Never Say Mao

(English version of the original article)

These are days when the concept of freedom becomes stronger. It’s getting stronger because it’s talked about, it’s discussed. This is a rather strange concept: the more you question it, the more you widen its definition to something else, the stronger it gets and the closer (perhaps) to its truer meaning. Today we think about freedom and we think about the pre-lockdown normality of a few months ago, we think about Silvia Romano (an italian girl kidnaped two years ago in Kenya by a terrorist group) who finally regained it, or we think about who says bullshit, free him, free everyone. I often find it difficult to link all these situations to the same root, but I do not think we need to think about it too much. After all, it’s the same feeling as when we think about how big the universe is: whatever size you’ve thought about, at the end of this sentence it’s already too small.

Mao 1–3, Ai Weiwei, 1985

Thinking about freedom (lost, found again), I remember when I discovered the figure of Ai Weiwei a few years ago. Chinese, 63 years old, artist. Of course, “artist” and “free” are two words that often go hand in hand, but for Ai Weiwei, this was not always true. Since he was a child he has been forced to face the severe Chinese dictatorship: the Cultural Revolution, wanted by Mao Tse-Tung, forced his father to forced labour because he is a poet and therefore a representative of that freedom that is more frightening to totalitarian regimes. The death of the great helmsman is a watershed in the life of China and in that of Ai, who returns with his family to Beijing, where he was born twenty years earlier. The climate of terror that had characterized the Cultural Revolution soon seems to be forgotten and Ai Weiwei begins to study in the academies of fine arts reopened by the government, but at his first exhibition with the Stars collective the state control of art becomes once again oppressive, so much to push many artists, including Ai Weiwei, into voluntary exile. After years spent on the other side of the Pacific, dreaming of China, in 1993 Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing to assist his sick father and stayed there for almost twenty years, maintaining a conniving relationship with the Chinese government so much so that he took part in the construction of the Beijing National Stadium (called “the nest”) for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Beijing National Stadium, Herzog & de Meuron, 2008

Suddenly, in 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested by the Chinese authorities at the airport, imprisoned in a secret location and kept in solitary confinement for 81 days. Accused of tax evasion, he was ordered to pay $1.5 million within fifteen days and without any possibility of appeal. Within ten days, a public fundraiser manages to cover almost half of the sum and Ai Weiwei is subsequently released and confined under house arrest. It is June 21, 2012, when the sentence ends, but Ai Weiwei remains strictly controlled by the Chinese government, so much so that his passport will be returned to him only three years later, in July 2015. From this moment on, he will leave China again and move to Europe where he will continue his opposition to the Beijing regime. His art is often focused on the quest for freedom, but what struck me is the declension given to this concept: excessive freedom, screamed out loud and difficult to digest. The first time I saw Studies of Perspective or Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, I thought I was facing yet another egocentric and ethereal contemporary artist, of whom essentially nobody understands anything except himself (perhaps), but, in light of his history and his activities as a political opponent, I see these actions from a different perspective.

Study of Perspective — Tiananmen Square, Ai Weiwei, 1995

When Ai Weiwei, in Study of Perspective — Tiananmen Square, stretches out his left arm and raises his middle finger against the monument to the Heroes of the People, symbol of communist China, he does so primarily to claim he can. It’s 1995, just six years have passed since the demonstrations in that same square were repressed in blood by the 27th Army of the Chinese army (the deaths of those protests, whose uncertain number is around nine hundred, will never be identified and remembered by the Beijing government). China is now projected towards the future: it is more liberal, more democratic and outward-looking, a process that will lead it in a few years to be the economic power we know today. Instead of taking a selfie in front of the monument, symbol of the revolution that put an end to the millennial Celestial Empire, Ai Weiwei shows the middle finger. He does it because he can do it, but also because the body is for him the mirror of his values: the middle finger is not addressed to people, but the building, to the symbol of oppression and denial of freedom of speech proper of the Chinese Big Brother.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Ai Weiwei, 1995

Also in Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Ai voluntarily abuses the freedom granted by the Beijing regime and shows its contradictions and hypocrisies. Like a robot, the People’s Republic engulfs China’s thousand-year-old history: the monuments and artistic artefacts of the past are but an unnecessary burden on the new empire and must be destroyed or sold. So, when Ai Weiwei, as impassive as the government in his actions, shatters an urn of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. — 220 A.D.), he does so because he can do so because once again Big Brother controls him but cannot deprive him (yet) of the freedom he himself granted. Once again, however, freedom is not an end in itself, it is a weapon that puts the regime against the wall and confronts it with its hypocrisies that it would like to hide from the outside world. Mao often repeated to his citizens that “the only way to build a new world is to destroy the old one”, but the substitution soon extended from symbols to men. From the Cultural Revolution to the (still active) re-education camps, China is profoundly renewing its society by distilling freedom to the extent it pleases. To the Weiwei, on the other hand, freedom screams out loud: when we see that urn shatter, we tighten our stomachs, but we also understand that freedom is not the ultimate goal to which we aspire, but an instrument to achieve something else. Returning to the initial discourse, drawing the concept of freedom within a circle is not easy, perhaps impossible, and it is certainly something we possess but don’t always know how to use. Perhaps all that remains is for us to understand what the other is to strive for and the figure of Ai Weiwei, after having lost it and regained it several times, questions and interrogates us about how we use it.