On Ai Weiwei's Evidence

I remember hearing on the news sometime during my junior year of high school about Ai Weiwei and him being held by the Chinese government for about 81 days. I did not really know much about him aside from the fact that he was the architect of the Bird's Nest Stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, and that the Chinese government hated his guts. It really wasn't until Global Theater I that I learned more about Ai Weiwei; his life and his works.

When I learned that there was an exhibit on Ai Weiwei's work in Berlin and that the museum it was housed in was on our list of museums to see, I was internally beyond ecstatic. He's blunt, honest, and unforgettable. His work has a sense of simplicity to it, but nothing ever fails to deliver messages that would punch you in the stomach.

I still have the image of "Remembering" in my head--with the backpacks spelling out "She lived happily for seven years in this world"--and it still gets to me every time I think about it.

There were a lot of pieces in this exhibit that spoke to me, and as I am writing this I'm having a really hard time picking one thing to focus on. <list begins here> They had 6000 Ming and Qing dynasty stools filling the main hallway of the exhibition room. They had "Name List Investigation" playing in which he displays the names of all the children who died during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. They had a series of sculptures made from metallic pipes from the earthquake's aftermath followed by similar-looking pipes made from marble. They had a series of photographs of Ai Weiwei flashing the middle finger at numerous landmarks around the world. They had authentic Ming pottery wholly covered in metallic paint used for cars. </list ends here>

The one piece that I feel inclined to write about is "IOU." When the Chinese government charged Ai Weiwei of tax evasion, they fined him roughly 12 million yuan that had to be paid off in a very small time period. Supporters of Ai Weiwei from all around the world set up a loan campaign and were able to raise about 9 million yuan in a matter of ten days since the campaign started. Many of the loaners gave amounts in symbolic values such as 8964 (1989/6/4 - the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre) and 512 (May 12th - the day of the Sichuan earthquake), etc. Ai Weiwei acknowledged the loans and wrote IOUs to everyone who donated. He used copies of these IOUs as wallpaper for the installation room.

The backstory is beautiful because so many different communities that Ai Weiwei was connected with came in and helped him despite the Chinese government giving him a hard time. It's just one of those things that you read about and it just gives you a sense of hope for humanity. And the fact that the loan values had meaning behind the numbers (which I found out through extra research by the way)--all I could think about was oh my gosh they went there. They went there. Where is a mic because it needs to be dropped. I could even argue that the loans themselves were artistic.

The actual installation is beautiful because...Ai Weiwei had handwritten A LOT of IOUs. I didn't even bother trying to count how many different IOUs there were, but I'm convinced that not a single one was repeated.

He could have easily done something different as a token of thanks, but Ai Weiwei chose to do this. He chose to write individual IOUs...with people's actual names and actual monetary amounts.

To me, this was an act of love.

Ai Weiwei is truly a great human being.
What I would do to meet this guy.