toilet. There was no roof there. He had to first ask if anybody was there because he had to clean the women’s toilet also. There’s a lot of liquid in the women’s toilet. There was much more liquid, and it was more colorful too.

He was so patient. I look at this man with the utmost respect. You know he was a poet. He wrote beautiful poems and never did physical work. When he worked, people looked and laughed because you could totally tell an intellectual couldn’t handle this kind of work. After one or two hours, if you walked into the room, you would be shocked. You would say, “This is not possible. This is not the same room. It’s not.” Everything was so clean. All the corners were cut very sharp and all the dry sand had been put on. It was amazing. I always remember every toilet after he passed through it. It became so clean. It was better than Donald Judd’s artwork. It’s true. There’s no comparison.

Andrew Solomon   I’m sure that if Donald Judd could only hear that comparison, he’d be deeply moved by it. Tell me, though, about the ability you have that I think your father didn’t have, except in your recounting of him, to take the circumstances of being so oppressed and make them an occasion of having an ever larger and more audible voice. Your father was sent off, and he wrote poems, and they were read only by people who thought, “He doesn’t know how to live in this village.” But you took the fact of being imprisoned, and instead of it silencing you as it was intended to do, it amplified your voice. How do you work with oppression to make it so compelling?

Ai Weiwei   I think the only differences between my father and me are maybe these two characteristics: First, in my father’s time, being repressed or being in harsh conditions, he would have this understanding and tolerance of it all. I still don’t know why the whole generation behaved like that. My difference is I remember it, and I would think of revenge. Revenge not necessarily to hurt somebody, but to tell the story clearly and to make sure the people who did it can also read it clearly. That’s my revenge, to show this to the people who did it.

The second difference is the internet. That’s more important than the first one. If I didn’t have the internet, it would not be possible for me to become Ai Weiwei today. I don’t know if it’s for good or for bad, but it challenges me and puts me in extremely difficult conditions only because I openly discuss any matter and answer any question on the internet. With my personal judgment, I bear the responsibility and consequences, so I think all those things make my actions meaningful because I believe I have to set an example of how to deal with this kind of tyranny. I don’t want to become like my father. I made all the efforts to clearly show everyone my mind.

Andrew Solomon   Talk a little bit about medium. Your father was a poet. You also have a remarkable literary output, not only of a certain kind of poetry but of all of your now widely collected and circulated tweets on social media. In 1992 when I first became aware of your work, it was very much as an artist and not as a writer. Of course, the relationship between the individual arts and language historically has been different in a character-based system than it is in a system that uses the Latin alphabet. Still, you seemed to have made that switch back and forth between visual art and text. Even Donald Judd would be quite jealous of the skill with which you’ve been able to do that. Now you’ve made a film, Human Flow, which I should say is a remarkable film. Talk about media.

Ai Weiwei   I think the real job of an artist is the struggle between media and language. For me, that is the true journey of how to use our knowledge and to dig out the different potential kinds of language. Of course, language matters the most in writing, and maybe that is from my father’s influence. At an early age, I saw on his bookshelves all those poetry books. Even before I could really understand them, I liked their design and the smell of the paper. I liked to see all those drawings in the books. Often a poetry book is very thin and small. It doesn’t have much of a hardcover. But it’s so beautiful. It somehow becomes part of your body, and so those were the books I liked the most. He had a lot of Impressionist and Renaissance painting and beautiful hardcover books as well. One day I helped him to burn the books because all those books were the source of his getting into trouble.

I remember my father tearing down those books page by page because those beautiful hardcover books with paintings were very hard to burn. You had to really separate the pages so they could start to burn. Red Guards came to my home, kicked down the door, and checked on those books, page by page. If they saw any nudity or religious books, they would question my father for hours. You know, it’s not his work, but they would think, why would he have those kinds of antirevolutionary images? Why am I talking about this?

Andrew Solomon   (Laughs) I was asking you about media. I was asking you about the words and film and art.

Ai Weiwei   Well, I started realizing why these powerful people hate expression. It’s just a poetry book if you don’t open it, you don’t even see what is inside. Once they read it, most people wouldn’t even understand what the book is about. I would read Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Éluard, and Lorca—all of them powerful poets. I think those poets have beautiful writing, simple and easy to understand. Of course, I’m not good at writing because I never really went through this kind of practice. I don’t think writing is difficult. It just takes some practice.

So I became an artist, making drawings and some paintings, at an early age. I wasn’t satisfied because these drawings and paintings were so far away from reality. I kind of gave up and started to learn from Marcel Duchamp. You don’t have to do anything. You just take it as readymade, which really liberated me so much. He has had a big influence on me. If you go to Washington Square now, you see under this arch, I made this silver metal cage. But there’s a door. The shape of the door comes from one of Marcel Duchamp’s early drawings. It’s two people holding each other. It’s just like a paper cut, and I made that door shiny. I took Marcel Duchamp as readymade, and I think I made a step forward.

In 1988, in this square, we had a big demonstration. I realized I had photos of that time. We were demonstrating about a curfew in those parks, Tompkins Square Park and Washington Square Park. I really enjoyed those moments because I took a lot of photographs. I would run to the nearest phone booth to call the New York Times to say, “Hey, I have this photo.” They said, “Just come over. We will pay for your taxi.” I said, “Okay.” I would take a taxi and go to their editorial department. They would print out my negative and say, “Okay, this one we can use. We can pay you …” I think it was thirty bucks or something. I felt so happy.

The next morning, I would go to the newsstand, which was at St. Marks on Eighth Street and Second Avenue. Very often, I would see Woody Allen also standing there, waiting for the New York Times to be delivered. About three o’clock or four o’clock in the morning, the New York Times would come to the stand. I would open the newspaper and I would say, “Wow, Ai Weiwei, New York Times.” My photo’s there! Again, I was so happy. People told me if you had three photos published, you could get a press pass. That was my dream. Also, I had many images published in the New York Daily News and the New York Post. I don’t think I even got a press pass because it was just as easy to do without it.

Andrew Solomon   Two things that I want to ask you about, in either order. One of them is your statement that because China is a country without a soul, it is not, in fact, going to dominate the world as we are regularly told it is in our local media. The other is your assertion that the removal of animal works from the exhibit of contemporary Chinese art 1989 to 2008 [Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World] is a violation not only of animal rights but also of human rights.

Let’s start with China not being about to take over the world.

Ai Weiwei   Oh, yeah.

Andrew Solomon   That would be reassuring.

Fig. 1.1: Bleeding protestor, Tompkins Square Park riot, 1988.

Fig. 1.2: Police at Tompkins Square Park, 1988.

Ai Weiwei   I think many people are trying to imagine China growing so fast, with its potential and power, and taking over the world. Very often, people ask this question. I think there’s no such question because China is never going to take over the world.

If you talk about a world power, it’s not just numbers, but rather humanity. Chinese society has 1.3 billion people, and those people have to be rightly informed. They cannot be censored. They have to have a personality, individuality, and some creativity. They have to have imagination and passion. If all those things don’t exist, if the people, after sixty-some years or more, still don’t have the right to vote or have an independent judicial system or media, how can this kind of power make any meaningful contribution to our civilization? It’s not possible. They are not willing to make any kind of change. They’re not willing to have a discussion or try a little bit. No. It’s absolutely clear. This China doesn’t allow talk about so-called basic values.

As one party controls the economy, all the power belongs to the party. It’s very easy for them to make a move and to make a deal with other powerful nations, like the United States, England, Germany, or France. Those nations never met another dealmaker that can make deals so fast and so big. That’s why everybody loves China and hates China. I think really they love China because it provides the possibility for globalization and to exploit cheap labor slavery. No human rights. No freedom of speech. But at the same time, there’s a market there, which was built after decades without any materialism. With 1.3 billion people, that’s the kind of market companies in the United States can only dream of.

That’s why you see all those big companies today having unspeakable deals with China. We all tolerate it because we think it will benefit us. It makes China a monster, and it’s quite arrogant. You can never really discuss anything related to human rights, and Western politicians are trained to say, “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t discuss it. When China becomes rich, they will change.” Forget about it. The United States became very rich. You have President Trump. Are you changing? No. You’re not changing, and you’re only changing in a bad way. Human rights require each individual to defend them, and you must do so in every generation, you have to defend them. Freedom is not given as a gift. There’s no way we can just give up our responsibility.

That’s about China. So, second question.

Andrew Solomon   This question of human rights and openness and all you’ve just described as being the reason China can’t be a world power seems to have been fully on display here in our own jolly United States.

Ai Weiwei   If I’m here, China cannot be a world power. I will be the judge, like Trump says: You’re fired! Okay.

The second question is about works being taken down from the Guggenheim Museum. How should I put it? There are always cases in art history of works being depicted as dangerous and not suitable to be shown. Those are from the times of dangerous tyrants, authoritarian societies that only want pureness of art. We want to have one idea dominate another. We don’t give enough space for freedom of speech, and we should remember those times.

Those times happened in China, in North Korea, under the Nazis, in Soviet Russia, and it was harsh. My father attempted suicide three times, and it caused a lot of people to be silent because they could not simply trust their inner voice.

They couldn’t reflect the reality, because some other voice could denounce them. That is why we have to leave some space for the artist to have some freedom. That freedom would make all of society much healthier. If we don’t have that freedom, society would become an unthinkable situation.

Andrew Solomon   I now have questions from the audience. I’ll read you the first of them, which does, in fact, continue on from that. It says, “What methods of resistance do you suggest ordinary American citizens use to fight today’s censorship and threats to free expression?”

Ai Weiwei   What method? I think the real method is, do you feel uncomfortable or comfortable when censorship happens? If you don’t feel comfortable about it, then you have to seek revenge. But revenge is not so easy. I see so many human rights organizations or animal rights organizations or whatever rights organizations. They’re very passionate, but very few of them, I find, have good language. Very often, they don’t have an interesting performance. Very often, they don’t even have humor. They can’t find the right language even to fight back. Those things are not so easy. Not everybody can cook a good dish. You have to eat enough to know the difference between different cultures or different possibilities, and then, maybe, you can cook. Yeah, I’ll let you talk.

Andrew Solomon   (Laughs) My talking is all done. I’m only now reading the words from our audience. Ron wants to know if you had one goal, with all of your current efforts, what is it? And what would success look like?

Ai Weiwei   My success maybe can be measured by my voice, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Everybody has their own forms of voice; they don’t have to listen to this Chinese guy talk. If you can make me disappear, you succeed, and I would also feel successful.

Andrew Solomon   What part of your art or activism keeps you from feeling overwhelmed and discouraged? I know so many activists who go to protests or run petition campaigns and go home and spend time depressed. What is the key to endurance and focus for your art and activism? Your focus and your ability to sustain this voice are quite astonishing, even to those of us who work in the field.

Ai Weiwei   I often surprise myself. I work with a lot of people, maybe sometimes forty, sometimes a thousand people. I think it’s very normal to work with them, but very often, I look at them, I see they’re terribly tired. I don’t take drugs. I’m a normal person, and so this is something I cannot explain. You need a passion, and you need a little bit of imagination. Also, you need good health.

Andrew Solomon   Well, good health leads to my favorite of this selection of questions. Here we go. What is your favorite food?

Ai Weiwei   It’s all about how hungry I am. Very often, I run to McDonald’s to have a milkshake or a hamburger. I know burgers are horrible, but I like the French fries. They have delicious French fries. It’s true. It’s not a joke. I feel ashamed.

Andrew Solomon   (Laughs) We’ll adjust the backstage catering for next time. Someone asks, somewhat curiously, “Why do you stay in China?” But you don’t actually stay in China. I think you now live in Berlin. But the question goes on, “Because it’s home? Defiance? Your mission as an activist? Or because everywhere else is equally shitty?”

Ai Weiwei   That’s a very profound question, why we are here or why we’re not there, or why I’m a male and not a female. I may become a female, but also, why won’t I do it? All those questions are too profound to answer here.

Andrew Solomon   (Laughs) If you do decide to become a female, we can have a whole other session here to talk about that.

Ai Weiwei   It’s true. It’s a very different feeling now.

Andrew Solomon   Right. And what is it like for you? Why Berlin?

Ai Weiwei   Yes. I can tell you this story. Every time when Germany had any kind of meeting with China or human rights delegation going on, the German ambassador always came to my home. My home in China had twenty-five surveillance cameras and always had secret police around it. He would come in and sit down with me to tell me what they did or what they were prepared to do. I was so impressed. He’s the only ambassador among the hundreds of ambassadors in China who would do that. It was very, very impressive.

You’re being depicted as an enemy of the state, but this ambassador from Germany would come to your house and describe exactly what happened in the last meeting between the chancellor and your president. This is the reason I have my passport. They really cared about me. That’s the very simple answer.

Funny enough, the day I got my passport, I got a call from the American embassy saying, “You have to come to the American embassy.” I said, “Tomorrow I’m leaving.” They said, “Yes. But the ambassador wants to see you.”

The ambassador is a very respectful man, and I went to see him, and he asked me the first question, “Why Germany?” I said, “Well.” I think that’s a very profound question.

Andrew Solomon   (Laughs) Why Germany and why not …

Ai Weiwei   Yeah, it’s true. (Takes a selfie with Andrew)

Andrew Solomon   (Laughs) Can and should art try to transcend the political?

Ai Weiwei   Yes. I think we are living in a moment when anything can transcend anything.

Andrew Solomon   Is anything hopeful happening in China now?

Ai Weiwei   When you say “hopeful,” all I can say is that they let me out. It’s true. I still cannot figure out why they let me out. I mean, it’s such a painful condition even to imagine why they let me out.

Andrew Solomon   Do you feel, in coming out, like you’ve become sort of the voice of China in the West, and how is that different from being a voice in China itself?

Ai Weiwei   I never think I can represent either the Chinese or the Chinese nationality. I like Chinese food, speak the Chinese language, but have never been accepted by the society. But it’s fine because I’m already sixty years old. I don’t feel I belong anywhere. There is no sense of home or sense of nationality for me, which also is fine. What’s the question?

Andrew Solomon   The question is lost and gone, but tell us about the backpacks.

Ai Weiwei   Backpacks. Oh yes.

Andrew Solomon   Tell us about the quake in Sichuan. Tell us about how you and the government first came to be so distinctly at odds.

Ai Weiwei   The earthquake happened in 2008 and was devastating. We all know they have earthquakes in Mexico and earthquakes in Italy. Yes, the school collapsed. In many locations, strangely enough, the schools that collapse are often built by the state and should be the safest areas. In Japan, when an earthquake happens, people will use that kind of school as a shelter because it will never collapse. It’s built so well. In China, when an earthquake happens, seventy to eighty thousand people vanish. People automatically accept this. If a farmer’s house collapsed, it is because they are farmers. They know nothing, and they built their houses by themselves. They’re responsible for their own deaths, so nobody makes any argument. When a school collapses and when five thousand people disappear, I ask, “How does that happen?”

I ask a simple question: how and who and how many and which school and how old are they? And nobody answers. At that time, I kind of carried out an internet investigation. I thought, “This is easy. I can do this.” I called it a citizen investigation. Actually, in China, there’s no such thing as a citizen because you don’t vote. There is no way you can exercise any opinion in public.

So I organized on the internet. A lot of people and young people said they wanted to join, so we said, “Let’s go to those locations and find out.” It is a very remote area in Sichuan. Also, a lot of people don’t understand their language. We managed to go village to village, door to door, and find the five thousand students’ names. We were arrested over a few thousand times, but still, it gave us great joy. Even with such a tragedy, we really found the names and birthdays and the parents of the dead bodies. Each day, I put those findings on the internet, which generated a lot of attention. People said, “This guy, he’s just an individual. He can’t make this happen.” The state was completely arrogant and said it’s a state secret. You’re not supposed to do it.

At that time, they did not yet have this severe censorship of the internet. Before my name disappeared, I made them really understand how dangerous the internet can be. Every day, I would cause a riot on the internet. My writings the next morning would be reposted by as many as two hundred thousand people. I said, “This could be almost a revolution if they let me do it for a few more months.” But of course I was followed, and I disappeared. I was beaten and all those things, but that was an extremely memorable experience.

Andrew Solomon   But do you think that the work that you’ve done, that work and other work, actually is bringing about change? I mean, it’s very inspiring, and it helps people who are already persuaded that there’s a great evil in the world to stand up against that evil with greater ammunition. But do you think the Chinese government was embarrassed to the point of actually making safer schools when they rebuilt in Chengdu? Do you think it has concrete effects, or do you think it’s about keeping a spirit of revolution alive, even when the institutions remain resistant to it?

Ai Weiwei   But institutions are extremely big because it’s a system. A system doesn’t have good intentions or bad intentions. You cannot teach a donkey to climb a tree because it simply doesn’t have that structure.

China has eighty million Communist Party members, which is already one in every fifteen Chinese. So why does such a powerful state not let a film be shown? Why do so many words have to be censored from writings or from newspapers? Why do they feel so scared? They have no reason to be afraid. People just want to be independent.

But they are scared. They are scared about even a very small fire or a spark that can cause the whole nation to burn, so they become more and more tough on ideas.

Andrew Solomon   The suppression of freedom and of expression often serves to strengthen the very things it attempts to close down because you’re left to think, “But what is it about this art that is so frightening to these people? It must be very powerful, this thing of which they’re so afraid.” You’ve done a remarkable job of embodying that freedom and that openness of expression. You’ve done a very good job of frightening the Chinese government, which is no small task.

Ai Weiwei   I hope I can do the same job in the United States. It’s not easy.

2   Conversation with Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos   I want to take a moment to talk about this extraordinary person whom we have on his way up to the stage: the artist, the activist, the Instagrammer, the filmmaker, the occasional nudist—my friend, Ai Weiwei.

It was seven years ago this year that I was living in Beijing, and I traveled out to the outskirts of the city, where Weiwei was living and working in his studio complex. One of his friends had described his place as a cross between a monastery and a crime family. He had designed the building from scratch, with no training as an architect. It became an instant icon. Over the course of five or six years, Ai Weiwei developed eighty buildings and then said, “I’m done with being an architect. It’s not what I want to do.”

His studio was this hive of extraordinary and very eccentric activity. It was as close as China had come to Warhol’s Factory. It was filled with artists, one particularly ancient cocker spaniel, and a tribe of semiferal cats that would occasionally tear apart his architectural models. Sometimes when that happened, he would say, “I sort of like it better this way. Let’s see if we can do something with that.”

When I said hello to Weiwei, his face was buried in a big bowl of noodles. Off to his left was a poster that he had made by altering a government poster, such that the hand was a single middle finger outstretched, flipping the viewer the bird. As I discovered, that was a gesture that resonated with Weiwei on a cosmic level. This was a philosophy of a particular kind. We all know his famous series of images with the Museum of Modern Art, the Eiffel Tower, Tiananmen Square, the White House—all of them with his finger in the foreground. It’s a series that’s known as Study of Perspective, and that title makes more and more sense to me every year.

Over the years, he’s produced at least two or three lifetimes worth of work: installations, photographs, furniture, paintings, buildings, books, and films. His audacity and his imagination have made him the leading innovator of provocation in China and beyond.

