HUFFINGTON
09.30.12
THE DISRUPTOR
there is “no Chinese art world,”
taking aim at a new show in London, “Art of Change: New Directions From China”:
“It is like a restaurant in Chinatown that sells all the standard
dishes, such as kung pao chicken
and sweet and sour pork. People
will eat it and say it is Chinese,
but it is simply a consumerist offering, providing little in the way
of a genuine experience of life in
China today,” Ai wrote. “Any show
curated without respect for the
people’s struggle, without concern
for an artist’s need for honest selfexpression, will inevitably lead to
the wrong conclusion.”
To many of the article’s commenters, Ai is naive in his assumption that every artist will
see life through a political lense,
and wrong to hold other artists
to the same standard to which he
holds himself. To Ai, artists have
a responsibility to react to their
environments, and aren’t fulfilling
their responsibilities if they don’t.
LOVE HATE
Ai may not sit well with other
Chinese artists, but he has his
place in China’s fragmented art
scene. He single-handedly set
off an artistic exodus to Beijing’s
Caochangdi village in 2000, when
he designed and built his studio
there. (His reasons were practical: its location by the airport
meant taxi drivers conveniently
lived in the village. “I don’t drive,
so I could call a taxi and go home
to visit my mom,” Ai explains.)
Many gallery owners followed for
less practical reasons, asking him
to design their studios, too.
Jump ahead 12 years, and the
now-established art district, a
30-minute drive from the center of the capital, orbits around
him. His high-walled, brick studio home appears unwelcoming
from the outside, but is widely
known to open its doors to visitors. After this interview, in fact,
a few young organizers from Beijing’s Ind ependent Film Festival
stop by to hand-deliver an invitation to the award show, along
with an offer to send a car for
him. (Ai politely hedges.)
“I’m a very open person. I accept anybody as a friend,” he
says. “But people who never give
out their opinions — not like my
case, my case is just one example — but to what extent can we
be friends? I don’t really care. I
have seen too much.”
As for sentiment in China more