Martin Hanging Man

The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28047-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

In October 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds appeared in the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern. Six months later, he was arrested in China and held for over two months in terrible conditions. The most famous living Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei is a figure of extraordinary talent, courage and integrity. From the beginning of his career, he has spoken out against the world's greatest totalitarian regime, in part by creating some of the most beautiful and mysterious artworks of our age, works which have touched millions around the world. After Weiwei's release, Barnaby Martin dodged the secret police to interview him about his imprisonment and his intentions. Based on these interviews and Martin's own intimate connections with China, Hanging Man is an exploration of Ai Weiwei's life, art and activism. It is a rich picture of the man and his beliefs, what he is trying to communicate with his art, and of his campaign for democracy and accountability in China. It is a book about courage and hope found in the absence of freedom and justice. 'Hanging Man is the most detailed, comprehensive and eloquent English-language account of what happens these days to Chinese political prisoners . . . [an] invaluable book' Literary Review

Barnaby Martin grew up in Oxford and has lived in the USA, France, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Scandinavia and Kenya. He has written novels, poems and plays and is a regular contributor to various publications, including the Financial Times. Barnaby Martin is also a regular speaker on the subject of art and has most recently spoken at the Venice Biennale about Chinese contemporary art. His book Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei was described by the Literary Review as 'invaluable'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Martin, Barnaby

Leseproben

1

It was July 2011 and Ai Weiwei was under house arrest in Beijing. He had just been released from detention and he was forbidden from talking to journalists or fellow dissidents, he was obliged to report all his proposed movements to his minders and when he did leave his house he was tailed and shadowed by undercover police. It wasn’t exactly the ‘freedom’ he’d been hoping for but as I was about to find out, it was immeasurably better than his experience inside.

Like thousands of other people round the world I had watched the footage of China’s most famous artist being unceremoniously dumped back on his doorstep by the police, clutching the top of his beltless trousers. He had looked cowed and he appeared to be in shock, and as he’d shuffled through the steel door into the courtyard of his home all he’d managed to mutter to the cameras was that he was not allowed to talk to the press and that he hoped people would understand. For all the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to portray the country as a modern, upstanding member of the international community it was still unable to tolerate dissent and its attempts to improve its image abroad were, as Weiwei had said of the Beijing Olympics, nothing more than ‘a fake smile’. If you crossed the invisible line that demarcated what could and could not be said you would still get arrested, no matter how famous or important you were. For many people in China and abroad who looked up to Ai Weiwei as one of the few people who dared to publicly criticise the Chinese government, it was an exceptionally demoralising and frightening moment.

A few years ago, the general public in the west knew next to nothing about this strange, bearlike man who sported a sage’s beard and chuckled frequently and made inexplicable pieces of art. As a package he was almost sui generis. Even to people within the art world he was an strange commodity. At first glance he could easily be mistaken for a latter-day Chinese Dadaist but if he was a Dadaist, he was a Dadaist who was operating in a country that appeared to be some sort of cross between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. He also appeared to be a political activist and blogger, but in a society where political activism and blogging is more often than not a fatal career move.

His Sunflower Seeds show in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London in 2010 propelled him to global fame and prompted more people to take a closer look at his work. Those who did found a succession of strange objects and bizarre installations. He appeared to specialise in altering and tinkering with the banal, background furniture of life: chairs and stools colliding with each other (Grapes); chairs made of marble; marble doors; a one-man shoe; a marble CCTV camera; hundreds of coal hives lined up on the floor; bicycles stacked upon bicycles, arranged in a circle; hundreds of Neolithic pots, immersed in industrial paint. Then there were the larger-scale pieces: Fairytale, for example – the work he created for Documenta 12 in 2007, in which 1001 Chinese people wandered the streets of Kassel in Germany for a week. Or Remembering, the haunting fresco he created for the facade of the Haus der Kunst in Munich as part of his So Sorry retrospective in 2009. It was made from nine thousand children’s backpacks and it spelt out the tragic words ‘She lived happily on this earth for seven years’. This was a quote from one of the mothers who had lost a child during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Thousands of children had perished in the disaster when their shoddily built school buildings had collapsed on their heads.

His art was serious and yet at other times it was irreverent; it was inventive and yet ordinary. Normal things were transformed by his touch so that they appeared in a new and uncanny light. It seemed that over the course of three decades he had succeeded in erecting a half-recognisable netherworld that had the effect of forcing people to look again at reality and see it through fresh eyes.