In 2011, he was detained by the military police. He was held for eighty-one days, and then for the next four years, he was unable to travel. He was prevented from going abroad. The Chinese government held onto his passport, and when I visited him under house arrest, he said that fighting with an opaque authoritarian state was an extraordinary experience, because the state doesn’t have to follow the rules. He said it was like playing chess with a person from outer space.

Fig. 2.1: Study of Perspective—White House, Washington, D.C., USA, 1995.

Since 2015, Ai Weiwei has worked from a studio in Berlin. He has received too many honors to name tonight. At the moment, his work is on display at twelve museums and gallery exhibitions around the world, including eight solo shows. Next week he’ll debut his largest public art installation right here in New York City, with thanks to Robert Frost, called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.

Today, we’re going to talk about art. We’re going to talk about China. We’re going to talk about New York City, a place you know quite well. However, I want to talk about Human Flow. This is an extraordinary film. There were many subjects you could have made movies about, and there are many things you could have focused on. Why is this the one subject that has grabbed you?

Ai Weiwei   It’s a tough question to answer. A lot of my work is concerned with human rights, human dignity, and freedom of speech. Two years ago, I gained my right to travel, and I moved to Berlin, Germany. While there, I heard a lot about the refugee crisis and the 1.2 million people fleeing to Germany. It was such an unthinkable situation that I realized I should pay more attention. It always happens this way when you want to understand something. You have to get yourself involved, as I did with the Sichuan earthquake. I had to visit the ruins. In this case, I decided to go to Lesbos.

Evan Osnos   In Greece.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, with my son and my girlfriend. In Lesbos, we met refugees who had just come ashore on a boat. I still remember how shocking it was for me to realize that these are real people.

Evan Osnos   These were the boats that were coming one after another ashore.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, and sometimes you could see thirty boats on the ocean. Each of them had seventy to a hundred people, squeezed on these very tiny dinghies. When they sink, often half of the drownings are kids. You also have babies with no adults attending to them. The adults cannot pay smugglers the money, so they let the children go ahead alone. When you see these situations, it’s hard to understand why people have to give up everything to go through such a dangerous journey. Also, you realize that there’s not much help coming from Europe. I followed them to the camps, and basically, no one was helping them. Only some volunteers or NGOs are helping. It’s an extreme and almost surreal situation. It still doesn’t look real, even after making this film.

Evan Osnos   It doesn’t. There are parts of it that feel lunar. It feels like you’re on another planet.

Ai Weiwei   Yes.

Evan Osnos   The scale of the camps is so big, and the landscape is so desiccated, that I wonder when you realized that this needed to be a film. When did you know that you needed to start traveling to place after place?

Ai Weiwei   I have a habit of filming things, so I often use my iPhone when filming. I realized, to understand this topic, it would take a lot of research. It was essential to go to Greece, but also to Turkey and areas in the Middle East like Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Gaza.

Evan Osnos   Had you been to any of these places before?

Ai Weiwei   No, I never imagined I would go to these locations. I also set up a team to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Evan Osnos   How many places did your team go to in the end?

Ai Weiwei   They went to about twenty-three nations, forty camps, and interviewed about six hundred people.

Evan Osnos   You have a line in this movie which is very powerful. This is not a film about numbers and statistics. It’s really about faces, but you do have some numbers that will blow the viewer away—one of which is that in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the number of countries with border walls and fences has grown from eleven to seventy. That’s what your film is about, in a sense: the age of barriers and the age of people coming up against them. Have you formed a theory in your mind about why it is that these fences have gone up?

Ai Weiwei   Yes, the fences have gone up, but those are just details on the physical map. After globalization, the new political and economic structures reach beyond these fences. We can never know who is doing what with whom. All those interests are so different from the physical map. These maps and fences are just there to stop the poorest people who are in crisis.

Evan Osnos   You are now living in Germany, and here in the United States; both countries have had this rise of a particular type of nationalism. In China, they’ve had it too. Why is this happening?

Ai Weiwei   This question is quite profound. One has to ask all those professors.

Evan Osnos   You are a professor at the University of Arts in Berlin.

Ai Weiwei   I have a theory. I think that after globalization, the powerful have become more powerful. Many people are being left with no space or no chance in life, and many areas have become unstable. Also, with many environmental changes and problems, the refugee numbers are going to go up even higher than today.

Evan Osnos   In a sense, you are one of the people who has been dislocated from your home. After all, in 2015, the Chinese government gave you your passport back and said, “You can go,” and you left. Are you able to go back now?

Ai Weiwei   I think I’m still able to go back because the only passport I have is a Chinese passport. However, two of my lawyers are still in jail. One served five years, and one served over ten years.

Evan Osnos   Why are they in jail?

Ai Weiwei   They are in jail for the reason that maybe they posted some tweets. One was on trial for twenty-five tweets—very peaceful tweets, I should say. They are not as vocal as I am, and I have been quite ruthless in my critique of the government. These lawyers are much more rational and softer. I think the Chinese government is just trying to teach the people that it can do anything. If you want to raise your voice or question its authority, then you will go to jail.

Evan Osnos   When you left, did they say to you, “Look, you have to stop doing anything to criticize China,” or did they put any conditions on your departure?

Ai Weiwei   They always put conditions not only on me, but on everybody else as well. Even today in China, a large number of specific words can’t be used on the internet. It would be the size of a dictionary, the list of words you can’t use.

Evan Osnos   Is that number growing?

Ai Weiwei   Yes, it’s growing more rapidly now, especially today after this so-called Nineteenth Party Congress.

Evan Osnos   They seem to get very nervous about any big political event in China. Is the name Ai Weiwei searchable today in China? Can I post it on Chinese social media networks?

Ai Weiwei   Not on Chinese media, but of course foreign media cannot even be accessed in China. Some say Ai Weiwei doesn’t exist.

Evan Osnos   Now that you are in exile, this presents challenges of its own, regarding staying connected to your own country. Do you feel a sense that you’re pulling apart from China and that you’re interested in other things? Does it make you feel a sense of possibility to talk about China in new ways because you’re living outside of China?

Ai Weiwei   Since leaving, I am less interested in talking about China. I was very active there because I was facing that reality every day, so I had to speak out. Now that I’m not there, of course, on principle I criticize it. I never changed that. However, now it’s less because there are so many other topics to talk about. I think all human rights issues are the same around the world; it’s not only China’s problem.

Evan Osnos   We have a few images that I want to talk about today because I think they might give us a sense of your experience. Who is this?

Ai Weiwei   It’s my father, who held me in front of Tiananmen Square. My father was a poet, and he was exiled for twenty years. That was the year he came back to Beijing and brought me to the exile location, which was northwest China.

Evan Osnos   Out in Xinjiang Province.

Ai Weiwei   Yes.

Evan Osnos   He was China’s most celebrated poet at the time. He was a loyal member of the [Communist] Party but was accused of disloyalty and treated quite terribly. He was eventually sent out even farther afield during the Cultural Revolution. You grew up partly out there. I interviewed your brother once a few years ago, and he said to me that he thought you were primarily affected by the experience because you were a smart and sensitive kid. You saw and heard more than other people.

Fig. 2.2.: Ai Weiwei and Ai Qing, 1958.

Ai Weiwei   He thinks I’m oversensitive about the whole situation. He’s a writer, but he has quit writing and drinks two bottles of whiskey a day. I think he’s oversensitive.

Evan Osnos   I’ll let him know you said that. You came to New York City in 1983, and you painted portraits on the sidewalk. You also went everywhere and to every gallery you could. How did New York affect you?

Ai Weiwei   I was a person coming from a communist society, so everything in New York was incredibly stimulating and had an enormous impact on me. I spent twelve years in the United States, so I learned all my bad habits from here. It victimized me.

Evan Osnos   Victimized.

Ai Weiwei   It’s true. When I was in detention, and after fifty interrogations, a very high-level secret police officer sitting in front of me said, “Ai Weiwei, you have been watching too many Hollywood movies.” He couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. He thought that maybe I was brainwashed.

Evan Osnos   What kinds of things were you talking about that made him say that?

Ai Weiwei   I talked about freedom of speech, individual rights, liberty, and all those things. The police thought it was ridiculous for a guy like me to be talking about such things.

Evan Osnos   You also went and saw protests in Tompkins Square Park.

Ai Weiwei   Yes.

Evan Osnos   You sold some photographs to the New York Times. I think you missed out on an opportunity to be a print journalist. It would have been a very lucrative opportunity for you. Do you believe that it shaped your sense of what dissent could be?

Ai Weiwei   Yes, at that time I was quite naïve. I believed an individual could exercise his or her rights and make their voice heard.

Evan Osnos   There was a time that the idea of Chinese art was a very exotic notion in New York City. I remember Joan Cohen, who’s an art historian and has collected your early work, tried to put on a show of Chinese art and was told, “We don’t show Third World art.” She contacted the Guggenheim and told me, “Not only would the curator not see me, but his secretary wouldn’t see me.” Now, there’s a big show at the Guggenheim on contemporary Chinese art.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, I wonder if that secretary still wouldn’t see me.

Evan Osnos   What do you think about the subject of the Guggenheim show, where there has been some talk about a couple of pieces being withdrawn shortly before its opening? There was a petition against sections involving animals and some threats against the museum. What do you think about the idea that they withdrew those pieces? Was it the right thing to do?

Ai Weiwei   A society that does not allow freedom of speech, to show something which is undesirable or unsuitable, would be much more dangerous. People who see art as degenerate or not fitting into a perfect image of society can spur on horrible things, like what we saw in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Evan Osnos   It is one thing if the state censors your work, but it’s something else entirely if the people begin to censor our work.

Ai Weiwei   I think this argument is profound. Art is the area in which one has the right to explore, not necessarily the idea of right and wrong, but to raise questions and present different possibilities. The art shouldn’t have been withdrawn from the show.

Evan Osnos   In 1993, you moved back to China. Everything you’ve just been talking about—developing the ability to hear different voices and the power of dissent—began to be the central concept of your work, from 1993 all the way through the next decade. You completed several famous works: The Black Cover Book, The White Cover Book, and a renowned exhibition called Fuck Off in English. It had a more genteel name in Chinese: A Non-Cooperative Approach.

Ai Weiwei   It’s true.

Evan Osnos   I’m curious what you were learning about yourself and the Chinese art world during that period?

Ai Weiwei   The Chinese art world has always been underground. Sometimes it’s underground only because the government thinks it is dangerous and sees it as the West’s spiritual pollution, with the intention to subvert communist power. Still, it’s not like art in the West. There is no real contemporary art practice in China because it doesn’t affect Chinese society and never becomes part of China’s intellectual discussions.

Evan Osnos   Did you feel that fellow Chinese artists were getting involved enough in politics and social issues, or did you want them to say more?

Ai Weiwei   I would say there is a slight intention to create art as an aesthetic, moral argument in society. Most artists can be very skillful and very smart, but concerning freedom of speech issues or defending human rights, it’s almost nonexistent. Yes, there is art that has some attitude, but there’s virtually no open discussion on these political matters.

Evan Osnos   One of the things that became recognizable about your work is that you deal with the idea of scale. Everything became large. Why does scale matter? Why does size have such an effect and such an essential role in your work?

Ai Weiwei   Scale only shows how small we are. As humans, we are just this small. Scale often tells us about our size, and it’s not very large. If you look within one kilometer from above, you can’t see it. It’s not big. It’s only our museums that are built so small, and anything in nature is bigger than this.

Evan Osnos   You’ve also done a very prominent piece that has traveled around the world. These are the faces of political prisoners and exiles made out of Legos.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, it’s made up of 176 political prisoners. I think one of them is in our audience. Chelsea Manning is here somewhere. I’m so happy she’s been released. Obama made the right decision.

Evan Osnos   How did you choose the people you represented in that piece?

Fig. 2.3: Trace, 2014. Installation view on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco.

Ai Weiwei   We worked with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They helped select these people.

Evan Osnos   Why Legos?

Ai Weiwei   Why not Legos? Legos are something everybody plays with. Adults and children would love to see a Lego structure and something besides Star Wars. For these dissidents, most of their photos were terrible quality, and Lego was the perfect medium to show this.

Evan Osnos   Pixelated pictures work out well.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, it makes them very sharp and clean, and the color is unbelievable. Some photos are so sorry that you couldn’t recognize them, but when you create them in Legos, they stand out.

Evan Osnos   This is your son. You should recognize him better than I could actually.

Ai Weiwei   Sometimes it takes me a few seconds.

Evan Osnos   He’s changing fast. This is a still from a movie, Berlin, I Love You, which you made while you were still in China and he was in Berlin.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, he is still in Berlin.

Evan Osnos   How did you make a movie when you were in China and he was in Berlin?

Ai Weiwei   Through Skype. We can use it quickly to direct anything now. I can make a revolution through Skype. Of course, I can make a movie through it!

Evan Osnos   I think that’s precisely what they’re afraid of. You once said to me, when he was very little, that you didn’t intend to be a father, but it had turned out to be much better than you predicted. You said, “So-called human intelligence, we shouldn’t overestimate it.” I wonder, since you’ve become a father, how do you think it has affected your work?

Ai Weiwei   First, I think we all learn from our mistakes. I’ve become more human and more caring. Without him, I would not have made this film.

Evan Osnos   Why wouldn’t you have made this film, do you think, before you became a father?

Ai Weiwei   I was ruthless. I was thinking only about myself. Now I have so many other things to worry about. It slows me down, and so I became a filmmaker.

Evan Osnos   You did a solo exhibition in Beijing in June of 2015. This was right before you were able to leave China. I wonder if you would help us understand what the boundaries are today and what an artist can or can’t do in China. We know some of the old ones. They used to say the three T’s: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen. What else can’t you do today?

Ai Weiwei   People always ask this question. The power of the state can never really be figured out. The state changes the rules all the time, every day. In the morning or evening, there can be very different rules. That is the core of this power, where only one player makes all the rules. You can never really win, and the state will make sure you can't win. There is no way you can understand what you can do or what you can't do.

Evan Osnos   Keeps you uncertain.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, the uncertainty is so powerful. It makes most people very nervous and very careful.

Evan Osnos   Do they self-censor?

Ai Weiwei   Of course, everybody self-censors. Self-censoring is the only way you can survive if you’re a writer, filmmaker, or artist.

Evan Osnos   You didn’t self-censor as much as some other people.

Ai Weiwei   But I still strategically self-censor more or less.

Evan Osnos   There’s a piece that probably everybody recognizes: the sunflower seeds. These seeds are all handcrafted by artisans, and each one is different. They’re made of porcelain. You’ve made millions of them over the years.

Ai Weiwei   One hundred million. It is only less than one-tenth of the Chinese population. You can’t believe it. You look at it, and it’s like an ocean. It’s endless.

Evan Osnos   I have to tell you that you once gave me a few of these seeds when you were first starting on this project. I brought them home, and I put them in a bowl. Then the housekeeper threw them away. I have only one left, and I plan to pay for my child’s college education with it.

Ai Weiwei   (Laughs)

Fig. 2.4: Sunflower Seeds, 2010. Detail.

Evan Osnos   I’m curious about the seeds. When you started on them, one of the things that was happening was the rise of social media. It was like each seed was an identity. It was as if a person out there was saying something distinct and different. Today, it’s a little different. Social media in China is more tightly controlled than it was back then. It feels as if it is.

Ai Weiwei   It is true. It is much tighter now, and even the Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp is being heavily censored. I don’t know why they’re so scared about people just chatting or gossiping.

Evan Osnos   Do you feel as if that period has ended when it was possible for you to go online and say anything you wanted and develop this enormous following? You have hundreds of thousands of people every day in China following you.

Ai Weiwei   That moment made me a bit crazy. I thought, “I can win this battle within years,” and I had this illusion at that time. Then I ended up in jail and I thought, “How silly can I be?” This just isn't possible.

Evan Osnos   But were you wrong?

Ai Weiwei   I was wrong. I made a wrong judgment. If the state has the military, or the judicial system, they have all the control, and there’s no space for freedom of speech. Most of my friends and all my colleagues used to have a good time on the internet, but now some of them are in jail or are being held without trial. Nobody even knows where they are.

Evan Osnos   Do you think that this will change in our lifetimes? Do you think that the struggle for freedom of expression, the struggle for justice and individual rights in China, will that be winnable in your lifetime?

Ai Weiwei   This only depends on how long we’re going to live. We all could have a very long life.

Evan Osnos   Let’s hope. Social media has been such a big part of your work. One of the things that we’ve felt over the course of the past few years in the United States is that social media has created such a hopeful phenomenon. In some ways that is still true today, but there is a dark side to it, as we now know. It can transmit hatred. It can convey the kind of instincts to build borders in the way that you have fought against with this film. What do you think is going to happen? Is social media going to continue? Does it remain something that you still practice and love today? Do you worry about the downside of it?

Ai Weiwei   I only stand on the sunny side of social media. There’s a lot of bright light and beautiful, positive things there. Of course, there’s a dark shadowy area, but you can choose to stay in the sunny part. Only social media gives this choice. In the days of old media, you didn’t have this choice, so I still appreciate living in this time. If I see a few Chinese standing around and they all are looking at their iPhones, this is like a window where they can see the whole world. They can associate with anybody. They can make a sentence just like poetry and send an image. This is beyond a miracle because it’s never happened like this before. I think it does so much good to the human brain and the way we look at the world.

Evan Osnos   You say it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the absence of it.

Ai Weiwei   I think if it becomes perfect, it will become dangerous. It’s nice if it is not perfect.

Evan Osnos   When you’re thinking about taking pictures and circulating them, is there always something that’s on your mind? How do you decide when you’re going to take out your camera? Why do you do it?

Ai Weiwei   I think it’s nice in life when you don’t have to decide everything, and you do it automatically. A great deal of pressure comes from that, and if you have to be so conscious of this, then you’re victimized by your logical rationality. You can be carried away when you feel the most comfortable and in the moment. It’s like you are freeing up some of your consciousness.

Evan Osnos   Do you feel in life that there is a barrier between you and the people when you bring out your camera? Your brother once said to me that your beard was your makeup.

Ai Weiwei   I don’t care that much. It’s not about a look. If I look at myself, it’s kind of scary, but I try.

Evan Osnos   If you sometimes stand next to people who don’t make you look as beautiful as you might otherwise be, I think it’s …

Ai Weiwei   It’s true.

Evan Osnos   This is part of the new show that you have opening up. Do I have that right? This is an image that I don’t recognize.

Ai Weiwei   Yes. This is one of the images from a park in Queens, New York.

Evan Osnos   This is part of the show that goes up next week, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. What is it going to involve? It’s got three hundred different sites around the city?

Fig. 2.5: Circle Fence, 2017.

Ai Weiwei   That large number comes from posters and light pole banners.

Evan Osnos   There will be small things on lampposts?

Ai Weiwei   Yes, many small things and five to ten large structures.

Evan Osnos   You’ve been to Washington recently with your show, and I’m curious about your impression. Some of us who live in Washington feel as if we’re in a bizarre place to be because of a particular occupant of the White House.

