Last week we described how Ai Weiwei, the artist and dissident, places flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his Beijing studio in protest against the Chinese government’s confiscation of his passport. Now Mr. Ai discusses in an interview what it’s like to be trapped in a country he loves, but may not leave.
He’s concerned that his art is suffering. An exhibition scheduled for April in Brooklyn (a reprise of a show at the Hirshhorn, titled “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”) and another in September at the former prison at Alcatraz, in California, would benefit if he could curate them on site, he said. But in a gesture against his confinement, he is proceeding with plans to open a studio in Berlin, saying it would, at least, stand as a symbol of his desire to work outside China again one day.
Mr. Ai was detained in April 2011 and served 81 days in jail. Now he is allowed to go about in Beijing, though “every time I leave, I’m supposed to tell them where I am going,” he said.
Following are excerpts from the interview with Mr. Ai in his studio, conducted one morning after he placed flowers in the bicycle basket as he has every day since Nov. 30. Mr. Ai spent some time showing his collection of ancient Chinese and Tibetan fabrics. At the end of the interview he referred to the fabrics, their beauty and history, and how they express something important about art.
Why do you put the flowers out at 9 every morning?
Nine in the morning is when I start work. I put the flowers in the basket, take a couple of photographs and upload them to the Internet.
Why flowers?
I think flowers are the most common language. For one thing, they’re about life. And I use fresh flowers. New ones every day. In this cold weather, they may only last a day.
What do they mean?
They are an artwork of mine that is very powerfully tied to my life. Starting on April 3, 2011, when I was taken away and detained in a secret place, until today, I haven’t had a passport. I was detained for 81 days, and when I was released on June 22, on that day they said I would have to have a year on bail. Every time since then that I’ve asked about my passport, they’ve said they’d give it back. But they never have, nearly three years now. Today is the 1,001st day since I lost my passport. I don’t know how long it will go on for. Another 1,000 days? Thousands more days? It’s all possible.
So that’s one reason, but not the whole reason. This is a society that claims to have rule of law. We have a constitution, criminal law, all sorts of rules. When a government forces a person into detention like this, what they are doing is not legal, at the very least it’s against the spirit of the law. You don’t have the right to restrict where a person lives, their ability to travel. When I get off a train, there are people there to photograph me. They follow me if I go to a hotel.
What is the deeper feeling that this situation produces?
Our basic worry in this country is that we only ever see what happens, we never know the reason. That bicycle, it belonged to a young German, he was arrested, but never officially. They detained him for I think more than 10 months. He worked for a German art shipping company, and the German government made a real effort to get him out. He’s out now, back in Germany. Before he left, he gave it to a German journalist, saying he wanted to give it to me. So suddenly I had this bicycle, and I knew that he had been really badly treated. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and they locked him up for so long. The government accused him of smuggling, but the real reason was that officials wanted to open a tax-free art zone and take over his business. I was just out of detention myself and I thought, what can I do with this bicycle? So I bought a very strong lock and locked it to a tree in front of my front door. It’s just like the kind of bicycle you would see anywhere in the world. Sometimes these bicycles are abandoned; in New York you see that all the time. In China, the owner may have been taken by the government or whatever, so it’s very symbolic. So I decided to put flowers in it, and I will do it every day until I get my passport back.
This feeling of not knowing when you’ll get your passport back, is that hard to live with?
In Chinese culture, it’s very normal. For example, we don’t know when we will get the vote. Sixty years have passed, and we still haven’t seen it. The government says, hey, Chinese people are too low quality for that, in 10 or 15 years, it will be a bit better. So we never know and everyone just goes on. How to express that? People say life is day by day and everyone’s life is the same, but when you start caring about the children who died in the May 12 [2008] Sichuan earthquake, when you discover their every name, their birthday, their parents, that moment I say we can’t just count the numbers, we have to remember every fresh life. I can buy a bunch of fresh flowers every day to remind everyone that loss of freedom happens, that it’s a possibility, and that it happens amid all our lives.
If you had a passport, where would you go?
