Posted: 06/19/2014 9:14 am EDT Updated: 06/19/2014 10:59 am EDT
AI WEIWEI SELF CENSORSHIP
It’s been a bad month for critics of the Chinese government, starting with the flood of arrests ahead of the Tiananmen Square anniversary. Now officials are battling a single man: their longtime opponent, the world-famous artist Ai Weiwei.
This month, Ai withdrew his work from a show at Beijing’s influential Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a tribute to the late scholar Hans Van Dijk, with whom he worked closely. It was a move made in protest: In a series of correspondences that surfaced online, UCCA chief Xue Mei admitted to removing Ai’s name from a press release, bowing to pressure from the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The incident follows a similar one this spring, when Ai’s name and work were “wiped” from a retrospective in Shanghai to placate the government.
In an email to the Huffington Post, Ai analyzed the culture of “self-censorship” at play in China’s art world, drawing a line between the government’s actions and an old Chinese saying, which translates to “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” The essay is reprinted in full below.
From:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/19/ai-weiwei-self-censorship-ullens_n_5509225.html