Ai Weiwei   Washington is still a refined city compared to the past. It used to be worse, I think.

Evan Osnos   Well, this is the problem, in some sense: it’s so comfort- able now that one can deceive oneself into thinking that everything is just fine.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, basically our life is always like that. If you always have food on the table, then you'll feel happy. Of course, if you start to cook or wash those vegetables, you feel a little bit different. We always have a dish at the table for too long.

Evan Osnos   In a few minutes, we’re going to open this up to questions from everybody. I know some people have questions that they want to ask, but before we do, there are a couple of things I want to mention. You just recently turned sixty. What do you want to do that you haven’t had a chance to do yet, as an artist or as an activist?

Ai Weiwei   My life serves no purpose. I try to appreciate all the opportunities given to me. Also, I want to see how far I can push or make some statement. However, I know that time is short. After thirty-one minutes, thirty-three seconds, thirty-two seconds, we’re going to be off the stage, and I will be thinking of something else.

Evan Osnos   Do you think that you will stay in Germany, or do you plan to move elsewhere? Do you have an idea about where you want to be and where you want to base yourself?

Ai Weiwei   I now think more about temperature. Germany has a long winter and at 4 p.m., the sky gets dark. I may move to a place that has more sunshine. I’m just like any animal. My cat’s always sleeping under the sun, and it’s very comfortable, which one can see.

Evan Osnos   A lot of us here in this room are going to be surrounded by some of your work over the course of the next few months because this project is going to open, the Good Fences Make Good Neighbors piece. What do you want people to take from that? What sort of message are you hoping that the world will gain?

Ai Weiwei   I think this city is so great. You have a lot of art here. However, I think people may pay little attention to it, and I don’t think people will care about it that much. For artists, it’s an excellent opportunity to make something and make the city look a little different.

Evan Osnos   Well, you could have made a single piece. I think we have an image here of this. What are we looking at here?

Fig. 2.6: Gilded Cage, 2017.

Ai Weiwei   This one has already been there for two days. It’s a golden cage, and it’s two blocks away from Trump Tower. I try to please both the neighbors and people there. It looks much more golden than this.

Evan Osnos   Gold is a color that’s popular around that neighborhood, I gather.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, so true.

Evan Osnos   I have to admit, you’ve left me with mixed feelings about how you look at the future, whether you’re optimistic or not. You’ve been traveling around the world over the past couple of years. You’ve probably been more places than any of us here. I wonder whether you’re feeling, as you begin this next chapter in your life, that the world is moving into a better place or not? In the past, some of your work has been driven by a kind of elemental optimism, a belief that perhaps the world, if you shout loudly enough, could be made into a better place.

Ai Weiwei   You’re talking about humanity’s future. I think if we look at the past, there’s always struggle. Today, I think the potential for danger is stronger than at any other time because we are so much more potent than before. Any mistakes can cause significant disasters. That is what I feel.

Evan Osnos   We talked backstage about the environment. Is that something you may be doing work on?

Ai Weiwei   Yes, we are part of this environment, and there are some huge factors concerning environmental change. The Earth’s ecological condition is very fragile. It’s our place on our planet to have humans and all of life’s species coexist. Now it’s quite fragile.

Evan Osnos   Before we turn it over to this audience, I have one question that I’ve been thinking about, which is something you mentioned to me years ago. When you were under house arrest, you were thinking about how you were going to explain this to your son—he was only two years old at that point, and now he’s eight. How do you explain to him why you live where you live? How do you talk about China with him?

Ai Weiwei   I try not to talk to him about this because there are so many other things that can be more interesting, profound, and joyful for him.

Evan Osnos   Do you want him to feel Chinese?

Ai Weiwei   I don’t want him even to remember those things. I did write everything in a book, and it’s my responsibility to write down what has happened, but he doesn’t necessarily need to read it.

Evan Osnos   He doesn’t have to know all of the details of what happened to you in that period.

Ai Weiwei   He only should have the possibility, if he wants, to know where to find what I wrote.

Evan Osnos   I think if we have microphones ready, we’ll ask people to offer up a question rather than a comment or a story.

Audience member   One thing that you’re notable for on social media is your preference for selfies. What do you feel are the elements of taking a good picture of yourself?

Evan Osnos   How do you take a good selfie? He’s admiring your ability to take a selfie.

Ai Weiwei   It’s a very complicated issue, it’s true. You have to think about this phone we have in our hands. It’s unthinkable to know that if Rembrandt had this, we would never see those paintings hanging in those museums. It took humans a long time to create this tool. It’s nice that in the same moment you take it, you can put it up on social media. I appreciate these possibilities.

Evan Osnos   What makes a bad selfie?

Ai Weiwei   There’s no bad selfie.

Evan Osnos   I hope somebody’s making a T-shirt with that right now.

Audience member   When I was looking at the work that you’re exhibiting now in New York, I noticed that it’s very fragile looking, very delicate and different from some of your other work. Can you talk about that? A type of fragility seems to be in the pieces that we saw today.

Ai Weiwei   You want me to tell you the truth?

Audience member   Yes.

Ai Weiwei   Each of them is already over ten tons, and shipping those structures and putting them together in a short time was so expensive. That’s the only answer.

Evan Osnos   Are you talking about the steel structures?

Ai Weiwei   All those works. To shape them or to store them afterward is always something you have to think about. I’m sorry if this answer is disappointing to you.

Audience member   No, no, no.

Ai Weiwei   But that’s the truth.

Audience member   When I say fragile, I mean they have very, very thin lines and all are very delicate and very lacy. That sign of fragility.

Ai Weiwei   Once I said, “Maybe being powerful means being fragile.” Sound a little bit better?

Audience member   Thank you.

Audience member   Well, obviously you’re very inspiring as an artist and an activist. I just wanted to ask you, who currently inspires you?

Ai Weiwei   Myself.

Evan Osnos   That was a selfie of a different kind.

Audience member   I have a quick question about self-censorship. You mentioned that this is something that comes up in your work a lot. Have you ever thought about doing something like Duchamp and creating an alias for yourself? Duchamp had his alias Rrose Sélavy and R. Mutt. Do you have any thought of maybe having a pseudonym, where you could perhaps not self-censor or say other things that you couldn’t tell in your own voice?

Evan Osnos   Would you ever do work under a pseudonym or a secret identity of any kind?

Ai Weiwei   Almost all my work is done that way.

Evan Osnos   In what sense?

Ai Weiwei   People always ask, “What do you mean by this?” Even if you try to be very frank and direct, people still think this has some hidden meaning, which is true.

Evan Osnos   Is there a public Ai Weiwei and a private Ai Weiwei? Do you ever feel as if the person who people think you are, or want you to be, is different from who you are?

Ai Weiwei   You think this person, this Ai Weiwei sitting here, is the real one?

Evan Osnos   I suspect so, but maybe I’m wrong. Do you think you are different?

Ai Weiwei   I wouldn’t tell you.

Audience member   How do you navigate the art world with its expensiveness, exclusivity, and everything that comes with that? How do you navigate that with the message that you bring forward?

Ai Weiwei   First, I am an individual. I’m not responsible for the art world. It’s a world beyond my understanding. Why people collect art or why the prices are so high or why some young artists will never make it or how I became what I am today, I still don’t understand. Honestly, it’s tough for even somebody as smart as I am to understand this kind of question.

Audience member   Do you feel conflicted about it?

Ai Weiwei   I feel guilty about it.

Evan Osnos   Why?

Ai Weiwei   You spend your lifetime doing something, but you still end up not understanding it. You’re also sending out a lot of wrong illusions about things you’re not exactly responsible for, but of course you’re the one that should be blamed for it. Get it?

Evan Osnos   Not entirely.

Ai Weiwei   We have seventeen minutes.

Evan Osnos   (Laughs)

Audience member   Quick question: How can we have Americans and the Western world better understand China?

Ai Weiwei   Not possible.

Audience member   It’s not possible?

Ai Weiwei   It’s not possible. You see this global situation? Here we have sunshine today, and now it’s night over in China. It’s just not possible. It’s never the same time. Here it’s winter, and over there it’s summer.

Evan Osnos   I think you have spent a lot of your time recently trying to explain other countries to viewers, through this new film, and trying to make people in that film look like human beings. Is there a way that people in the United States can begin to look at people in China with greater depth and understanding?

Ai Weiwei   These misunderstandings, and don’t take me seriously, make life so much more interesting because we spend more time thinking about what other people are thinking about. Sometimes you feel you know it, but years later you think, “Oh, that’s wrong. It’s not really what it’s about.” We should first recognize that our intelligence is so limited, or so conditioned, by many other factors.

Audience member   It seems like you feel that, since the rise of globalization, physical borders on the map are the only obvious borders, and you allude to a potential new agenda driving us beyond nation-states. What do you think is the driving underlying trend in a postglobalization world?

Ai Weiwei   There’s a movie called All the President’s Men, and it has a very famous line, “Follow the money.”

Audience member   My heart is beating very fast. I feel like a tiny porcelain sunflower seed standing here, talking to you. The picture with your father made me think about what I believe is traditional in Chinese culture: the revering of wisdom and experience. Do you think that this is somewhat incongruous with social media? That people, specifically young people, feel like they already have a voice? If you like something, then all of a sudden you have power and wisdom. Are the values that come from knowledge and experience somehow getting lost today?

Ai Weiwei   This is a real problem. Young people are so quick to grab all the information without spending the time to digest it. All this knowledge and information may not have emotion or experience attached to it. This new generation or new human being will have a profoundly different view from the older generation’s way of thinking. I don’t know if this will be good or bad, but it indeed will be a new character. If you see students in universities today, I rarely see anybody working hard or writing or reading as before. It is just so easy for people to get any information they desire without the time to develop any deeper thoughts.

Audience member   I think one of the reasons everyone’s here is because you possess something that is amazing. You’re a leader, and you don’t stand for just standing there.

Ai Weiwei   I wish somebody could vote me in as a president, but I know it’s not going to happen. But, please go on and try.

Audience member   Young or old, some things happen here that make people stand and watch. I’m curious if there’s some advice that you would give to people that could help increase the type of leaders that don’t stand around and watch?

Ai Weiwei   I think this is a complicated question because we are all a product of our environment. If we always have a comfortable life, or the family has no problems for generations, then we become so disconnected from other types of reality. This is a problem. I think humans can only learn or gain new ideas from tragedies and difficulties in life, because if you don’t have those problems, you will never know the kind of suffering that brings out this kind of intelligence. For example, you need a specific temperature for high-quality porcelain. You cannot just have 50 degrees. You need 1,250 degrees. It’s under these different kinds of conditions that different materials come out. It doesn’t matter what type of education system you have if you’re so disconnected from reality. That’s the problem.

Audience member   Thank you for the very deep discussion. You’ve mentioned that globalization and social media have brought so much good to the world and so much awareness to so many people. However, as you said in the introduction, there are many more borders today than there were before: U.S. / Mexico, Spain / Morocco / Europe, India / Bangladesh. I think that’s distressing, given all the information we have today that we didn’t have before. How do individuals in society bridge those gaps that are starting to form that didn’t exist before? It’s one of the most vexing things that I think has happened as a result of globalization.

Evan Osnos   Selfie?

Ai Weiwei   Certainly selfies are one answer, but it’s not enough. I think the political and civil systems all need to change in this global situation, and this takes time. You already see the struggle for change in current political structures. What is happening in the United States and in England, Germany, and Spain is the same “something”: a sign of struggle for a different kind of system. I think there is going to be a more dramatic change, but of course these changes require all individuals to be involved. This is a democratic society. Your voice needs to be heard, and you have to find your language and your expression. If you don’t have that expression, it just doesn’t work. You must create your own image, just as this stupid Chinese artist did. There is no other way. The only way to bear some responsibility is to find yourself.

3   Conversation with Tim Marlow

Chase Robinson   I now have the pleasure of welcoming the Royal Academy’s director of artistic programs, Tim Marlow. Tim is an art historian, a lecturer, a writer, and an arts broadcaster whose credits include the series Great Artists with Tim Marlow and podcasts with leading contemporary artists for the BBC World Service. The Guardian has called his current position at the Royal Academy “one of the most coveted visual arts jobs in the UK.”

In 2015, the Royal Academy mounted a major retrospective of the work of Ai Weiwei, describing him as a visionary and radical provocateur. The exhibit chronicles his work of more than twenty years, beginning in 1993 when he returned to China from the United States, where he had lived for more than a decade. The work drew on his vision of creative freedom, censorship, and human rights and his examination of contemporary Chinese art in society. He was able to attend the exhibit only because the Chinese government decided to return his passport eight weeks before the show.

Ai Weiwei currently lives in Berlin and has exhibited his works all over the world. He continues to use a range of media, from architecture and installations to documentaries, all in the service of exploring society and its values. Among his many honors is the Human Rights Foundation’s Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent, the Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International, and an honorary RA from the Royal Academy itself.

Recently, Chinese authorities, without warning, demolished one of his studios, just days after a new sculpture of a refugee boat was shipped to a show in Los Angeles. Commenting on an earlier destruction of artist neighborhoods and free expression in China, Ai Weiwei said, “If you are being treated unfairly, you have to let your voice out, and let other people know it. You cannot just be silent.” That’s a powerful phrase. Nevertheless, he persists. Please join me in welcoming Tim Marlow and Ai Weiwei.

Tim Marlow   I want to start with what Chase has just told everyone, about the demolition of your studio in Beijing. Your studio in Shanghai was demolished by the Chinese authorities in 2011 and now, in 2018, the studio in Beijing has been demolished. The first question is, does this cut, for the moment, your formal ties with China? Is there anywhere for you to go back to now in Beijing? Do you see this as an end of a particular chapter in your relationship with making work in China?

Ai Weiwei   Thank you. I wouldn’t say that it ends my relationship with China, because that relationship is beyond my understanding. I’m Chinese, my father was Chinese, and all the people before me were Chinese. At this moment, my son is in my studio in Beijing, and I just received a little video piece from him. He is collecting some earth, and he’s going to bring it back to me. He’s ten years old, and he’s really acting on his own. He says, “I cannot go back.”

Actually, my brother took him to a hot spring. Normally you don’t take a child there, but in Beijing it’s another kind of thing. An old man sat next to my ten-year-old son and asked, “This guy next to you is your father?” My son said, “No, he isn't my father. My father cannot come back.” The old man asked, “Why can't he come back?” He replied, “Because it’s not safe for him.” The old man felt very strange and said, “Why is it not safe?”

My son surprisingly told him, “His name is Ai Weiwei, don’t you think it’s not safe?” The man said, “No, I don’t know the guy.” He then said, “He’s the son of Ai Qing, do you know Ai Qing? Ai Qing is my grandfather, and he’s a writer. Everybody knows him.” The old man said, “Yes, I know Ai Qing.” Then they started to talk with each other. He told the man that because Ai Weiwei is like Ai Qing and he has those ideas and the state simply thinks this guy is dangerous, he cannot come back. My son is almost ten years old, and he starts to say that he’s worried, and he wants to bring something back to me.

He started to save my cats. I have about forty cats in my studio in Beijing, and I feel very proud of young kids like that. I started to think, what does China mean to him? When he was one year old, I was detained. Then, after I was released, I’d take him every day to the park. There were secret police taking photos from behind the bushes. If we went to a restaurant, at the next table, there would be secret police. They were always next to us. He grew up in that society, and he still wants to go back. He feels so much better when he’s there.

English is his first language, and German is his second language. He lives in Berlin, but he still wants to go back. I don’t understand it.

Tim Marlow   That’s beautiful. I remember you made a piece about the surveillance of your son, and you made a marble pushchair or stroller. I remember you telling us again, in 2015, that it was the discovery of all the photographs that the secret police had been taking that meant you wanted to get your son Ai Lao out of China, and here he is going back. It’s very touching.

You brilliantly avoided the question about whether your own connection with China is cut, and I’ll come back to that. Let’s go back to your relationship with your own father. John Tancock has written a beautiful essay about it called “Born Radical.” He says that because of the experience you had as a consequence of the Cultural Revolution, being exiled to northwestern China, you were radical from the beginning. Is that a fair observation? Were you always someone who felt the need to speak up?

Ai Weiwei   I guess when your child is being treated very unfairly, you don’t even know it. It’s like if you stand in the rain, you get wet. When the conditions are like that, you feel it’s the nature of society, so you accept it. But when I left China and came to the United States in the 1980s, I gradually understood that there can be another way of living and another kind of society.

Still, I couldn’t find the right moment for me to express myself. Even when I understood everything, still my expression didn’t exist. I couldn’t find the right medium until I got on the internet. Then I realized, “Oh, this is fantastic. You can write down whatever you think about.” I started to use it to express things directly. I feel this is a miracle for somebody in China because everything is censored and there’s no way to express yourself.

But then, soon after, I was put in jail and put in all kinds of strange conditions. To answer you, it was really through my writings that I realized I was quite radical. Later, I read through some of my writings and thought, “This guy is pretty crazy.”

Tim Marlow   When did you realize that you wanted to be an artist?

Ai Weiwei   I still struggle to ask myself that. Do I really want to be an artist? It’s really a tough job for me now. I’m still undecided.

Tim Marlow   That’s interesting. Because of the range of materials that you use, in certain regards, it seems that it’s a genuine discovery. There is a richness in the found object, in the objects that you’ve collected and worked with, and you’ve worked with everything from wood to stone to Legos, and so on. Hearing you say, slightly disingenuously, that you’re still working out if you’re an artist or not is profound too.

It makes me think that, even in the way you use materials, it’s still a search for what you want to do or what you want to be. Do you think there’s a poetic aspect to what you do that comes from your father and his being a poet? Is that too glib of a way of seeing the way you use materials? Do you think you’re your father’s son in that way?

Ai Weiwei   My father is a poet, and if I look at his way of making art, he totally opens his senses to any kind of condition. When I use materials, it is not very often I choose the materials, but rather I think the materials start to talk to me. These are always difficult conversations. It is very hard to find out how to deal with such materials because then you have to study history, how those materials have been used before, in what kind of context, and what kind of form can come out of work from these materials. Then you start to feel, “This is not enough,” because we are living in this very modern society, and basically any material has equal potential. How much can you know about it, and what kind of possibilities can you give it in order to create a new language?

Tim Marlow   Do you still feel the compulsion to work with objects that you’ve collected from China? Have you got material in your studio in Berlin that you will eventually work with? Or is the Chinese material, from the pots that you’ve collected to the material from the Sichuan earthquake, still in Beijing?

Ai Weiwei   I have had a habit of collecting ever since I went back to China in 1993. It’s basically because at that time I had nothing to do. I spent every day going to the market. It was a golden time for collecting things, and it was a very cheap place for materials. Not everybody understood what those materials really meant because China had been cut off from its own cultural heritage for too long. Very few people understood how valuable those materials were, so you could really spend very little money to get them.

I started collecting and gradually, after maybe six years, concentrated on studying these materials from the earliest findings to the Qing dynasty. That covers about six to seven thousand years of material culture. I do have a very large collection. Most of it is in China.

