{"id":2386,"date":"2014-07-29T18:45:06","date_gmt":"2014-07-29T18:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=2386"},"modified":"2014-07-29T18:45:06","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T18:45:06","slug":"tienchi-martin-liao-ai-weiweis-art-and-the-chinese-tragi-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/tienchi-martin-liao-ai-weiweis-art-and-the-chinese-tragi-comedy","title":{"rendered":"Tienchi Martin-Liao: Ai Weiwei\u2019s Art and the Chinese Tragi-Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 23, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Thoughts on the artist\u2019s one-man exhibition in Berlin.<\/p>\n

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Ai Weiwei He Xie
\nAi Weiwei’s piece ‘He Xie’ at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Photo provided by Tienchi Martin-Liao.<\/p>\n

The largest one-man exhibition of Ai Weiwei\u2019s artwork ended this week in Berlin\u2019s Martin-Gropius-Bau. During the past three months visitors have been impressed by his creative, bold, and indicative manner of artistic expression. The exhibition hall\u2019s 3000 square meters housed 34 new pieces, several huge installations, photos, and videos that are the artist\u2019s call for dialogue and mutual understanding between himself and the viewers. Throughout the exhibit one can feel the artist\u2019s tension and explosive strength, even though he was absent from the proceedings.<\/p>\n

Though Ai is not in jail, he cannot leave China and come to his own exhibition. He can move \u201cfreely,\u201d yet he\u2019s always under surveillance and tailed by a bunch of police. However, the government\u2019s pressure and suppression seems to be one of the most important sources of ideas and emotional inspiration for him. Without \u201cbig brother\u201d watching, threatening, harassing, and conducting sabotage Ai would probably only be half as good, and half as successful. Really, the story of Ai Weiwei and his fight sounds like a paranoid tragic-comedy.<\/p>\n

The problem with contemporary art is that most artists are trying to see things from a twisted new perspective, and record it in an absurd, sensational form. It infrequently imparts any outstanding thoughts nor ideas. No wonder this kind of art generates no resonance among its viewers. However, Ai is different. He is a great artist who knows how to reproduce the anxiety, humiliation, anger, and fear he suffers daily as a dissident-artist and he knows how to use his work to transfer these genuine feelings and complex circumstances to viewers.<\/p>\n

The title of his Berlin exhibition is \u201cEvidence.\u201d Showing evidence not in court but in a museum, through aesthetic artworks one can trace back to the thoughts of the artist. In this, Ai has picked up prominent political and social topics from Chinese society and presented them in a provocative and humorous way. For example, hundreds of porcelain river crabs (hexie) piled on the ground coincide with the Beijing government\u2019s hypocritical slogan of \u201csocial harmony\u201d (hexie). In fact, in November 2010 Ai invited hundreds of neighbors to his Shanghai workshop for a \u201ccrab-eating party,\u201d but, because of police intervention, the party certainly didn\u2019t take place under harmonious circumstances.<\/p>\n

A year after the earthquake in Sichuan, where nearly 70,000 thousand people died, a large part of them school children, Ai hosted an exhibition in Munich where 8,738 school bags were hung to symbolize and memorialize the number of students who were killed in the earthquake. Before the exhibition, Ai went to the site of the catastrophe in Chengdu, where he helped victims and gathered materials. While he was there, he was taken to a police station and beaten up by several policemen. With a head wound he still flew to Munich for the opening of his exhibition. If the German physicians had delayed performing the surgery Ai could\u2019ve died of of a brain hemorrhage.<\/p>\n

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For detail please visit here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 23, 2014 Thoughts on the artist\u2019s o … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,91],"tags":[57,685],"views":2108,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2386"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2389,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2386\/revisions\/2389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}