The day I was detained they put a black hood over my head and took me to a secret location. I thought, why am I so stupid? I could have had an American passport. I lived in the U.S. for 12 years. But after I came out, I wasn’t anxious to leave. I feel I have so much to do here. I have a lot of friends. My family is here. I’ve even thought, the day you give me back my passport, I might tear it up in front of your eyes. You can’t take it from me. That choice is mine, not yours.
I have an exhibition in Brooklyn in April, and I lived in New York, of course I’d like to go there. It is a very important place in my life. I’d like to make it really good and to interact with the audience. In September, I have an exhibition in California, in Alcatraz. It’s such a special event. I’d like to go there. Exhibitions are better if you work really hard at them. But right now, well, I don’t know if I can.
Alcatraz was a jail. What does the location mean to you?
I feel that many so-called political prisoners, or people who are jailed for their politics, what they want is always more freedom. Most of them aren’t doing it for themselves but for a group, or for others. Because of that, they lose a piece of basic freedom. To me, that’s not a civilized or modern way to handle things — to force people into that kind of unfreedom because of their work for others, their conscience.
Have you given up the idea of having a studio in Berlin?
I have not. Because I feel I may need a studio outside China. I’d have more opportunities for more exchanges. Intellectual exchanges. But because of my detention here, that plan pretty much stopped.
You were offered a professorship at the Universität der Künste Berlin, or Berlin University of the Arts.
Right. But I couldn’t tell them when I’d take it up. They are still waiting. I still think Berlin is a very active place. It’s an environment an artist can survive. It’s relatively cheap and has a lot of other artists. Those things are all really important. We’re still doing the restoration on the studio, it’s not finished. Soon. A month or two.
If you are here, how do you plan to use the studio in Berlin?
I feel that even standing empty it is a symbol. Being willing to go, but not being able to, there are a lot of people like that in this world. Many people are in that situation for all kinds of reasons. Mine are political, but for a lot of people the reasons are economic or other complex reasons. It’s a basic symbol of existence.
So the empty studio in a good location also carries a message.
Right. I feel my artworks, to a great degree, they are desires that will never be fulfilled. But that doesn’t impact on what we do manage to do. Just as I feel that the great part of the demand for freedom lies in fighting for it, and not just in it being a goal. I feel that the process of striving is where value lies in life. In the process of living our life, whether it’s an artist’s, a theoretician’s or a philosopher’s, we’re doing something very difficult.
If you are out of Beijing will someone else place the flowers for you?
Yes.
Have the police interfered with the flowers yet?
No. They don’t come by to make trouble for me any more. They used to ring every day, now they don’t.
Do you feel cut off from the world, lonely?
I don’t feel lonely. I also don’t feel that many restrictions in an artistic sense, because my art basically deals with restrictions. The most important thing I think is this uncertainty which accompanies every Chinese person’s life. No one has a solid belief or trust in society or the law. And you can’t build a modern society like that. Because all civilized societies are built on basic values and trust. If there’s no trust, there’s no civilization. And trust, it provides the legitimacy for power.
Is this the lack of a sense of security that people here often talk about?
Correct. Because where does that sense of security come from? Definitely power, and that power must be legitimate. With things the way they are, if everyone feels that way, is that a stable society? No one wants things to be like this. There’s no credibility in society and no trust.
For nearly three years now you haven’t been outside China. Do you feel marginalized? Do you feel you are missing international developments?
I think that today the concept of marginalization is a very interesting one for an artist. As a contemporary artist, we’re always looking for reasons to exist in marginalization, for the possibilities in marginalization. The minute we talk about possibilities, in reality we’re talking about the question of marginalization. With the Internet, it’s all not a problem. If there weren’t one, it would be really scary. But with the Internet, we all have opportunities to discuss our plight, quickly and accurately, with other people who are in their own plight. When our feelings and other people’s feelings join up, well, that’s the action of placing flowers. The flowers are about putting in place a necessary connection.
And then you upload the pictures and send them out to the world.
Right. Because it’s different if all that people know is that I can’t travel, and if they can actually see the flowers every day. Because so-called art is about the possibility of turning emotions into something that other people can understand. Otherwise it’s not art. Whether it’s looking at a beautiful fabric, or a pattern, that transmits emotion. The emotion may be 600 years old or 1,000 years old, but without the fabric we have no way to imagine what that feeling was. It’s a message. The medium is the message.