Tim Marlow   An articulately framed question: so you’re still very connected to those Chinese traditions of making, and of craftsman-ship, and that will still be a continuing strand in your own work? You’ll still work with some of those materials? That will still be part of what you do?

Ai Weiwei   No, I’m already very bored with it. Six years is quite a long time. You basically touch every material from silk to porcelain to bronze. For craftsmanship, you only have, maybe, twenty dynasties with materials that are not difficult for you to get hold of and to understand. Now I’ve stopped collecting because it’s kind of boring. You repeat yourself.

Tim Marlow   Let’s try to go back to that issue of Beijing and the studio ending. There was speculation in the New York Times recently that you might be moving to New York. We know your main studio now is in Berlin. The studio in Beijing has gone. Do you have a sense of where you’re going to be in the next two, three, four years? Or is the nomadic life that you seem to have had in the past three or four years, which we’ll come to in a minute—the traveling around the world, particularly engaging with the refugee crisis—the model for the next few years?

Ai Weiwei   It’s kind of funny. I gradually realized I never had a place I could call home, and I have no one location I would be so emotionally attached to and say, “Okay, I want to stay here forever.” There’s no such place. I relate to my father’s generation’s being refugees and later becoming political dissidents, so it’s very normal to me. Today, I still have a studio in Berlin, but my Beijing studio is destroyed, so I think it’s the moment I should move because it’s always good to be able to select another place before my Berlin studio is destroyed.

Tim Marlow   I remember talking to you about the loss of your Shanghai studio, and you made a piece, Souvenir from Shanghai, in which the fragments of the studio were constructed into a three-dimensional rectangular structure of an old Qing dynasty bed. I thought then how you had turned something violent into something creative and memorializing, and you didn’t seem angry. I know that you always expect the unexpected, but do you feel a certain anger or frustration that your Beijing studio is destroyed?

This was a place where you worked for a long time. Extraordinary work came out of it, and a lot of people were employed in the studio itself. It was the studio where a lot of large-scale work was fabricated and stored. Did that generate anger?

Ai Weiwei   It should have, but it didn't, because in my life I have seen generations being destroyed. My father’s whole generation, three hundred thousand intellectuals, just vanished in one year, and then in the Cultural Revolution, all those old things were destroyed—temples, Buddhist statues, and anything relating to the past. The finest of porcelains, calligraphy, and paintings were all being destroyed right in front of the public. Recently in China, with houses being torn down and migrants being kicked around, it’s all very common and it happens every second.

With my art studio being destroyed, of course it’s affected me, because in the past twelve years most of my major works were made there, but I don’t feel that sad about it. It’s just one of the places being destroyed.

Tim Marlow   The idea that you’re not sure where you feel at home, I think, is a very powerful one. The idea that your son—who has experience in Beijing but has grown up in the past five years or more in Berlin—wants to go back is interesting too. Do you think that you will ever put down roots? Or are you saying that it really does seem that for the next decade or two, or three, of your life, you have no sense of wanting to be rooted somewhere?

Ai Weiwei   Well, I never had the experience of being rooted. I am always being rerooted and being pulled, and sometimes thrown to dry land, and sometimes you survive well. I’m always ready to be pulled out.

Fig. 3.1: Ai Weiwei’s Zuoyou studio in Beijing demolished by the Chinese authorities, 2018.

Tim Marlow   Let’s talk a little bit about the refugee crisis, because there was kind of coincidence of your getting a passport back in 2015, coming to Europe, coming to Berlin to see your son and the studio that had been set up there in your absence, and coming to London for the London Academy show. Then I remember there was a walk across London that you did with Anish Kapoor in support of the refugees. Then, I’m summarizing, off you went eventually to Lesbos, where you set up a studio and started to engage with that crisis. Was this something that you had been aware of from China over the previous three, four, or five years? Or was it only by leaving China that you suddenly became aware of what was going on, and this became something that fueled your art?

Ai Weiwei   We made the refugee film in 2015 and 2016, but in 2014, I was still in China in detention. We sent our studio colleagues to a refugee camp in Iraq to find out who the refugees were, and made hundreds of interviews, long videos, and portraits. We were trying to find out who those people were, and why they had become refugees in crappy northern Iraq. It was purely for my political curiosity. What was the future of these people? Not too long after that, I got my passport and I could travel. So I just continuously try to find out what is really happening in the world. I need to know.

Tim Marlow   What have you learned from those travels? What have you learned from making Human Flow?

Ai Weiwei   At the beginning, I brought my son with me. We traveled to Lesbos, to the beach, and I told him it was a vacation. And it is a beautiful place for a vacation, because around Christmastime, Germany is pretty dark and cold. It was a very beautiful sunny day, and the ocean was so blue. Then suddenly I saw a boat approaching us. The people on the boat wore orange life jackets. I was kind of shocked, even though that’s what I came for, to see how they arrived. I used to say that to hear about a snake is very different from seeing a snake. I was totally shocked.

At that second, I decided I should move my studio to Lesbos, because the people were coming in, boat after boat, especially after midnight. Sometimes you could see thirty boats approaching, with all those women and the babies crying. They were all wet. They all came from a very unfamiliar culture and religion, and they were just trying to escape. You know, so many people died on that journey. I said this has to be recorded.

I started recording it on my iPhone, and I called my studio because we have a tradition of documenting things. That’s when we started to make the film. But of course, I soon realized the problem is much larger than just the Syrian refugees. You have a history of refugees. You have refugees in the world for very different reasons. We went to twenty-three nations, including in Africa, Bangladesh, Iraq, Pakistan, the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. That brought me to forty different camps, and I interviewed six hundred people. That’s the price you pay for trying to satisfy your curiosity.

Tim Marlow   Does it feel overwhelming and futile to encounter the scale of the refugee problem? Or do you have enough optimism and hope in human nature, having met these people? Many of them, individual people—you were constantly talking about understanding and hearing individual voices, not seeing them lumped together as a mass. Do you see a glimmer of hope for humanity? Because of their fortitude? Does it make everything seem rather futile when you encounter the scale of the refugee crisis? Does art seem futile?

Ai Weiwei   My approach is quite selfish and is for my personal learning. I have to have my understanding and perspective about what kind of world we live in, so it’s really about how I understand the situation. It’s very simple. If you are not there facing these people and you’re not staying a period of time to see how they pass the night, how they stand in the rain, how they make their food, how the children and women can go to the bathroom or take a shower, and all those very simple things, then you will never understand the situation.

Not until you’re facing them do you realize they are just like you, or your sister, or your baby. There is a very raw humanity there at the camps. Then you start to question who put them in that kind of condition? Why can't people accept them? Why do people discriminate against them and give all kinds of dirty names to those who are already vulnerable victims? There are about seventy million people being forced out of their homes. They all had a home before. Nobody wants to go to another place; it’s almost impossible for people, even escaping, to have a real life in a new location.

Tim Marlow   There was a moment when, on the shores of Lesbos, you had yourself photographed in the pose of Alan Kurdi, a young Kurdish boy who drowned. There was a lot of controversy over that. You, I think quite rightly, said you were empathizing, you were trying to engage with something and actually trying to put yourself in that position. Are you surprised by the public reaction to some of the things you do? What I’m really getting at is that you’re now a celebrated international artist, an activist. Do you have to think about the way things will play out publicly?

Ai Weiwei   Do you think if I cared about those kinds of outcries I could become an artist like I am today? Do you think I could survive? I don’t give a damn shit about those things.

Tim Marlow   Yeah, I think that’s borne out by most of your career. Let’s talk about what you do care about, which is this ongoing exploration of trying to understand. I certainly would never expect you to come up with an answer to how we might solve the problems of the global refugee crisis. I’m curious as to what you’ve learned, having experienced the scale of the problem. We talked a bit about it earlier. Do you think it is possible for a global solution, given the rise of nationalism, xenophobia, and suspicion? Do you still believe humanity can sort this problem out?

Ai Weiwei   This is very simple and it always comes to these kinds of questions. How do we solve it? We are a society that always believes we can solve things. We’re scientifically developed, and we have had so much potential in the past hundred years to push us to believe we can solve things. Problems created by humans are really humanity’s tragic condition, and they can be completely solved by ourselves. The question, rather, is do we really want to solve them? As you know, the United States is still pushing to sell 110 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to the Saudis, and the British also sold at least five billion dollars’ worth of weapons to the Saudis. When Germany says, “Let’s stop selling these weapons,” Britain, France, and the United States disagreed. It’s so obvious that this makes us feel stupid even to talk about it on a stage like this. Everybody knows what the problem is. Everybody knows weapons are made for killing, and everybody knows those weapons should not be sold to those kinds of societies. I think it’s an insult to our public and our intellect to think we don’t understand this, or we are just pretending not to understand this. We just pretend that the consequences have nothing to do with us.

They have been selfish, narrow-minded, and so corrupt. The whole society is corrupted. They just pretend we’re not a part of it. Come on. I don’t think we even need to talk about it. We’re all in deep shame.

Tim Marlow   Who have you learned most from? Let’s talk artists first, but let’s talk others as well. Which artist have you learned most from?

Ai Weiwei   You… . You’re laughing.

Tim Marlow   I am. I don’t think you’ve learned anything from me. I’ve certainly learned from you. Sean Scully was your teacher at Parsons for a time, and he played a certain role, but he’s very funny about it too. He was one of your teachers. You also said that Duchamp, although he wasn’t alive at the time, was perhaps someone you learned a vast amount from, and Jasper Johns, actually. They would have been two possible artists. Do you learn, still, from the art that you encounter around the world? Or does your activism and the experiences—say, the refugee crisis we’ve just been talking about—mean that you’re not looking so much at art anymore?

Ai Weiwei   Around 1993, I moved back to China and spent more than six years looking back at what humans have created in different periods. Since then, I haven’t looked at contemporary art. I have enough knowledge about contemporary art, actually, and waste too much time on contemporary art. I pay a lot of attention to other things, like architecture, art, design, life, cooking, or just cutting people’s hair, or things like that. I no longer go to galleries.

Tim Marlow   But you’re very much a part of the art world, as well as being outside of it. You’ve shown in thirty-five major museums or institutions in the past five years, and a hundred or so before that. Is the art world a means to an end for you?

Ai Weiwei   Well, it is existing institutions, just as you walk down a road and the road is already there. You cross a river, and the bridge is already there. It’s not that I imagine how the bridge is. It’s just a bridge and you don’t want to get wet, so you just cross it.

Tim Marlow   There’s still something about the context in which museums and institutions frame art, and in which artists can critique or reframe art, that potentially makes people see things in slightly different ways. Presumably, that still appeals to you. It’s not just a bridge, or a means to something else?

Ai Weiwei   Not so much, because life itself is so fresh. If you grow vegetables, you are not so concerned about selling at the supermarket, because you are in the field. You can just grow those vegetables from the earth. That gives me so much joy.

Straight. Installation at the Brooklyn Museum.

Tim Marlow   What about the art market? Is that a means for you to actually be able to fund the projects you want to do? It sustains you, and it’s a way of earning a living.

Ai Weiwei   The art market is very—and I should say very—strange, because you really realize when a piece sells. It could be on paper, it could be on canvas, and of course it could have a very strong spiritual value, but to sell at a price can be kind of erratic. Still, it provides for me. I’m not against it, because I profit from it. It gives me the possibility to make more so-called “ambitious work.” It’s not really ambitious. I just make it big or have more people get involved, but I should stop somewhere, because it’s not really interesting.

Tim Marlow   I think I’ll be the judge of that, or we will. I think it is interesting. You said earlier that in Beijing, Ai Lao, your son, met a man who didn’t know who you were. I’m certain that there are plenty of people in China who don’t know who you are, but I haven’t been to China with you or gone for meals or drinks. There are a lot of people who do know who you are—who did know who you were and who know who you are now. Do you think that your work has made a difference in any significant way to the way people are or how they perceive human rights or freedom of speech in China?

Ai Weiwei   Yes, I do. I often get stopped by a vendor or taxi driver and he will say, “Okay, I like your work.” I say, “Oh, why do you like my work?” He says, “You keep doing good work because you speak out for us.” I’m always very surprised to hear things like that. Yesterday in SoHo, I saw a carpenter, a young man, his whole outfit was full of paint, or was just very dirty. He wanted to take a selfie, and he said, “I like your work.” I’m always touched by people who speak their mind or heart. I think that’s very important, and just making all this work for that person is already worth something.

Tim Marlow   It’s interesting. Take Straight, which is the piece you made from the debris of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It’s seventy-five tons of rebar straightened out in this amazing wavelike pattern in this minimalistic grid, and when it was shown at the Royal Academy, there were people in tears at the exhibition. It was partly the naming of the children on the wall, but it was also the power of this material that they felt somehow had borne witness to a tragedy, and this was an extraordinary memorial. That work, I know, you just installed in São Paulo, but it’s also been shown in Brooklyn, it’s been shown in Washington, you told me, and in Tokyo. Does that work in particular, and your work in general, have a kind of universal resonance? Or do different countries, different cities, react differently to that piece?

Ai Weiwei   I think that certain works can really survive in very different cultures, like the Sunflower Seeds made in China and shown in the Tate. When I showed it in Israel, the people started to pick them up. I said, “No, you cannot touch it.” Since then, we measured that five hundred kilos have disappeared. They really thought that they were their sunflower seeds. Israeli people think that way. “Those are my sunflower seeds,” I said. “Okay, those are your sunflower seeds.” Then it showed in Turkey, and the Turkish people said, “These are our sunflower seeds. We love sunflower seeds.” Okay. Now we are showing in Brazil, so we have this kind of civilian sensor, and if you go close to it, it will make a “beep, beep” sound. I guess Brazilians think that the work is their sunflower seeds too.

This iron rebar came from one badly built high school that collapsed, and 1,700 students lost their lives. It took us about two years to separate the rebar. In the beginning, we didn’t know what we could do with 150 tons of rebar, but we did know we should collect it as evidence, because it would be melted down in the factory and then the people would forget about those things.

Since those 1,700 students would not exist, the memory of them would not exist. So I had this internet moment: to record and respect life, to never forget. To never forget, we needed a form, we needed evidence. We needed a clear accounting of their names, birthdays,and which schools collapsed. We did all that. When I looked at those rebars, I thought, “Why don’t we just straighten them out?” It was a huge, huge amount. After I was detained, I came back to my studio and realized people were still working there, making a very beautiful sound, trying to straighten those rebars so that they would appear as though I did nothing to them. Like almost new from the factory, just like that.

Tim Marlow   There are questions from the floor. I’m going to go through some of these because there are some interesting ones. Do you have any religious practices, or do you believe in some kind of God?

Ai Weiwei   I definitely believe in some kind of God, but I still don’t know what kind.

Tim Marlow   Is art a surrogate religion? Not for you, but for many, do you think?

Ai Weiwei   I think for many it is, or they pretend it is. Very often I see they pretend it is, but it should be.

Tim Marlow   It should be? Should be religious?

Ai Weiwei   Any best moment in art or in poetry has got some religious feeling in it.

Tim Marlow   What advice would you have for young activists who want to use art to reimagine how people could live without oppression?

Ai Weiwei   I can’t answer it. It’s not something I can answer.

Tim Marlow   To follow their own research, to find out more for themselves, to be brave?

Ai Weiwei   I think they should not really just work for ideology. They should work for themselves. They should work to question what their life will be like if they don’t fight for the very basic dignity of life, or they will forget about the very essential feelings of happiness or sadness and what kind of human being they will be. I think it’s very sad if you already think you are an activist or an artist. I think very often it’s just a persona, and you cannot think you are just an artist or an activist.

Tim Marlow   I can see how the two are inextricably linked for you. You’ve been quite critical of certain artists and writers in China who haven’t been politically engaged, or those who have been outed by the authorities for being complicit in oppression. Do you still feel strongly that more artists should speak out in oppressive societies?

Ai Weiwei   It’s a disappointment if you think writers or artists are not protecting the most important quality of their life, which is the search for truth and for a language to express it. This is already a very difficult job, but people are just giving this up and pretending they are writers or artists. What a shame. Today’s world can be very dramatic. While visiting for a short time in China, this actress, who knows nothing about the political situation, was secretly detained. She is a famous Chinese actress, although I never watched her movies. Also recently, the head of public security was called back from Paris and has been secretly detained. There is also news of a journalist being called into the Saudi embassy. The rest everybody knows. They’re still asking, “Who did it?” Nobody asks, “Where is the body?” It doesn’t matter who did it, where’s the body? Just tell us, where is the body? The world is like that. It’s a very strange world.

Tim Marlow   I remember reading an interview in the Art Newspaper in which they pointed out that you’d shown recently in Doha, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. These are three countries where the attitude toward human rights have been questioned and where there have been crack-downs. Did you feel compromised showing there? You gave a very interesting answer.

Ai Weiwei   I think you’ll feel compromised by not showing there and saying, “I’m out of it.” I think it is important to really be there, to let your voice be heard, to trust the people, trust humanity, and still make an effort in a difficult situation. I tried to communicate with the secret police who detained me. They visited me every day, and we had to have a conversation. I always gave them a very sincere conversation, even more sincere than I do here. It’s true, because I believe they understand my language, and they should. Why shouldn’t they? Or do I become shy about my feelings? Do I have any excuse not to say what is deeply in my heart to another human being? I think, for me, this is success.

Tim Marlow   Are there countries in the world that, on principle, you wouldn’t show in?

Ai Weiwei   United States, Britain.

Tim Marlow   Yeah.

Ai Weiwei   If I can’t show in Israel, why show in the United States? Why do I show in Britain? Those nations don’t do much better than other places.

Tim Marlow   You included scenes of solitary animals in Human Flow. What drew you to those animals and to film them?

Ai Weiwei   First, my next film is about animals. I really think it is so tragic when women, children, and animals are the most victimized. They have nothing to do with politics or our ambitious ideology, but they’re always being victimized. Now I’m making another film about animals’ relationship to humans. What are the true relationships throughout history? Through different religions, different cultures, how do we see ourselves and our relationship to animals? It’s all very, very fascinating.

Tim Marlow   Is this global? Will you be traveling?

Ai Weiwei   Same scale as Human Flow, maybe even bigger.

Tim Marlow   Okay. Last question from the floor. Two parts: How many languages do you speak, and what language do you dream in?

Ai Weiwei   I’m speechless.

Tim Marlow   Very good. No, you’re not getting off yet. I have one more question to ask you. You’re doing a new film, there’s a book to be published, and I know there are many museum and institutional shows that have been lined up for you. Do you see your career in …

Ai Weiwei   (Takes out cell phone) I always record the last question.

Tim Marlow   You could see your career in terms of certain sections and certain moments. Have you finished Human Flow? Do you see yourself entering a new phase of your career, or is it going to be, for the next few years, a continuation of what you’re doing now? More filming, more museum projects?

Ai Weiwei   This is a very typical Western question. You cut it up: salad, main course, and dessert. For the Chinese, we eat all the time. We don’t have that kind of problem.

Tim Marlow   On a gnomic, humorous, and absurd note, but very profound too, we should end. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, Ai Weiwei. Thank you very much indeed.

