The phrase “fuck” in big neon letters, (FUCK, 2020), greets guests to the Seattle Artwork Museum’s exhibition “Ai, Insurgent: The Artwork and Activism of Ai Weiwei,” the famous person artist’s largest United States retrospective ever. The glowing expletive about sums up the prevailing liberal temper within the nation as of late—although maybe not in the best way the present’s curator, Ping Foong, meant. Just like the close by sculpture of a human hand making the gesture, (Center Finger, 2000), and the photographic sequence during which Ai provides the identical to websites such because the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Sq. (“Research of Perspective,” 1995–2011), FUCK is supposed to convey defiance. Simply as a lot, although, it conveys frustration, even impotence, within the face of abusive state energy.
To be clear, Ai’s oeuvre repeatedly demonstrates his refusal to be cowed by the political persecution the Chinese language authorities has inflicted on him, most famously his brutal 2011 arrest and detention on tax evasion costs. And lots of components of that oeuvre bristle with poignance and wit. However because the second Trump presidency takes a wrecking ball to home establishments and civil rights, in addition to to the submit–Chilly Warfare worldwide order, one may surprise what the artist’s methods provide our present second. Platitudes about elevating consciousness and difficult authority will abound, however probably the most helpful takeaways are subtler and stranger. “Ai, Insurgent” holds a mirror as much as current liberal paradigms of political artwork, and unwittingly suggests their symbolism is partially compensatory, providing an aesthetic outlet for emotions of powerlessness.
Maybe the strangest factor about Ai’s work, seen all collectively in a single place, is how acquainted, even unoriginal, it seems. A part of that’s by design: Ai remixes the classics. Duchamp’s affect permeates all the things, from a discovered mailbox (U.S. Mail, 2020), to a thicket of gnarled rebar salvaged from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (Forge, 2008–12). Many different works allude not directly to readymades, as in his iconic cross-cultural mash-up Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Brand (2011). Nonetheless others play with duplication, comparable to his replicas of historic Chinese language porcelain vessels, or his Warholian iterations of painted Mao Zedong portraits. Even his current Lego works translate basic Western work, by figures comparable to Rubens and Munch, into blocky candy-colored variations of the originals.
Ai Weiwei: Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995.
Courtesy neugerriemschneider Berlin
It’s not simply the contents of his works that seem acquainted but in addition their varieties, which span the repertoire of up to date political artwork. There’s Conceptualist documentation that bears witness to disaster, comparable to Names of the Scholar Earthquake Victims Discovered by the Residents’ Investigation (2008–11), a sobering inkjet print catalog of the Sichuan earthquake’s 5,196 baby victims. There’s efficiency documentation, as within the earlier than, throughout, and after photographs comprising his notorious triptych, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). There are spectacular aggregations of emotionally freighted objects, together with a 50-foot-long snake sculpture from 2009 comprising interlocking kids’s backpacks to memorialize the Sichuan victims. The checklist of aesthetic motion pictures—public artwork installations, documentary movies, activist social media campaigns—might go on, and might be acquainted to artwork audiences, even when viewers much less acquainted with the canon may discover extra shock worth in them.
At this stage in Ai’s profession, the query will not be whether or not these qualities make his work authentic or by-product, or good or unhealthy. His oeuvre accommodates loads of highly effective work—my favorites are the spiky assemblages of issues like furnishings or bicycles—that doesn’t purport to be distinctive when it comes to artwork historical past (or is exclusive maybe within the sense that he takes outdated concepts to new extremes). The query is what it reveals concerning the common understanding of political artwork, on condition that his work epitomizes so most of the style’s tropes.
On the literal and figurative middle of “Ai, Insurgent” stands 81 (2013), a replica of the solitary confinement chamber the place the artist was detained by the Chinese language authorities, in an undisclosed location, for 81 days in 2011. The room’s naked lightless inside feels claustrophobic, a way exacerbated by the padding that covers the furnishings to stop self-harm. The sculpture’s exterior, left unfinished as a result of the artist by no means noticed the room from the surface, has an amnesiac really feel. The forbidding art work differs in tone from the trickster Conceptualism that characterizes Ai’s different work. Its starkness renders palpable its harrowing stakes, eliciting despair somewhat than defiance, and suggesting there’s nothing uplifting concerning the artist’s tribulations. Standing contained in the sculpture looks like being a rat plopped down in a maze, and greedy—FUCK—that you’ve restricted management over your destiny.
Ai Weiwei: Water Lilies, 2022.
Marjorie Brunet Plaza
That sense of curtailed company varieties the retrospective’s coronary heart of darkness, even when it’s not the message you’re meant to remove from the present. 81 is located in an exhibition part titled “Watching Ai Watching Energy,” its strained little bit of wordplay tiptoes across the displayed works’ existential and political binds. Bearing witness to state malfeasance is a essential process, well-suited to artwork’s capabilities. However, even at its most poignant, that process has sensible limitations; at its most flat-footed, it verges on farce. Ai’s awkward 15-by-11-foot Lego replica from 2019 of the Mueller Report cowl web page, for example, strains after function, as if its showy dimension and supplies might compensate for its toothless political gesture.
The retrospective’s daring four-letter-word of an epigraph additionally evinces showmanship. However it has a deeper that means: the title FUCK references Ai’s Beijing design studio, FAKE, which may sound just like the English epithet when spoken in Mandarin. This thinly veiled pun is, positive, a type of defiance, however not the truth-to-power variety. As a substitute, it hints on the manner some residents should converse in code below authoritarianism, on the ersatz facades they undertake to take care of believable deniability towards censorship or worse. The pun challenges authority but in addition acknowledges the damaging energy imbalance inherent to that problem. As a punitive political ambiance looms over US residents, “Ai, Insurgent” gives uncomfortable glimpses of how issues may come to feel and appear.