But it wasn’t Ai Weiwei’s tinkering with the realia of existence that first got him into trouble with the Chinese government. His problems really began when his art merged with his vociferous campaigning for transparency and accountability in government and for freedom of expression. It is hard to overemphasise just how extensive Ai Weiwei’s non-art activities were before his arrest. At times he had more than fifteen hundred people on his payroll; his art was just one of the many manifestations of his energy and personality. Art, architecture, blogging, book writing, campaigning were all natural by-products. First and foremost he was an irrepressible demiurge with a deeply radical agenda. Until his arrest, Weiwei’s real drive and power often went unrecognised, perhaps due to the fact that because of his wit and intelligence he has been regarded in the past as something of a puckish character, a sort of Duchampian clown. But there was something far darker lurking beneath the surface. Weiwei was on a self-imposed mission: his stated ambition is to change China and, like one of the Furies of Greek myth, he is both the child and the nemesis of the current order.

*

A few days after his release I phoned various contacts in Beijing. No one I knew had yet spoken to him. He was refusing all interviews because he was worried that if he did speak to anyone he would be rearrested for breaching the terms of his bail and above all else he didn’t want to be detained again. There was only one thing left to do: I picked up the phone and rang his old mobile number. I assumed that the police would have confiscated it or turned it off, but to my surprise Weiwei answered. My first thought was that he sounded much older than when we had last spoken, a month or so before his arrest – much older and much slower. And my second thought was: ‘They’ve broken him.’ But when I asked him what it had been like inside, his characteristic openness and alacrity suddenly returned: ‘Come and visit and we can talk about everything.’ I agreed, but because his phone and email were tapped I refrained from telling him precisely when I would come.

During the first six months of 2011 the atmosphere among the dissident community in Beijing, and among the broader community of people who dared to criticise the Chinese government, went from excitement to stifling fear and paranoia. The Arab Spring was in full swing and all across the Middle East authoritarian regimes were fighting desperate rearguard actions. With the overthrow of the Egyptian and Yemeni governments in February 2011, the revolutionaries appeared to have the wind in their sails and to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party these events must have been worryingly reminiscent of the atmosphere in April 1989, when events in Poland brought Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Party a step closer to power and precipitated the domino-like collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In 1989 the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square had held up banners expressing their solidarity with their brothers and sisters abroad in the Soviet Union; Wu’er Kaixi, perhaps the most charismatic of the student leaders in 1989, even went so far as to boast that he was ‘better than Lech Walesa’.

In February 2011 the Chinese government decided to act: scores of human rights activists and dissidents were detained by the police. They suffered beatings, torture and repeated interrogation and they were forced to make videotaped confessions. Some of these people were held for a few days, others were sent to re-education camps and still others simply vanished. At the time of writing their relatives still do not know where they are. They were often hooded when they were arrested; they were often watched round the clock. Relatives of those arrested who have dared to talk to the Guardian newspaper said that when the detainees returned home, they suffered disturbed sleep, memory loss and trauma.

For the Chinese government, the round-up was a pre-emptive strike. The Tiananmen Square showdown and the eventual massacre on 4 June 1989 have coloured the thoughts and actions of the leadership ever since. The 1989 demonstrations began peacefully enough as a spontaneous mourning vigil for the well-loved aspirant reformer Hu Yaobang, who had died on 11 April that year. But very quickly things had escalated. First the students called for a continuation of reform and then, emboldened by the inaction of the leadership and the support of the people and workers of Beijing, they began to denounce the Politburo members by name. Student leaders like Wu’er Kaixi, Wang Dan and Chai Lin were allowed to use Tiananmen Square as a platform from which they addressed China and the world. Zhao Ziyang, the General Secretary of the Party, had urged restraint, counselling that the students were only expressing their patriotism; Li Peng, the leader of the conservative faction, had advised force. The ultimate decision lay with the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, a man who had been an active participant in almost all the great events of China’s tumultuous post-imperial history.

Deng was born in 1904. He had seen countless friends and colleagues die horribly in the conflicts with the Nationalists and the Japanese. He had been on the Long March with Mao Zedong in 1934–5, the seminal event in the story of the Chinese Communist Party, a year-long military retreat in which only some eight thousand survived of the eighty thousand who had set out. He had seen military service at first hand and at a high level; he was political secretary for the Second Field Army during one of the biggest conventional military battles in human history,...