4   Conversation with Amale Andraos and Carol Becker

Amale Andraos   I first met Ai Weiwei in the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia in China. Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron had invited one hundred young architects from around the world to each propose a villa for a residential development within this new Chinese city.

Though the villas were never built, Ordos 100 represents a network of lifelong friendships and collaborations that are single-handedly upending canonical narratives about architecture, decentering its European hegemony, and most important, searching for ways to engage the potential and challenges that global urbanization, migration, real estate development, and climate change present. These opportunities and challenges crystallized for many of us in Ordos with great intensity and urgency, so I wanted to personally thank Ai Weiwei for enabling that experience for all of us. Preparing for today’s conversation was no small feat, so I’m also delighted that Carol Becker, dean of the School of the Arts, has agreed to share the stage with us this evening. Diving together over the past few weeks into Ai Weiwei’s more recent work has given us some precious time to connect a flurry of thoughts and to share old and new experiences.

This is maybe how the encounter with Ai Weiwei’s work happens: Whether experienced directly or through media, a constant unfolding, layering, and expansion occurs. You see the piece, always beautiful and beautifully crafted, then you realize its scale—whether literally, in terms of its physical presence, or as a result of the narratives around it, such as the labor it took to make it, the stories embedded in the materials it is made of, the references it brings to life, the disconnected threads it draws together, the mediatic scaling up from smartphone to smartphone, courageously, provocatively, and generously blurring intensely and often violently lived moments with their instant broadcast.

Ai Weiwei’s work is bound to touch all of us. It is at once deeply personal and able to reach across differences in time, space, experience, and knowledge to render whatever is left of our shared humanity viscerally tangible and present, opening up within the thick walls of his own beautiful buildings small yet powerful windows, frames to look out and imagine a different world but also to look in, to transform ourselves and our gaze. Ai Weiwei’s work is a constant register of our times. It makes visible what we refuse to see, or invites us to consider what we think we know differently.

It appropriates everyday objects and materials and transforms them across mediums with great intensity of labor and care. As new juxtapositions converge, new aesthetic experiences are created, new meanings are produced, and new associations are made possible; old boundaries are erased, walls crumble, and limits are recast. It is not only the work that expands and is expansive; it is also the person and his practice—more than an artist, more than an architect, more than a writer, a filmmaker, or an activist. Ai Weiwei’s expanded practice is opening up for all of us—and certainly, I suspect, for many students in this room—new possibilities for knowledge, for engagement, and for action.

Carol Becker   Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is an incredible project that tries to bring the stories of immigrants and refugees right into the heart of the city. You are coming back to New York with memories of what Washington Square Park was like when you were first here. I wanted to start by hearing about your experiences then and about how it feels to return to this city now.

Ai Weiwei   Thank you for the very long introduction you gave me. I always think, is that really me? I am very happy to have a chance to be with you. I practice architecture and art, and as you see, I’m in love with both practices. It’s about having a fantasy and the skill to have rational practical thinking. Also, it is very important to make things happen and to add something to our life. For Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, it happened a few years ago when the Public Art Fund invited me to do a project.

First, I was hesitant. I thought, New York City is such a beautiful city, and it doesn’t really need public art. Very often I see something there and always think, “Oh, it’s too much, it shouldn’t be there.” But nevertheless, I ended up having a project in the city. I spent about ten years here, between 1982 and 1993. During that time, I was a student just like most of you here. I considered myself a student, but I actually only studied for about a year, or less than a year.

Carol Becker   Don’t tell our students that.

Ai Weiwei   I dropped out of Parsons. It’s a nice school but very expensive, and it was like a kindergarten for me. I came from a communist society, and my parents couldn’t support me. I never told them how expensive it was. It would have given them a heart attack. It was not possible for them to understand tuition. Here you have to pay so much, and I still don’t understand it. In many countries you don’t have to pay, but why does this country have you pay? I guess some kind of magic psychological thing will be set up with young people. They’re conscious about money and later have to make money to pay back all those things. I never understood all this because I never finished school. I just dropped out. By dropping out, I became an illegal person in New York, but that wasn’t a problem. A lot of illegal aliens live here. It didn’t make me feel bad. I felt liberated because I wasn’t part of this capitalist machine.

Carol Becker   You could drop out because you still were able to continue as an artist without those structures.

Ai Weiwei   You can always call yourself an artist if you drop out.

Carol Becker   Right. But architects …

Ai Weiwei   You tell people you’re an artist, people will not even ask you the second question. It’s not polite to ask somebody who’s already said he’s an artist. I spent about ten years wandering around and pretending to go to all those galleries and museums and standing in front of paintings for like maybe ten minutes without knowing what they were. I cannot understand it, but this wall is so beautiful, the lighting is amazing, but why do they hang this art here? I have no idea. When you’re twenty-four, you really think the world is so profound, and there’s no possibility to really penetrate our assumptions.

Let’s talk about this project. Public Art Fund invited me to do this, and it was a bit difficult because I love the city but I didn’t want to make a sculpture in the city. I have concerns about borders, territory, and immigration, and then I got the opportunity to make something about current issues. I think it’s interesting to do something with architecture. An idea with fences, in relation to building facades or objects that are ready-made with their own history, could work well in the city. Our parents are all immigrants to this city, as refugees or otherwise, so it wasn’t a difficult matter to discuss this idea. Public Art Fund liked this concept, so we started to work. I decided to work on many layers, from a bus stop to subway posters to light banners.

Fig. 4.1: Banner 64, 2017. Installation view during Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, New York, 2017.

Carol Becker   Laser-cut banners.

Ai Weiwei   Yes. Laser-cut is the technique we used, and we made faces from prominent refugees like Kandinsky and Einstein, poets, musicians, and also images I took in refugee camps.

Amale Andraos   What you’re seeing here is one of them in the arch at Washington Square Park. Carol and I were there, and we were saying it was already very beautiful; as the light went through, you could read the gate in various ways with these cutouts.

Carol Becker   You can walk through the figures.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, because I am an architect.

Amale Andraos   It’s clear, yes.

Ai Weiwei   It’s clear, and it’s easy for me to make this. If anything goes wrong with architecture, I can tell them: I’m an artist. I have really profited by doing both architecture and art.

Carol Becker   I was particularly struck by the gates you put up at Cooper Union. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, Cooper Union was the place where immigrants who wanted to study art, architecture, or engineering got to go to school for free. It was designed for the immigrant populations of New York.

Ai Weiwei   Oh?

Carol Becker   It was Peter Cooper’s vision that it would be a school for people who would never get to go to school because he never got to go to school. So he built Cooper Union with that idea that it would be a school immigrants could attend. It was always the most open place, and I thought it was very interesting to see a very different kind of fence being installed at Cooper Union, as if that possibility no longer exists. You really have to think about what Cooper Union has been and relook at it with this notion that you can’t get in with the gates up now, since it has always been the school that you could go to and you could go to for free.

Ai Weiwei   I like Cooper Union only for the reason I heard they used to have a very tough architecture program. By the second year, if you’re not good, the professor could just destroy your models and say, “Get out of here.” Somehow I liked that, and I thought this must be a good school.

Amale Andraos   We don’t do that anymore.

Ai Weiwei   I’m teaching art in Berlin now. I have to be very courteous to my students because they’re more like professors, and if you push too hard they start to cry. What is happening to students today? They say, “Oh, you know, students are very liberal.” I looked in the dictionary and liberal doesn’t mean lazy, but they are really lazy, these students today. How can you meet a real challenge? Maybe there’s no challenge in later life? I think it’s very difficult for a professor to teach today because you cannot push too hard, and without pushing hard why would you become a professor? It’s tough.

Carol Becker   What do you think students, in both art and architecture, need to know to go into this world, the way it is now?

Ai Weiwei   First, I think the whole education system is unbelievably long. Some students at twenty-five or in their thirties are still trying to get a degree, and I think you spend the best years of your life in school. There are better places to learn than in a school. Even a school in Manhattan does not offer enough information for young people to structure knowledge around what real life is all about. I think that teaching is for me, but schooling is too long.

Amale Andraos   I think this is one of the things that we talk about a lot, actually, within the school of the arts and the school of architecture. Today, I think architects and artists need to work across disciplines and in many different mediums. It’s not so linear anymore. It’s something that we try to teach. You’re right that you have to engage with life.

Ai Weiwei   It’s as though life has become slow motion. When you’re in school, it is so different from real life. My situation, of course, may not be a good example. I never learned architecture and I never learned filmmaking, but it does not take so long to learn those things—maybe three months or something. Architecture and filmmaking are somehow related. Filmmaking is very much like architecture, where everything’s predesigned. You’re collaborating, because you have a cameraman, lighting, makeup person, actor, and actresses—all predesigned—and architecture also works this way. I think if you’re an architect already, you should be a filmmaker at the same time.

Amale Andraos   One part that I think is really interesting regarding your crossover as an artist and an architect is how you deal with the question of scale and the individual. We had a fantastic lecture last week at GSAPP by Rosanne Haggerty, who’s developing housing for homeless people. She found out, after a number of years, that the only way to start opening up that problem is actually to know the name of every person who is homeless. It’s the specificity of the narrative and the granular scale that can allow us to deal with larger-scale issues. In your work, it’s always the singular part that makes up these very large-scale projects. As architects, we still struggle to make those bridges, right? I mean, we’re building these huge cities that often lack humanity.

Ai Weiwei   Exactly! You might know the measurements, the proportions, and how people use it, but if it’s lacking humanity, then nothing’s going to work. That’s the problem with architecture education. You have a lot of people who understand those physical qualities, rather than understanding human life. If you talk about refugees, they have been through war zones and famine. When they come to Europe, all they need is some attention paid to them rather than being put in camps or waiting for policy to design their future. Give them some recognition as human beings. They’re people with strong dignity, and they’re also quite proud, and to take the chance of going through this journey is extremely difficult. I see many of them in Europe; even after they are accepted, people still look at them very differently. This is not only unpleasant but also very dangerous because you’re really going to push away those people by saying they’re very different.

Carol Becker   These images are of the work you made from the life jackets saved from Lesbos after Syrian refugees arrived. When I first saw these pieces, I thought, only an artist would think this way.

Ai Weiwei   (Laughs)

Carol Becker   All these abandoned life preservers are here used to communicate as both image and metaphor. To Amale’s point, you have tried to keep to the particularity, to the specificity, to try to make the enormity of the refugee situation real to people. I think you’ve struggled to find a form and made so many different pieces about this issue, all trying to get at its scale but also keep the humanity of its breadth intact. Is Human Flow in some way a resolution for you? Being able to bring together all the elements that need to be talked about?

Fig. 4.2: Safe Passage, 2016. Installation view at the Berlin Konzerthaus.

Ai Weiwei   Well, those projects did just pop into my mind like in a second. When you look at a building from the Renaissance, you know it carries all kinds of meanings. Why are those things designed like that, and why does it dominate our understanding about a building? We have this culture of conflicts—religious conflicts and aesthetic conflicts. If I can call something ugly, I would say those life jackets are very ugly. I usually don’t use that word, but you know, because so many people drowned in this ocean, because many of the jackets were fake and didn’t float. How can you illustrate all those feelings? It’s very hard. You’re not decorating life, but you are instead saying, “Hey, this is it.” I feel quite ashamed when I look at those images because it says so much about today’s humanity, with no solution in sight for those people.

Amale Andraos   One of the things that I know from our students is that they want to find a new way to engage. I do think that this is an interesting time. If I think about the past decades in architectural education, there was a division between form and content, especially in America, and between meaning and medium. It was frowned upon if you brought a political or activist narrative to architectural practice. And yet of course architecture is completely embedded in power, right? How do architects and artists find a way to engage?

Fig. 4.3: Studio House, 1999.

Ai Weiwei   I became an architect because of one incident. I moved back to China in 1993 after being in the United States for twelve years. I tried to be a good boy and spend more time with my mom after my father passed away. Basically, I had nothing to do as someone coming back from New York. I still had that liberal tradition in me and felt very comfortable doing nothing and just staying home. My mom is a typical Chinese, and she’s always been proud of me because I was always good at school. She never understood why I came back and never graduated, never got a diploma or had many things. I didn’t even have an American green card or passport. One day she got angry and said I needed to move out. I thought this would give me an opportunity to build a house of my own.

At that time, to build a house was quite cheap, and the building you are seeing here was made from a simple drawing.

It took about thirty days to build it. It cost about $30,000; that’s less than one year’s tuition at your school. It is really beautiful inside, and I tried to make just one window and one door. It’s like a child making a little building, but inside it’s much better looking with very nice lighting. It became a model in China because at that time all the developers were trying to copy the Western style. The style they were doing was more like from the Renaissance time because I think architects can ask for more money by doing those designs. If you made a drawing like this, maybe they would kick you out and say, “What is this drawing?” So I started to build for many people and had about sixty projects. Later I quit because I had had enough of it.

So if you want to be an architect, first you have to be kicked out by your mom. You either become homeless or you build something.

Carol Becker   I think probably for all of us to come into our own, in any form of adultness, we need to be kicked out by our parents, not only those who will become architects. I want to go back to this notion of action. Hannah Arendt talks about speech as action. This idea seems similar to what Amale was saying about architects and their gestures, and I see it with young artists. There is a growing new trend and desire to work in the public sphere, to work in new, unexpected forms. I was really taken with the story of what happened during the Sichuan earthquake. As an artist, you moved into a situation and actually took over a role that the government was refusing to play, which was to articulate the names and the number of children in particular who died from these faultily built buildings. There were 5,335 children, and you started a citizen’s investigation to find out the name of each of those children. It seemed to be—at least looking at your life—a very crucial and pivotal moment when things turned for you, and your purpose also became apparent. I would love for you to talk about that because there are many young artists and architects in the room, and the notion that artists could be useful in a different and important way is very interesting to me and perhaps to them.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, I think this all comes from how you deal with events in your life. Today’s teaching is like having a good car that you drive fast on the highway, and everything is quite safe, but you don’t know by driving fast on this highway that you miss so much. You can see so much without having a car or without being on this highway. Life is not just about reaching another point, because once you are on this highway you cannot even drive off, and the next exit will be very far away.

I think this kind of design is really problematic. Since I never finished school, my life is full of wonder and I can always decide what I will do tomorrow. At the moment, I don’t have this liberty because in the next two months my life is pretty much designed. I’ve never experienced life that way, but right now I have a lot of engagements. In the past fifty-some years I could do anything the next day if I wanted to because I didn’t have any obligations. I don’t know why I started to talk about this.

Carol Becker   Because you were going to explain this piece. …

Ai Weiwei   Yes. I have to give some explanation about this. By 2005, I became a spokesperson for a new lifestyle because of my building designs. People said, “Oh, you have some kind of aesthetics we never knew,” and I really liked to talk about it all, so people realized all these new things. China suddenly had a hundred different kinds of fashion magazines, so they all wanted to find someone who could speak to something that could catch young people’s minds. I started to talk about my mind, my feelings, so they all felt something new was there. I became very well known in talking about architecture, interior design, and lifestyle aesthetics in relating to those things. In China, the internet had just started, and they said they had to open a blog for me. It was a blog for well-known individuals.

It was challenging because I had never touched a computer and didn’t know how to type. Sina, which is a Chinese company, said they would send an assistant to help me type. I was a bit embarrassed, but I said okay because I wanted to see what was possible. In the beginning, I put a few words on the computer and posted them. Then I realized it was not so exciting, so I started to involve myself every day sitting in front of the computer and writing articles. I would just open a newspaper to find any topic. I’m full of opinions and criticism. Each day I would put around three articles on the internet, and the next morning I would see my articles being reposted or retweeted three hundred thousand or so times. That really shocked me because this was a nation where nobody had ever experienced freedom of speech. There was no such platform. The internet gave me power, so for the next three years, from 2005 onward, I was completely involved in this. By 2008, China had the Olympics and at the same time had this earthquake. So I thought, if the government doesn’t cover how many people died in the quake, I can do it. I can just do the investigation myself, and it’s not going to be difficult. I called it a citizens' investigation and, on the internet, we had a hundred volunteers and young students. They didn’t know how dangerous it was going to be to get involved. We went to the earthquake area to teach them how to investigate and do research. We basically knocked on the doors of all those people whose children had lost their lives in those villages to find a little over five thousand names, but of course we got arrested about a few dozen times by the police. The police would just erase our findings and delete our photos, and I even ended up being beaten by police. Then I wrote a lot and I also made a lot of artworks in relation to this event. I felt very emotionally involved, and I think when you are so involved you forget about all your education, which for me is very easy since I never had much education. I came out with some witty works, one of which was quite powerful, called Straight. It’s about one high school in Wenchuan where the earthquake caused more than 1,700 students to go missing under the rubble. This is really a very sad story. After almost two years, I located those rebars from the quake.

Fig. 4.4: Straight. Installation at the Brooklyn Museum.

They were all these broken rebars, all very twisted. The local people were reselling the rebars; they would break down the concrete and take them out. The rebars were made of metal, so you could make a few hundred dollars a ton. By that time, my name was already very sensitive, so I had to use people from my studio to buy all that rebar. We just paid more to the local people for the rebars, took them to Beijing, and started to straighten them out one by one. It takes about two hundred hammer strokes to straighten one rebar, and there were about 150 tons of rebar to work on. After two years, they were all straightened. It’s a form, so it doesn’t really need that much creativity, and it bears a lot of meaning and struggle. It has strength in itself. That’s a photo in the Brooklyn Museum.

Fig. 4.5: Laundromat, 2016. Installation at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, 2016.

Carol Becker   It’s the same with the Laundromat project, where all the clothes left by the refugees were washed and ironed. This is at Jeffrey Deitch, but there really is something so contemplative and almost devotional about taking each piece individually and treating it with care. In each of the two hundred hammerings of the individual rods of rebar, there is also so much intensity and meaning to the gesture. The more we focus on these processes, the more the layers of your life and work reveal themselves as well.

Ai Weiwei   You make me think, because very often art school teaches students to be creative. Everybody is so afraid to create whatever they like that even when I was at Parsons I realized you have all the freedom, but freedom doesn’t mean you can make an excellent piece of art. You see students from different schools, and mostly they are very much doing the same thing. I think that it’s kind of a wrong notion to encourage people to be creative, because how can you be creative if you don’t have enough patience or enough understanding? Can you give enough attention to what is happening? If you don’t know the meaning of these things, it’s very hard to encourage someone to be creative.

Carol Becker   In reading the blogs, what became clear to me was that your notion of personal freedom is very much connected to the idea of the public good. You believe very much in freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but in your own work increasingly, that concern seems to be interwoven with the notion of the collective. It’s not just your own freedom that is important but freedom for the entire society. You are continually pushing on that wall, which especially gets you in trouble in China because you refuse not to say what you think. I came to this idea that for you there is no individual freedom, but I was curious what you would say to that formulation?

Ai Weiwei   Yeah, I think in the West, freedom always relates to individuality. We talk about freedom as the freedom to have character, but as a cultural product, especially of China, I realize that individual character simply doesn’t exist. I have to relate to my existence, not to generalize, but to really relate to other people to find myself. It’s more like a mirror. That makes it easier to understand the meaning of my struggles.

