Ai Weiwei is an artist focused on exposing human wrongs.
His father and grandfather were both favored and crushed by the Chinese government. Weiwei lived in poor conditions as a child for that. In 1981 in the first wave of Chinese international students, he came to New York City at age 24. He photographed Wigstock and police response to the early AIDS protests in New York. That experience sparked his art life of fighting injustice. 1989 and the Democracy Movement was yet to come.
Ai Weiwei exhibited photographs Dropping the Urn in Portland at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2010.
Later he really got in trouble. Privatization and corruption resulted in rapid building throughout China. The result was "tofu construction" with poor quality concrete and inadequate rebar. The Sichuan earthquake of 2008 caused them to crumble. Tofu construction killed about 90,000. The government never even counted them. Weiwei organized volunteers to go door to door to record the names, many were children. He later collected rebar from the buildings, straightened it, and displayed it alongside the names. As a result he was disappeared in 2011 by the Chinese government for 81 days.
A strong documentary by Alison Klayman in 2012, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, tells the artist's story to that point. Klayman generously visited the Portland Art Museum to screen the film. She subsequently made a fly on the wall documentary about Steve Bannon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TvFouKz6j0
Since, Weiwei has taken on many injustices, including the refugee migrations in Europe. Republican neocons, President Bush II, and John Bolton developed the idea of the Axis of Evil. Some were selected for war, including Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The list expands and contracts. Families naturally fled and flooded Europe. That changed, and continues to change governments. Irish artist Richard Mosse has also engaged the subject.
Since the revolution, China seems to have a desire for manifest destiny. Sound familiar? That included Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and soon Taiwan. Filmmaker Deborah Stratman captured the story of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang in film Kings of the Sky. Weiwei brings the story of Hong Kong democracy protests in film Cockroach.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/dec/18/cockroach-review-ai-weiwei-hong-kong-protests-pro-democracy-activists
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/cockroach/488037419?autoplay=1 Trailer
Weiwei is making stream free for a few days. Click through at https://arte.bio/ai-weiwei/b/34Bh1L2.
His autobiography 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir in 2021 is a fascinating read, and he has a new book On Censorship coming in January.
In my opinion, the United States should have encouraged Hong Kong immigration to the US, but this was 2020. Ditto Taiwan in the near future, but this is 2025.