Carol Becker   I think that the purposefulness that you are describing gives real weight to your work as an artist and as an architect, and this is what a lot of young artists (and I would guess architects as well) are looking for. I see this in our students.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, but then we are living in such a peaceful time, we’re all so spoiled, and we can’t really find a problem. So we start to create the problem. A lot of architecture and art practice at school tries to create a problem rather than face a problem. It is quite sad. It’s really a waste of time.

Amale Andraos   I think what’s interesting, and what I love the most about being here and teaching here, is the diversity of our students’ backgrounds and their exchange of experience. I think we have to change how we engage because we have to think across all these different experiences. What you are pointing to is how important it is to have something very personal to relate to, to be able to reach out and produce something that’s meaningful beyond yourself.

Ai Weiwei   If a school is always repeating the same language, that can be a problem, because if you learn a language at least you have to know a few languages. Do you pay attention to, say, the cat’s language or the dog’s language? We must have a much broader understanding of what language is about. It’s a tool. Language is not just for making a beautiful sentence but rather for communication. I think that, generally, this is missing in school, because schools are institutions and institutions are always corrupt. By definition, all the institutions have this potential to be corrupted. I’m not talking materially, but I am thinking spiritually. That’s difficult because you need a school for mass education, but at the same time you need meaningful teaching for someone who is unique. You still have the character of being a human being or being a leader in relating to creativity. There is always a difficult balance between knowledge and character. Very often schools only teach expertise but never really teach character.

Amale Andraos   But maybe you can’t teach character?

Ai Weiwei   If I have character, would I sit here for too long?

Carol Becker   I think most authoritarian governments have a tough time with artists, and I have a whole list of reasons why. Artists stress the individual; they stand outside of the masses; they create experiential experiences; they respond quickly and don’t ask permission; and they approach social issues in unexpected ways. Artists are also irreverent. I’m curious what you think gets to the Chinese government about your practice. You really got under their skin, and you paid dearly for it. Right now we are showing your installation S.A.C.R.E.D. I think it is one of the most amazing things you’ve ever done. Here it is installed in Venice. It is a depiction of your eighty-one days in detention. I’m just curious about what provoked the government to lock you up in this instance. What do you think? The piece is an amazing response to that experience.

Fig. 4.7: S.A.C.R.E.D., 2011–2013. Installation view at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, Venice, 2013.

Fig. 4.8: S.A.C.R.E.D. (Ritual), 2011–2013, detail.

Ai Weiwei   It comes from a very simple reason. When I was released from jail, my mom, friends, and people who love me or not wanted to hear what had really happened in detention. It’s very hard to describe the situation, so I thought if you all need to ask these kinds of questions, maybe I will re-create the conditions. For eighty-one days, I was sitting there doing nothing, and I remember everything. How many tiles there were, how large they were, and what patterns were on them. I remember everything because there’s really nothing to do and you just have to sit in there. You are not allowed to do anything. After I made this work, the police who had interrogated me came and said it’s not possible because we looked at your piece and we examined the real room and it is exactly the same. I told them, “You are dealing with an artist,” and they were really shocked. They became much nicer to me because they thought I had some kind of magic power and could get into that detention room again to make measurements and everything else exactly the same.

Amale Andraos   Because you are actually an architect?

Ai Weiwei   Yes, I’m an architect. I even found the same tile from a very old market, and I know they were going to buy the cheapest tile from the 1970s era. They had some tiles left, so I made those patterns and everything the same. It’s half scale. I want people to look at it and examine it. It’s more like you have to have some kind of superior height to look at it.

Carol Becker   You have to stand on these little boxes and look in, either from the top or the side. It has this childlike feeling because it is miniature and is juxtaposed to this horrifying content, and that’s why I think it is so successful. I don’t know if there’s another work of yours where you appear quite so centrally as yourself—where the subject is you.

Amale Andraos   We have some questions from the students. Who was the most influential contributor to your becoming who you are today?

Ai Weiwei   I would say my father. I never really even thought about it, but I never really liked him. When he was sixty, I was only ten years old. It was very hard to communicate because he was living in such difficult conditions. I never could remember anything he taught me because he had to do hard labor, clean the public toilets, and take all types of insults. So we were quite apart in ways. But now I feel I’m very close to him, and I learned almost everything from him. I will not say too much and waste your time—only a few things. He studied art in Paris, and after he got back to China, he was arrested and sent to jail. He studied art but became a poet in jail because art wasn’t allowed. This idea of poetry made him survive in these extreme conditions. I think that is something I learned from him—to make things simple.

Carol Becker   I think that you are becoming a writer yourself now— I mean, judging from the blogs and all.

Ai Weiwei   There are two things that I was really jealous of my father for. First, he was a good writer, and he knew how to use language. Having simple language is the most beautiful skill anybody can have. Many of my art students are asked to write a paper, and after a week or a month, they still can’t hand me presentable writing. I feel very sorry for them. How can you not write clearly about your ideas? That’s always the way I examine a human being: whether you can really illustrate your idea clearly. The next thing I was really jealous of him for was that he was put in jail. I said, “I will never have a chance to be put in jail.” So both things matched up. I wrote 250,000 words on the blog, where the writing is one meter thick.

Carol Becker   I have them all here in this book. It is very heavy.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, this is a very small portion of it. There is lot more than this—maybe ten times or more.

Carol Becker   Being in an art school, and being a dean of an art school, I meet a lot of people working in different forms, so when I read this, I thought you were a writer. You move like a writer in your mind.

Ai Weiwei   I write my own way.

Carol Becker   It is your way, and it is pretty interesting.

Ai Weiwei   It’s hard to read, but … (laughs)

Carol Becker   No, the writing is like Kafka; I decided you are like Kafka.

Ai Weiwei   Oh, I love Kafka!

Carol Becker   I’ll just say this one thing and promise not to dominate our conversation with my literary analysis of your writing. Similar to reading Kafka, in your writing it is unclear, in a very interesting way, who the narrator is and also who is receiving the message the narrator is writing. There is this ambiguity which I think points once again to Hannah Arendt, when she talks about tyranny. She says that when tyranny reaches a certain point, there is no longer an actual tyrant; there is just a heartless/headless bureaucracy. I feel as though you are writing to that bureaucracy in these blogs. There is no one there. You know there is no one there, and that’s why it feels like Kafka. But as the writer, you are caught in an enveloping mesh that you can’t get out from under.

Ai Weiwei   You really put it very beautifully, and it’s true. Nobody ever talked about my writing as you have. It’s very beautiful. Thank you.

Carol Becker   I’m a big fan.

Ai Weiwei   (Laughs) You know why I had that book come out quickly? I had this feeling they were going to arrest me, so I thought, before that happens, maybe the book should be out, because I would feel more comfortable sitting in the trial with my book published.

Carol Becker   That’s how writers think: “Get my book out before they take me away.”

Amale Andraos   Architects can’t think like that.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, it’s true.

Amale Andraos   This dovetails with the rise of advanced surveillance globally. Where will artists go to produce politically and socially challenging art?

Ai Weiwei   Surveillance or no surveillance, it’s about the given conditions, and I think art is always trying to find a way to be parallel to the given conditions in dealing with reality. It doesn’t matter what conditions are given, art can always survive and find its own way.

Carol Becker   When I heard you were teaching at the University of the Arts in Berlin, I was somewhat jealous, I have to say. But now, having heard you talk about teaching, I think you might not want to be teaching a whole lot longer. But if you were to develop a school for artists or architects, how would you go about it?

Ai Weiwei   A school? I think it would be meaningful to set up a learning process in dealing with reality. Of course, you need some kind of theoretical study, but that has to be examined by the reality. I think so many things need to be explored about real life, from cooking to just repainting your wall. Many things can bring us joy, curiosity, and passion. Without this, life would have no meaning, and it doesn’t matter what kind of status you have. You can see people in very high positions called architects or artists or whatever, but it is so empty.

Amale Andraos   How relevant to your work are organizations like the Public Art Fund? What benefits does the partnership offer to you as an artist?

Ai Weiwei   My work is very much about collaboration, and it’s not because I love those people but because by working with people you understand so much more. You have to work with the city and work with all kind of restraints. It’s not easy to work with people and to work with the Public Art Fund. They also challenged me with this project to work with the city, with transportation, with different boroughs and the park. It is so complicated to build something in the public sphere, and the projects always have a life of their own. You also have to deal with a budget, and it’s a very big issue because large projects require a lot of money. Creating art that is very controversial is just not practical. It is not like a building investment where things are bought and sold. An artist can never really solve it by himself, and it depends on very devoted people who believe art can make a difference. I’m very lucky I can be involved with people who have a profound understanding of this.

5   Conversation with Vivian Yee

Vivian Yee   Ai Weiwei, thank you so much for coming to speak with us. Everyone seems very excited, and I know I am too. I’m relatively new to writing about immigration for the New York Times, so I think I’m going to learn a lot tonight. I first wanted to talk about your installation Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. I’m sure many of you—this is a downtown crowd—will have seen the Washington Square Arch filled with this cage. Weiwei, you spent more than a decade living in New York on the Lower East Side, if I’m not mistaken. Why did you choose New York to come back to for the show?

Ai Weiwei   Since I got involved with the refugee crisis, I have made this film and had maybe ten other museum shows that are all refugee-related projects. But this New York City exhibition is a very special one. Public Art Fund is very different from museums and galleries, so it’s a good opportunity for me. This is where I lived for more than ten years, and I have quite strong emotions concerning this city. I feel in this city that almost everyone is an immigrant, or a child of refugees, from somewhere. It is a place I can relate my past to and connect to the current situation.The strongest characteristic of this city is the mix of people from all different nations, classes, religions, races, and languages. There are a lot of culturally oriented things here, in terms of literature, art, and performance. I think it’s the perfect city for me to do this project in.

Vivian Yee   You have talked in the past about how you grew up as a displaced person when your father, who was a dissident poet, was in political exile. Right now you’re living in Berlin after famously being detained by the Chinese authorities. Do you consider yourself an immigrant or a political refugee?

Ai Weiwei   I never paid much attention to this because I was forced out after so many years of detention. The only possibility was to send my son out to study, and that’s the reason I also moved out. If I didn’t have my son, I wouldn’t necessarily be out, even though it’s very dangerous there. Two of my lawyers are still in jail, and many of my friends are being detained without trial. Nobody knows where the lawyers might be, including their families. They couldn’t even have lawyers. I’m not scared. I just don’t want my son to be in the same kind of condition as I grew up in. When my father was exiled, he had no option to send me out because there was simply no way anybody could leave China.

Fig. 5.1: Arch, 2017. Installation view at Washington Square Park, 2017.

Vivian Yee   Now you’re in Berlin, by choice as you say, even though you would have had many freedoms restricted if you were in China. What is your relationship to your home country at this point? I mean, you’re basically in exile because of your artwork about the Chinese government. What is it like to continue to make art about China or raise your voice about China from a country that’s across the globe and is entirely different?

Ai Weiwei   In China, we had so many fights and arguments with the authorities, but I never thought that the problem was with China. I believe human rights and freedom of speech are values, common values that are all related. I often talk about those issues in a much larger context. Of course, I use this measurement with China. These arguments never really go anywhere, and the discussions can never go into more depth. They openly tell you, you cannot talk about it. They will never explain why. They never get into that kind of discussion. They merely say, shut up or you will go to jail.

I didn’t have many feelings when I left because I wouldn’t even call myself a citizen. In China, nobody can really be entitled to call themselves a citizen because nobody has the right to vote, you never get a chance to have an opinion, and you have never counted as an individual. After many years, I realized that I could not have my voice heard in China. My social media blogs had been shut down since 2009. Then I got on Twitter, but nobody can read Twitter in China. You need a special skill to get on the internet. Very often, it can be considered a crime to get on the foreign internet, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, because a particular online tool helps you climb the so-called Wall. China is building this Great Firewall. It has created a lot of so- called internet police watching every line and every citizen’s post, even though you’re just chatting or gossiping. They’re watching every line, and many words cannot be used on the internet. If certain words are mentioned, your discussion can disappear or get shut off. It’s a very different situation.

Vivian Yee   That brings me to something that I meant to ask you later. A few years ago, you were one of the internet’s and Twitter’s great free speech success stories. Through Twitter and the internet, you could reach a vast audience. You could express yourself and reach an audience in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise—until, of course, the Chinese authorities censored you and shut that down. Now the conversation in the United States is more about how technology platforms like Twitter and Facebook can be used or abused to enable hate speech, spread bad information, deepen the political divide, or even be manipulated by outside powers. Do you think the internet should continue to be as open and flexible as it has been, or—given your experience with being censored in China—do we need to rethink how it’s being used?

Ai Weiwei   Well, the internet is being used like water, which can have a good side or a bad side. It really depends on the situation. In general, I think the internet is probably the best thing that has happened to society. Individuals having their own information and knowledge, and expressing themselves, hasn’t really happened in human history. All the power has always belonged to people with social status or political status, and the internet is a real liberator for the individual. Of course, there’s a lot of power abuse. Power also loves the internet.

Vivian Yee   I just wanted to return to your installation. This is a bus stop in Brooklyn; actually, it’s near where I live. It’s one of your cages next to a bus stop. A New York Times art critic reviewed your installation across the city last week and praised it overall, which makes it much less awkward for me tonight. He said a striking thing: it disturbed him that the works plugged into the city so easily. The structures didn’t disrupt the daily lives of people shopping on Fifth Avenue or waiting for the bus, which to him was a kind of metaphor for how we’ve all accepted these boundaries, borders, and barriers, in our lives and in our politics. How did you intend for people to interact with the works in the city?

Ai Weiwei   I don’t want to disturb the people who use the city as a tool or instrument. With artwork, you always bring some unfamiliar condition, some uneasiness, so you still have to control how much you would add to the work to carry the concept. You also have to bring some familiarity. The city is ready-made, so you use the city, the facilities, the bus station, or light pole banners and market banners in the public square. I think we are very carefully using those familiar elements but also putting some message in there. Artwork is always a test. It’s never meant to be safe. People could think it does have some meaning, or maybe not. It’s not really guaranteed. That’s why I like to make art, because it’s a little bit dangerous, a little bit of an unknown situation.

Vivian Yee   It leaves some space for people to bring their own interpretation to it.

Ai Weiwei   It’s a public space, and people are entitled to give an opinion about it. People may feel it’s too much or it’s not relevant. People may like it, and it very much depends on their own experience with art, or if they know me. You need some knowledge to walk into a museum. If they don’t have that knowledge, I don’t think people would think all those things are art or valuable.

Vivian Yee   Right, they could just be fakes on the wall, I guess.

Fig. 5.2: Shelter, 2017.

Fig. 5.3: Shelter, 2017.

Ai Weiwei   It’s true. You need to have some brainwashing in there.

Vivian Yee   I went to see the Washington Square Arch and also your Gilded Cage at Central Park South yesterday. At both places, I saw people attaching their own art or their own protests onto what you had put there. At the Gilded Cage, there was a Chinese man who had taped a banner across the cage criticizing the Chinese education system in Chinese and English. At the arch, there was one of those fake statue guys, the ones who paint themselves all white, and he was clinging onto the arch and taking advantage of the crowd that had gathered. What do you make of people who are piggybacking onto your art?

Ai Weiwei   It’s okay if they’re touching it temporarily or not destroying it. It’s public art. Strangely, my work always attracts a certain kind of people. I really feel sorry for myself, and yes, I have to think about it.

Vivian Yee   Do you anticipate this when you install things across the city like this, where people may disrupt it in their own way?

Ai Weiwei   Yes. Anything can happen. (Laughs)

Vivian Yee   And when you say a particular kind of person, what would you say that kind of person is?

Ai Weiwei   I like people who have some humor and can react. Maybe, they also look at me as someone lacking creativity or …

Vivian Yee   They want to add their own spice to it?

Ai Weiwei   Yes.

Vivian Yee   So much of what we’re seeing with refugees and migration these days is about vast numbers of people getting bottled up in a system that just isn’t prepared to deal with this many people. Because of that, it’s hard to see each of them as individuals. How do you deal with that in your film Human Flow? Do you feel that part of your mission with the documentary is to get us to see them as individuals, or is it okay that you are kind of depicting a crowd that is essentially faceless?

Ai Weiwei   When I began to film, I started with my iPhone. At that moment, I realized these things are not so simple. When I saw people come down from those boats, I had never met people like that. They looked different. They had a very different religion, very different language, and very different habits. Old people, babies, young women, all kinds of people came down from the boat. Why did they have to leave their home and come to a land where nobody understands them, and why is nobody receiving them except a few volunteers? This is Europe, and I never expected this could happen. Not even in my imagination could I expect to see people, on one side, desperately trying to save their own lives or their children’s lives and, on the other side, nobody paying attention. This is not just one boat, right? That little island had more than five hundred thousand people already there. After they got on the island, they would walk about seventy kilometers away to register. They had to sleep on the road. It seemed as though they didn’t exist, as if they were ghosts, and of course ghosts don’t exist. They couldn’t even talk. Nobody understood their language. With all this new curiosity, I had to get involved. For an artist, how do you get involved? Is it just to learn where they come from, and who they are, or what really happened to them and why they have to do all these things? I started to organize my team and said, “Okay, let’s move my studio to Lesbos.” People were quite surprised and said, “You really want to move your studio there?” I said, “Yes, we want to start shooting.”

Vivian Yee   Your entire operation?

Ai Weiwei   Yes. I felt too lonely to be there, and I needed some people. The only people I could grab were my studio people. They are all like me and have been involved in many dramatic situations. We never imagined the scale of this, so we decided to go to the other side of the water, the Turkish side, to see how those smugglers got refugees on the boat. Then we went to different refugee camps. Turkey is a nation that maybe has the most refugees. Three million people have settled there, or been sent back to Turkey. Then I thought, “What is a refugee? Those refugees are coming from the Syrian war, and I want to know more about the history of these refugees.” That’s why I went to Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, as well as parts of Africa. Also, we went to Italy, France, and Germany, where refugees have a long history. Gradually, that got me involved. Of course, during the film shooting, we had to quickly arrange more teams to cover different areas because it was all happening at the same time. In the end, we had more than two hundred people working on this project.

Vivian Yee   Wow.

Ai Weiwei   Of course, it’s a big organization, and we have an active research team with a lot of fixers because many locations are dangerous and still in a war, like Syria and Iraq. That’s how this film had to be made.

Vivian Yee   As a journalist, I’ve always struggled with this question. I can tell people’s stories. I can describe what seem to be injustices or problems, such as the refugee crisis, and maybe it’ll make some people more aware of what’s going on, but a lot of the time, it doesn’t necessarily feel like it has any effect. You went to so many places for this documentary to tell this story. Do you judge your artwork by the impact that it has, or is there some other standard that you’re measuring it by?

Ai Weiwei   It’s a really personal journey to try to understand it. It is very involved, because I always put myself in the shoes of someone else. If I can learn something from it, I’m sure someone else can learn something as well. The journey is significant to me. It helps me to understand the world and what’s going on with these unfortunate people who have become unwanted …

Vivian Yee   Unwanted?

Ai Weiwei   … become nobody. There is always a cause. Why hasn’t Europe or the United States given them amnesty or support? All these questions led me to some kind of action. It may not work for others, but it works for me, and that’s most important. I’m a very selfish person. It’s true. It’s really from the bottom of my heart to want to understand another person.

Vivian Yee   I think this leads perfectly to a sequence from Human Flow.

Ai Weiwei (in film clip)   I’ll show you my Chinese passport.

I also have a passport.

Refugee   Yes, we changing passport.

Ai Weiwei   I’ll become a Syrian.

You become a Chinese, right?

Refugee   Yeah. I hope.

Ai Weiwei   Where’s my passport?

Oh, here’s my passport.

Refugee   Oh, your passport’s there.

Ai Weiwei   So you go to China, and I’ll come to …

Refugee   To Syria.

Ai Weiwei   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you have this. I have this.

Refugee   Thank you very much.

Ai Weiwei   What’s my new name? Omar …

Refugee   Mahmoud. Mahmoud.

Ai Weiwei   Mahmoud?

Refugee   Yes.

Fig: 5.4: Film stills from Human Flow.

Ai Weiwei   Abdullah Mahmoud.

Refugee   I’ll give you my tent.

Ai Weiwei   My name is Ai Weiwei.

So that’s who you are. You’re Ai Weiwei. I’m …

Refugee   I’m Mahmoud. Nice to meet you.

If you want to take my tent, it’s …

Ai Weiwei   Take your tent, sure?

Refugee   Yeah.

Ai Weiwei   Then you have to take my studio in Berlin.

I have a studio in Berlin.

Refugee   Thank you. Really, thank you.

Ai Weiwei   I respect you. You know, I respect …

Refugee   We have to respect you.

Ai Weiwei   … the passport, and I respect you.

Vivian Yee   So you’re in this documentary a lot, whether it’s just shots of you walking around or talking to refugees. Why did you choose to put so much of yourself in?

Ai Weiwei   Well, besides myself, what else can I do? I see myself as someone who can approach them. It’s funny. You change a passport. All the refugees love their passports. But nobody cares about their passports. Nobody even cares where they really come from. They’re all one person. They’re refugees. Many nations don’t give them refugee status. Sometimes they call them guests, so they don’t even get the rights of a refugee. They’re nobody. My passport just came back to me two years ago. I was also never allowed to have a passport. It is all about our relation to the nation, to those nationalities, and the individual’s rights to move or to stay somewhere that becomes so complicated. Those people may never find a place they can call home in their lifetime.

Vivian Yee   I thought this was an exciting moment because you’re living in Berlin, which is not really your country or your home. This Syrian man is trying desperately to make it to Berlin or a place like Berlin because he doesn’t have a home either. Here you are offering him your studio kind of as a joke, but to him, it’s basically life or death. Are you equating his tent and your studio?

Ai Weiwei   Well, he doesn’t even understand what a studio is. How would he know that this artist has a very luxurious studio? What does a studio even mean? But I know what his tent is like. It is wet, cold, with no light, and it’s so small that the whole family of maybe five or ten people have to crawl into it. It’s a horrible situation for those people. They have to spend months or sometimes years in these kinds of conditions. Nobody tells them what will happen next.

Vivian Yee   You were saying earlier that you just can’t believe that this country and European countries won’t do something for the refugees. Apparently, this has become a really huge issue here in the United States, especially after President Trump took office, with immigrants from Mexico and Central America coming here. For you, what does it mean that the United States, which you immigrated to as a young man, is struggling with the same questions about who should be let in?

Ai Weiwei   I don’t want to get too much into the discussion of U.S. politics.

Vivian Yee   It’s a dangerous minefield. I get that.

Ai Weiwei   You see CNN spend months or even years just talking about the same person. For me, it’s very funny. If you look at democracy, or this liberal world, or the world we call free, all those very simple issues are related to fundamental human dignity and fundamental rights. You see how difficult and how selfish a nation can be. I don’t want to discuss that much because I would feel ashamed, if I were a U.S. citizen, to have a president like this. It’s not only him. It’s not personal. With this kind of democratic society, and his having been legally elected president, how can I criticize the United States?

It’s not easy for a foreigner even to look at these things. We all believe the United States is in an extremely powerful period. It is a leading society in many respects, with the fundamental value of everyone created equal. It is very simple, with “America First,” you see how backward this nation has become, and also how much of it affects our way of thinking, our vision, our courage, and our understanding of ourselves. It’s quite sad to look at a situation like this, but this is the reality. We all feel entirely comfortable with this reality. Of course, we may say something different, but I think life here is so comfortable, and that comfort doesn’t really structure us intellectually to think about a human’s dignity and our modern society. I think this is unimaginable.

Vivian Yee   I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this question because I want to be careful here. It must be strange for you, as someone who fought for so long for very, very basic human freedoms like voting and free speech. We have all of those things in the United States. It seems you’re saying that those freedoms have still led us to a place that you don’t think we should be in.

Ai Weiwei   I don’t think this kind of freedom really put the United States in a much better position than even an authoritarian society. It’s very hard to accept that. It seems in many ways, if you look at the political condition, that it’s very hard to make any kind of meaningful decisions in this society. A straightforward argument can go on for an incredibly long time. I think there is not much in-depth discussion about what is really happening today. People just blame someone else, but the problem is much more profound, and it needs greater intelligence for a debate like that.

Vivian Yee   I don’t know if we have time to get into all the questions that you’ve just raised. We do have some time for an audience Q&A. My overlords at the New York Times have reminded me to say that we want to let as many people as possible ask questions, so when you do come up to the microphones, please keep it short.

Audience member   Hello. The last question that Vivian asked you, you said you look at what the world is like today, and you answer that the problem of what is happening right now is very profound and not easy to talk about quickly. But is there any way you could just give a little insight into what you meant when you said that?

Ai Weiwei   Well, I have to talk about my feelings because basically I’m an artist. I get involved in all kinds of situations only because I have to find out who I am. Only through my actions, my so-called artworks or my behavior, can I understand myself. It’s a process. I don’t think everybody can take the same kind of process. That’s why you have educated people staying in school for twenty, thirty years and basically doing nothing, just reading to get this so-called knowledge. After that, you are pretty tired; although trained, you act almost the same way. I think education has a problem, and the social values also have a huge problem. On the surface, we always talk about individuality, but in reality, there’s very little individuality there.

Audience member   Having been to so many places in person, what was your experience around the borders, and with the border patrol? For example, were there groups on the ground, like Doctors Without Borders, that were helpful in these scenarios, or did you find any other groups outside of governments that were helping people on the ground?

Ai Weiwei   I think what is happening in this so-called refugee crisis is a lot of NGOs and volunteers are working on these matters only because governments hesitated. The European governments have waited to act, or they operated in a not so humane way. There are a lot of individuals and young people helping who have knowledge and skills from every profession. There are lawyers, doctors, teachers, and also a lot of people taking care of the children. A lot of those people motivated themselves to help, and that’s an exciting aspect.

Audience member   Do you think censorship inspires or suppresses creativity? How does protest art differ from country to country?

Ai Weiwei   I think censorship really destroys creativity, especially in a nation where your writing and your art can lead you to prison. In those kinds of societies, censorship not only destroys creativity, but it also destroys humanity. In China, since the establishment of the new communist government, censorship has become the norm. Basically, in China, there’s almost no creativity in literature, art, or film. It’s been either censored or self-censored. Of course, there’s still a lot of entertainment, but there’s no imagination. There’s no passion as well, because you can never really do something you believe is right. You have to think about what can be accepted by the authorities. It has already become a common rule, accepted by everyone in society, especially by parents, friends, and classmates. Anybody will tell you if you do that, then you’re finished.

Vivian Yee   The pressure comes not just from above but from everyone around you.

Ai Weiwei   Yes. They just have to punish a few people, and all of society will be scared. They have been doing that for the past sixty-eight years.

Vivian Yee   You said at the very beginning of our conversation that it was sort of exhausting for you to continue making art in China because you were fighting for such basic values, freedom of speech, and creativity. Do you feel that moving to Berlin has given you the freedom to explore more complicated or more profound issues?

Ai Weiwei   I don’t think so. I don’t speak German. I moved there, and my studio is still like in Beijing. It’s just now I can travel. I can do my refugee films, but the Germans don’t like that film either. They don’t want other people talking about the movie or talking about this issue that much. The Germans have very strong negative feelings about someone from somewhere else talking about this situation. You wouldn’t believe how much censorship they have. Have you heard there is a magazine called Der Spiegel?

Vivian Yee   Yes.

Ai Weiwei   They announced they would not review this film.

Vivian Yee   Really?

Ai Weiwei   I was so surprised. There is even another German newspaper that says whatever Ai Weiwei is doing is wrong. It’s quite a strange society.

Vivian Yee   That is so interesting.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, it is fascinating. I really wish I could have a German person here and have a real argument with them, but I don’t speak German, so it’s too bad.

Vivian Yee   I asked you backstage about your use of Instagram, which you said you took up in 2011, five or six years ago. What is your relationship to social media and the internet at this point? You said you can say anything you want on Twitter outside of China, but it makes no difference within China.

Ai Weiwei   Yes. I think using social media is not enough. I really have to take action. I have to design the game and create trouble. Otherwise, it just seems I don’t exist. Every single day, I’m thinking about how to create a problem.

Vivian Yee   Designing a problem for other people.

Ai Weiwei   For myself.

Vivian Yee   For yourself.

Ai Weiwei   For my own game. You play chess, then you think about how to change some of the rules of play. You have to design it because you have to refresh yourself to realize you’re still alive.

Audience member   What direction do you see China going in over the next couple of decades, politically and socially?

Ai Weiwei   About five years ago, people asked me how long this communist state would last. I said three years. Before those three years, I was put in jail. If they can continuously put people in prison as they did to me, they can have a long life. This is a society that doesn’t have any kind of establishment except the [Communist] Party. They have eighty million party members, and now they will have their nineteenth parliament or some sort of congressional meeting.

Vivian Yee   Right. The Party Congress.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, the Party Congress. After sixty to seventy years, they still don’t trust their people. They don’t let them see a ballot. They have a one-party system. The party controls the army, the media, and the internet. They can really last quite a long time.

Vivian Yee   I just want to ask one more thing that our host actually brought up, which is how do you have such a strong commitment to your art and your life’s work while not knowing where it may take you? Knowing that it may involve risks such as being detained for years on end? Not knowing the future, how do you make that strong commitment to your art?

Ai Weiwei   Again, it’s not really a commitment. If you look at life and what you really care about and what makes you happy and what will make you unhappy, I think those things are very essential. I always act with my intuition and first thoughts about the situation. These things lead me to a lot of unpredicted situations, and mostly, I’m pleased about where I am. I’m very easily able to be happy. I’m quite a happy person. That’s true.

Vivian Yee   Good. Well, we are all happy that you were here with us tonight. Thank you so much, Weiwei. We really appreciate it.

Ai Weiwei   Thank you. Thank you.

6   Conversation with Nicholas Baume

Nicholas Baume   Weiwei, I met you first about eight years ago. You were in New York, and I’d just started at the Public Art Fund. You had done many works in public spaces. It was clear to me that you and your work were fundamentally involved in the public sphere and engaged a broad audience. I was excited to have the chance to meet you.

At that time, you were preparing your Zodiac Heads installation in New York City, which ended up being at the Pritzker Fountain across from the Plaza Hotel. We talked about coming back to the idea of doing something that was a site-specific commission for New York City. I thought, “Okay, in a couple of years we’ll be able to do that and follow up the Zodiac Heads.” I didn’t realize at the time that Weiwei would return to China and would be put under house arrest, detained, abducted, beaten, placed under constant surveillance, and unable to travel again until he got his passport back in 2015.

I went to see him in Berlin. We met in the fall of 2015 and reengaged in the conversation and the invitation for him to conceive something for New York City. I also had a hunch that, because you had lived in New York City, you would have a strong response to the city not only as an exciting place to work but as somewhere that had a significant influence on you. Probably doing this exhibition has also been a reminder of that period of your life. You’ve even unearthed photographs that you took at that time.

You also rediscovered a poem by your father, Ai Qing, one of China’s most prominent poets, who was exiled during the Cultural Revolution. Weiwei really grew up having that experience of being an outsider within his own community. I thought I would just like to read a few lines from your father’s poem, called “New York.”

Standing at the mouth of the Hudson River,

an entire metropolis,

a huge incomparable framework,

human lives in a maelstrom of steel.

Steel vibrating,

steel rubbing together,

steel vaulting up,

steel flying through.

Above the streets,

bridge buttresses intersect one another,

long bridge spans of steel

stretch skyward,

like strong forearms joining together,

several little islands into one greater New York.

The poem goes on, and maybe I’ll jump to the closing stanza.

And the Goddess of Liberty,

is no more than a likeness.

Standing alone on an island out in the harbor,

gazing on vacantly, watching this great city.

Weiwei, how did your reengagement with New York City inspire you to think about and to create this project?

Ai Weiwei   Thank you.

Audience   (Laughter)

Ai Weiwei   Yes, it’s funny. I came back to the city, and recently I had to do five or six public talks. In those talks, they introduce me, and I have to listen to introductions about myself. It’s like a trial. Precisely like a trial, you know? It’s about my crimes. Some of them I’m responsible for, but some of them I’m not. History is always the most mysterious. I cannot believe I am sitting here talking to you.

Of course, Cooper Union is my neighborhood. I used to live on Seventh Street at Second Avenue. It’s just two blocks down. I spent days and nights on St. Mark’s, which was a very funny place. But where do you go? You’re a Lower East Side person. At that time, people would ask, “Where do you live?” I would reply, “The Lower East Side.” Then they didn’t ask any more about it. Before I moved to Seventh Street and Second Avenue, I was living on Third Street, between Avenues A and B. There was a Hell’s Angels Club. I don’t know if it’s still there, but that was quite a tough area.

Daily, I would pass by here when I was an art student for a short time at Parsons. I didn’t like to be at that school. I always wanted to be at Cooper Union. No, it’s not an advertisement for Cooper Union. It was only for the tuition. For a young man coming from China, tuition was always a big problem. Is tuition still free here or no? If tuition is free, I could even enroll as a student here. My only exercise was to try and push the cube. I don’t like sport, but every time I passed by, I would push it.

Last night, I came to see the lighting on these five fences. I also pushed the cube and surprised my Swiss friend. He said, “You can push it?” I said, “Yes.” He was amazed.

Nicholas Baume   It was restored recently.

Ai Weiwei   Yeah. But it feels the same.

Nicholas Baume   You’re not stronger now?

Ai Weiwei   No, not any stronger. Thirty-five years have passed.

Nicholas Baume   Right.

Ai Weiwei   So, what should we talk about?

Nicholas Baume   Well, here are some photographs that you took.

Ai Weiwei   Oh, I took those photos in 1988. The city had a curfew on both Washington Square and Tompkins Square Park, and there were a lot of demonstrations, so I took a lot of photos at that time. When we had a plan to build this new artwork under the Washington Square Arch, I never thought that it would be a problem. But for one moment, I thought maybe it would not happen because neighbors raised questions about it. The argument was that it would stop their annual Christmas tree. I had never noticed there was a Christmas tree, and I spent over ten years here, you know? That’s the story.

Nicholas Baume   We’re finding an excellent alternative location in the park for the Christmas tree, just for this year.

Figs. 6.1 and 6.2: Washington Square Park protests, 1988.

Ai Weiwei   We can also decorate the sculpture as a Christmas tree. Why not? I don’t see this as a conflict.

Nicholas Baume   Washington Square has that history of protest and activism and diversity—all the things, in a way, that New York symbolizes to you.

Ai Weiwei   At that time, it was more like a people’s park. You could still pay twenty bucks for marijuana.

Nicholas Baume   They still do that.

Ai Weiwei   But today, there are a lot of students. It was emptier back then.

Nicholas Baume   People were afraid to go in.

Ai Weiwei   It’s quite packed now, and it’s lovely. There’s so much energy. A lot of sunshine.

Nicholas Baume   It was a very contested time, in a way. You had Reagan in the White House, and you had issues with AIDS activism, which was something emerging at that time. Coming from a country where you’d not been allowed to have that kind of expression, I’m curious what kind of impact that had on you.

Ai Weiwei   I came from a society where everything’s restricted. Everything. Suddenly, you come to a place where even if you were found dead in your apartment, nobody would care. Nobody would care. You can call it freedom, but you also can call it something else. It is an entirely different society.

Nicholas Baume   Right, but as someone who grew up in Sydney, Australia, New York City always had a mythic kind of dimension for me. As someone interested in art, I knew that so many great artists had made art here. Also, the museums of New York City are legendary. Poets like your father would write about New York City.

Ai Weiwei   No, he writes about a lot of other places too.

Nicholas Baume   Oh, sure.

Ai Weiwei   And his New York poem is not a great one.

Nicholas Baume   It’s a late work.

Ai Weiwei   Yeah, New York is okay. There are a lot of superrich people here, and that draws a lot of attention because you have really expensive shops, and you have museums that are scary. But you have a lot of poor people—people in desperate situations. You see them having to rush into the subway, and they walk on the streets so fast. It’s not an easy city to be struggling in. The city is so attractive to people because of the energy, power, and opportunities here.

Nicholas Baume   As a student, how did your experience of the art in the city affect you? You dropped out of art school. Was that because you found you could learn more about art yourself?

Ai Weiwei   I spent a lot of time going to galleries and museums. I just tried to figure out why those spaces were so beautifully renovated, yet almost nobody went in there. I would stand in front of the canvas or sculpture for a while. I would feel shy to go out of the gallery room because I always tried to wait for another person to come in before I left. All those galleries were utterly empty. I had to pretend that I found some profound meaning in front of those works.

Nicholas Baume   Weiwei, you came back to New York at our invitation to develop a project. It’s been very fun to work with you on this project because, as everyone realizes, Weiwei has a great sense of humor, joie de vivre, and always makes things a lot of fun. Whether it’s exploring Queens, stopping for ice cream, or meeting people all over the city, it was amazing to see how people would come up to you and say how much your works means to them and take a selfie. I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on how you thought about where you wanted to have your project in the city?

Ai Weiwei   Well, you have a lot of choices to make a work in the city. But you have to think about New York itself as a great masterpiece. It comes from this idea of a cosmopolitan city with all kinds of people, different religions and races, coming here. This is a city that probably looks and feels the most stable or democratic. This city is also like a monster. You can feel quite lonely, and you can feel not so romantic about it, at least back in the 1980s. It had a lot of danger. But still, it’s a powerful and attractive place and, for young people, gives a lot of imagination for those making art. To be relevant in the city is always a challenge because the city doesn’t need to be decorated. It’s already very powerful. It functions because of its meaning. All that city planning, different neighborhoods, and the history of the city attract me. I still want to do work that feels relevant and has meaning to this city’s history and for the people using these facilities. That’s how this work is being conceptualized.

Nicholas Baume   Speaking of relevance, when you came and developed the concept for the exhibition, you’d already been traveling to refugee camps. The motif of the fence had struck you as something you wanted to translate into a kind of sculptural language. I’m curious, Weiwei, to hear a little bit about how you took that idea of the fence and thought about elaborating it in these different forms across the city. There are these freestanding sculptural objects.

Ai Weiwei   I think people are using the city very differently. Some people are taking the subway or bus from different locations or different boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. The city has various meanings, only because it has multiple usages. I tried to create a work that functions on multiple levels and speaks to different kinds of people. It should make people feel there’s something different and that something was touched or changed, but not necessarily to think it’s a piece of art. To feel a little bit of difference is very important because we are so used to our daily routine. That small difference means a lot to people. That’s what I wanted this work to be about.

This is an image in Washington Square. I wanted to try to do something in Washington Square because it’s where I did street portraits back in the 1980s. I was a portrait artist, sitting there and making drawings for people passing by.

Fig. 6.3: Arch, 2017. Installation view at Washington Square Park, 2017.

Nicholas Baume   People in New York might have an original Ai Weiwei drawing? An early work?

Ai Weiwei   I made thousands of them, but I think they all threw them away.

Nicholas Baume   Weren’t they any good, Weiwei?

Ai Weiwei   They’re just as good as Matisse or Picasso. They could have been even better.

Nicholas Baume   (Laughs)

Ai Weiwei   But you know, people are very blind. I wouldn’t blame them. I made those drawings and would make fifteen bucks for each. Of course, I didn’t pay tax. It was just cash. Who’s going to pay tax, anyway?

Nicholas Baume   Well, you were probably an illegal alien then.

Ai Weiwei   Yeah, I was illegal. There’s no place here even to accept your tax. When we started to design it, it looked very different, but later I learned you could not touch this arch. That is very challenging. You want to build something there, but you can’t touch the arch. I thought that the arch is just an arch. It’s a door without function. It is a little bit stupid. But that’s our culture, right?

Nicholas Baume   You’re making a liar of me.

Ai Weiwei   Yes. You have to create something without touching it, and you have to let people pass through it. You also have to allow the disabled to move through it. There were all kinds of regulations. That’s how this work came out; it didn’t come out of creativity but from regulations.

Nicholas Baume   So, is that good or bad?

Ai Weiwei   Most of my work is made from restrictions, whether in China or here. All of my work is about those regulations. I made that door there, but I have to find something meaningful. I cannot just cut a door there or people will feel bad about it. I have to make it a little bit artistic. This business is straightforward. I’m not so creative. I thought about readymade, and who is readymade? Duchamp. He’s the one who created the readymade, so I used him as a readymade. He created this door, and I think the writer Andre Breton …

Nicholas Baume   Andre Breton. Right.

Ai Weiwei   They did a show about surrealism, and that was the door design. They didn’t make it so fancy because they didn’t have money at that time. They just did it on paper, like a cut-paper work. I thought, “Oh, this is nice. If I put this door there, nobody would argue that it’s not artistic.” There is a simple reason I did it. It’s not that I like it or not, but I wanted to have this face-to-face argument. I said, “That’s not enough. You have to polish it so that people can see their reflections. It’s better for them to take selfies there.” I always think about selfies because when I think about public art, the first thing that jumps into my mind is how public art is seen on social media and the internet. I had to do something physical.

Nicholas Baume   Those doors are very heavy. It’s about how many tons? Twenty or fifteen tons.

Ai Weiwei   It was very heavy and very expensive. You have to prove yourself as an artist. You have to make it heavier or bigger and always make people say, “Wow!” Otherwise, people pass by without noticing it.

Nicholas Baume   You also told me this is a reference to the “ha-ha” kind of mirrored pavilion in Shanghai.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, it’s true. It’s funny. Everything one does is a reference somehow, and that’s another way to prove it’s not creative. In the 1920s or ’30s, before the communists took over China from all those Western bankers in China, Westerners exploited China, and they built a lot of buildings. One of the buildings, called the Big World of Shanghai, was like Disneyland. Inside were a few mirrors, which weren’t flat but curved. All those farmers came to Shanghai and would look at the mirrors and stand there to laugh. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. To laugh! People enjoyed that so much that people were waiting in line. Those farmers in the 1920s and ’30s just wanted to see that mirror.

I also did this location in Queens. I remember this park from one summer I was selling T-shirts there. I made some money by printing something on the T-shirt and selling it. It’s a lovely park. It’s very open, and you don’t hear all those traffic sounds in Queens. A peaceful, peaceful place. We designed some sculptures that look like refugee tents. I think, because it’s a public park, it should be inviting for people to sit on it and enjoy the sunshine, or for children to climb on it.

Nicholas Baume   The design for this piece changed a lot as well. Even though this whole exhibition developed from concept to execution very quickly, the entire design process had to have a lot of back and forth, working with the regulations and what was possible.

Ai Weiwei   Yes, if you give me more time, I will continue to change it. It’s never a final form. It can always go in this direction or that direction.

Nicholas Baume   I speculated, and I think you’ve confirmed in a way, that one of the reasons you’re able to be very successful in this mode of doing public art is that you don’t take any obstacle as a problem. You immediately change course. You don’t waste time worrying about that in the end.

Ai Weiwei   Yes. That’s why I’m so successful, because I don’t have this self-indulgence most artists have. I’m always ready to change, and I may have an ice cream in a nearby shop and enjoy it very much. But I have to sit here and talk about art.

Nicholas Baume   Is that your personality, or is that also your experience of growing up where you were not able to express yourself directly? Did you always have to think around these problems?

Ai Weiwei   I think it’s nice to think around these problems. Duchamp said, “There’s no solution because there’s no problem.” Art is that kind of problem we create, and there are many ways to do it.

Nicholas Baume   We’re now looking at a piece that was made for Cooper Union, the Five Fences.

Ai Weiwei   This is something I liked to do because there are doors there. It’s like five holes there, and for years winter looked bad in there. I said, “That would be the perfect place to have a fence because it’s easier to deal with an educated university than private owners.” It’s tough to negotiate with private owners and to build anything on their buildings. All those buildings are so ugly and horrible. This is a perfect, perfect location. When I heard Cooper Union had agreed to let me do it, I was so happy, because I respect Cooper Union so much. I remember one winter I saw one artist selling snowballs here.

Nicholas Baume   David Hammond.

Five Fences, 2017. Installation view at Cooper Union, 2017.

Ai Weiwei   He was standing there with a few snowballs. I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m selling those.” Selling snowballs? This is a beautiful place, and I like this space.

Nicholas Baume   These are Weiwei’s new snowballs.

Ai Weiwei   If it’s possible, I will donate this work to Cooper Union, so you can permanently keep it here. I only worry if I take it down where to store it? It is quite an expensive work. You know value changes all the time.

Nicholas Baume   These fences.

Ai Weiwei   I know they have to talk to their trustees and must have a lot of meetings about it. You don’t have to answer me today.

Nicholas Baume   We’ll talk after.

Ai Weiwei   Okay.

Nicholas Baume   What about this idea of fences filling spaces that already exist. They are almost like these viral structures that fit in between walls—in this case in between arches. Why do this?

Ai Weiwei   I cannot build it in the middle of Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue. It’s not possible. Those spaces are not available.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, there were only eleven fences in the world. Now there are more than seventy of them. We are building a wall, but now they call it a fence, between the United States and Mexico. They try to push away people from the other side of the fence. You even have a president calling those people “criminals” or “rapists,” which is quite shocking to hear. Fences can also be friendly, but you don’t have to say you’re pointing fingers at others because you have a problem. Let’s not talk about politics.

Nicholas Baume   Okay. Let’s talk about it more abstractly. I understand some of your thinking about this, and maybe it’s only my response about the way these fences, which are power structures in a sense, also find a home between existing structures. Fences can attach themselves readily to something that already exists. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to extend that metaphor and to think about how our existing social structures, existing prejudices, are easily attached to create these kinds of barriers that you’re drawing attention to.

Ai Weiwei   One thing I like about making art is not becoming too complicated. I don’t have to interpret my art that much. I think you’re getting a little bit sophisticated. It’s really about minimal art. You can look at it, and it is pure and abstract.

Nicholas Baume   There are rooftop fences on the Lower East Side, which are on private property. There’s a mix of public institutions and private property. This is the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side was important to you, given its history of immigration, as well as your personal history.

Ai Weiwei   I think it celebrates the values of people having the right to move and decide where to live. Unfortunately, most people move because it’s necessary, because of killings, because of environmental problems, because of famine. They have to leave their homes. There’s not a single one really among all those refugees who had free choice. They had to go. If you look at the history of immigrants, people are always moving, merging, choosing new locations, and mixing with different cultures. This plays into the best part of our literature, poetry, and art. It makes New York City an extraordinary place.

Fig. 6.5: Exodus, 2017. Installation view at Essex Street Market, 2017.

Nicholas Baume   Right. By the way, this work is all made through using negative space that you’ve cut out of vinyl, which is the same technique you’ve used for the portrait banners that we’ll see in a minute. This is a series called Exodus, and it’s about the kind of journeys that refugees take in an attempt to escape war and famine and all those challenges. I’ve been interested to see how this exhibition takes different materials, from off-the-shelf chain-link fence to very meticulously fabricated polished elements. There’s a lot of invention about using the city as a platform, such as using banners between flagpoles, street lampposts for banners, or bus shelters. Why did you want to use the city’s infrastructure in that way?

Ai Weiwei   You can take the city as a readymade. It’s the easiest and cheapest way to make the most effect. The banners on Essex Street were not designed as banners, but as fences above the building. It was a very different attempt. When the calculation of the cost came out, it was quite shocking. Building theses fences along the roofs of Essex Street was going to cost a lot. Should I say the number? It would have cost almost four hundred thousand U.S. dollars. Over here, there is a labor union, but I couldn’t believe how much money it was going to cost. I could have built another Essex Street Market in China with that money. We had to find a cheaper material. Of course, it turned out nice. You have to be creative, only because of these restrictions. I think all of my creativity comes from problems. I didn’t want to give up Essex Street. I think it’s a vital neighborhood and a wonderful, beautiful instrument for this city. That’s why we designed those banners. It turned out to be about twenty thousand dollars, and everybody was happy.

Nicholas Baume   This is one of your bus shelters. I love the way you have turned an object that’s a barrier, a fence, into something that is generous to the public as well. You’ve built in a seat on the back of the fence, and the top is scalloped.

Ai Weiwei   But think about it. Who’s going sit on the back of the bus shelter?

Nicholas Baume   You also have the images on the display.

Ai Weiwei   It’s nice. It makes the bus shelter look mysterious and a bit arty. I know that MoMA will never take that as art, but this is so much better than anything they ever accepted. You know MoMA is such a shitty place, and they will never enjoy this. They simply don’t know it. They have too much money and have built fantastic buildings, but shit is shown there. Sorry. I cannot control myself when I talk about those art institutions.

Nicholas Baume   Well, I think this is also why you love doing this public project.

Shelter, 2017.

Ai Weiwei   Because art belongs to people. Right?

Nicholas Baume   Right.

Ai Weiwei   People are the only element in the world that can be arrogant. Not MoMA, you know. Forget about it.

Nicholas Baume   You might be surprised, Weiwei. They might come knocking.

Ai Weiwei   Yes. See how beautiful that is. It’s not pretentious. It’s not expensive. It doesn’t even need a building to contain it. The people don’t care when they’re passing it. You can ruin it too, and I won’t care. The only problem is later I might want to donate it to somebody, and nobody would want it.

Nicholas Baume   I’m sure things have changed since the days of drawing portraits on Seventh Avenue.

You’re working incredibly hard with this exhibition and your film, Human Flow, which is now being released. It’s extraordinary that you’ve done this feature film and this citywide exhibition at three hundred– plus sites, all in the same short space of time. You’re incredibly prolific.

Ai Weiwei   I can make it even shorter, or make it bigger. It’s easy. Being an artist is the easiest job in the world.

Nicholas Baume   You have a great team as well.

Ai Weiwei   The team doesn’t matter. You always can organize another team. Sorry, it’s the truth. It’s so laughable, but it’s the truth. I respect my team. Sorry to any one of them here. I appreciate them. They’re like my family.

Nicholas Baume   Right. Families have to be a bit dysfunctional.

Ai Weiwei   My mom never understood that the things I made could be called art.

Nicholas Baume   What about your dad?

Ai Weiwei   He passed away a long time ago.

Nicholas Baume   Would he have thought this was art?

Ai Weiwei   I don’t think so.

Nicholas Baume   What would he have thought of this?

Ai Weiwei   He belonged to something much more profound. He was a poet. He dealt with language, and in a way I admire him for that. Being an artist is much more comfortable.

Nicholas Baume   I have to disagree because I know how difficult it is to do a successful public art piece. It’s hard. Having pulled it off in so many different ways, all over the city, is astonishing.

Weiwei, I think we probably have some time for some questions.

Audience member   Hi, I’m a Cooper Union student. I was curious about how New York City has influenced you, regarding fashion and your navigation of social scenes. I noticed that you’re wearing Nikes— I think Air Force Ones. My friends and I were interested in that and appreciated that you came on the stage in sneakers. I worry about that all the time. I’m this young artist person, and I’m just curious, how you’ve navigated figuring out what shoes and clothes to wear.

Ai Weiwei   To tell you the truth, I got these shoes from an excellent designer who is in Berlin. I don’t like to wear these kinds of shoes, but I started to wear them while shooting the film, in all different types of camps. On the shore, you have to step into the ocean, and then you go to very muddy areas; in all those different nations, about ten to fifteen locations, the shoes ended up being quite durable. This surprised me. One day, this designer said, “That’s my design.” I said, “Okay, I need another pair,” and I got a new pair. It’s nice to be famous. You can get free Nike shoes.

Audience member   Why did you choose to put historical immigrants from Ellis Island next to contemporary refugees from Syria?

Ai Weiwei   Concerning immigration, I think it’s a historical issue. It didn’t just start today. As we all know, New Yorkers and people from the United States are people from many nations and are mainly immigrants from somewhere else. This is a truth, and a lot of refugees or early immigrants made significant contributions to the culture here. People have the courage, vision, and dream to change their lives and to make some special effort for this. I have a deep respect for all the refugees I meet. I call them heroes. If you can take children, go through this perilous journey, and go to a location that has a very different kind of culture, language, or religion, it’s challenging. You can see their future is almost unthinkable. It’s much more difficult than I would have thought. It’s crazy. We chose some historical or more so-called well-known refugees, used their faces, and mixed them with the images from Ellis Island and also a lot of photos of the refugees—more than one hundred thousand refugee images. People may find some faces recognizable, some faces are foreign, and some faces even look suspicious or questionable. But they are all the same. They are no different from us, and I think they deserve to have their faces in this metropolitan city.

Audience member   What advice do you have for a young artist looking to use their work for good and to cause change, especially given what’s going on in our country today?

Ai Weiwei   This is a complicated question because you may ruin a generation’s life if you give the wrong advice. My advice? Nobody would listen to it. Quit school and do some traveling. Go to areas you never imagined or dreamed of. I don’t know. If you don’t pay tuition, of course, stay in school. If you have to pay tuition, then why do you have to stay in school? I mean, spending that money can bring you some rich experiences. Sorry.

Audience member   No, that’s great. Thank you.

Ai Weiwei   It’s your life.

Audience member   Regarding your new gate series. Are you keeping in mind the deterioration of the gates, or do you imagine it will stay this clean?

Ai Weiwei   Everything happens in the public space, and that is how these works should be experienced. I never worry about it. I only fear that my work will not do something impactful to the surroundings, or environment. Nothing can damage my work. I even dropped a Han dynasty vase and it wasn’t really damaged—just broken.

Nicholas Baume   It’s the most famous vase from the Han period now.

Audience member   How can art change bad fences toward better fences, and are they physical or mental?

Ai Weiwei   There are no good fences.

Contributor Biographies

Amale Andraos   is the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She is also cofounder of WORKac, a New York-based firm that focuses on architectural projects that reinvent the relationship between urban and natural environments. Her recent publications include We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge (Monacelli Press, 2017); Architecture and Representation: The Arab City (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2015), co-edited with Nora Akawi; 49 Cities (Inventory Press, 2015); and Above the Pavement, the Farm! (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), in collaboration with Dan Wood. Andraos has taught at numerous institutions, including Princeton University, Harvard University, and the American University in Beirut. She serves on the board of the Architectural League of New York, the AUB Faculty of Engineering and Architecture International Advisory Committee, and the New Museum’s New INC. Advisory Council, in New York.

Nicholas Baume   joined the Public Art Fund as director and chief curator in 2009. A native of Australia, he began his curatorial career there with Kaldor Public Art Projects and later the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Previously, he was contemporary curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Over the past decade, Baume has led the Public Art Fund through a period of significant growth and impact, confirming the organization’s place as the leader in its field. With a strong commitment to making urban space a platform for artists that is always accessible to the public free of charge, he has curated numerous exhibitions with significant international artists at different stages of their careers. Author of several major catalogues, he is a frequent public speaker on contemporary art, and has contributed essays and interviews to numerous publications.

Carol Becker   is professor of the arts and dean of Columbia University School of the Arts. She received her PhD in English and American literature from the University of California, San Diego. Before coming to Columbia University, she was dean of faculty and executive vice president at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of numerous articles and several books, including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art; Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production; and her most recent long essay/memoir, Losing Helen. She travels widely, often lecturing on art, artists, their place in society, and feminist theory. She works closely with the World Economic Forum’s program on art, culture, and leadership.

Tim Marlow   is chief executive and director of the Design Museum in London. Formerly artistic director of the Royal Academy of Arts and director of exhibitions at White Cube, Marlow has been involved in the contemporary art world for the past thirty years as a curator, writer, and broadcaster. He has worked with many of the most important and influential artists of our time to deliver wide-ranging and popular programs and is committed to diverse and engaging exhibitions in showcasing the transformational capability of design. Marlow sits on the board of trustees for the Imperial War Museum, the board for Sadler’s Wells, the Art on the Underground Advisory Board, and the board for Cultureshock Media. He was awarded an OBE in 2019.

Evan Osnos   is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Based in Washington, DC, he covers politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming book Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury (September 2021). Osnos often writes about China, where he lived from 2005 to 2013. That experience was the subject of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which traces the rise of the individual in China and the clash between aspiration and authoritarianism. The book won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Previously, Osnos worked as Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, where he was part of a team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He is a three-time recipient of the Overseas Press Club Award and has received the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Before his appointment in China, he worked in the Middle East covering the Iraq war and reported from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. He is a frequent guest on television and radio.

Andrew Solomon, PhD, is a professor of clinical medical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and past president of PEN America. He writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was chosen as one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2012. His subsequent Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World has been named a New York Times Notable Book. His previous book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He made an award-winning film of Far from the Tree and an audio series, New Family Values. He lives with his husband and son in New York and London; he also has a daughter with a college friend.

Vivian Yee   is a Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, based in Beirut, Lebanon. She writes about politics, war, culture, and everyday life from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Egypt. Before moving to Beirut from New York in late 2018, she reported on immigration policy under the Trump administration, New York politics, and New York City. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in English literature.