The Politics of Indignation: Art, Activism and Ai Weiwei

A symbol of the struggle for human rights, renowned artist, architect, and activist Ai Weiwei (b. Beijing, 1957) has become a global figure despite being forbidden to travel outside China. In May 2012 he was one of three dissidents awarded the New York-based Human Rights Foundation’s inaugural Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent, and in October his first survey exhibition in the U.S., According to What?, opened at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Ai did not attend the opening, however; his passport has been held by Chinese authorities since his detainment in April 2011 and subsequent year-long house arrest on allegations of tax evasion.

In China, the charge of economic crime is the choice pretext of the state to pre-empt accusations of human rights violations. Ai’s incarceration is widely known to be related to his many previous run-ins with state security over his outspoken criticism, both online and off, of government corruption and China’s suppression of freedom of expression. As Michael Wines of The New York Times put it: “Ai Weiwei is perhaps China’s most famous living artist and its most vociferous domestic critic, titles of a sort this committed iconoclast disdains.”¹ 1 - Michael Wines, “China’s Impolitic Artist, Still Waiting to Be Silenced,” New York Times, 27 November 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/world/asia/28weiwei.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0. “Maybe I’m just an undercover artist in the disguise of a dissident” the contrary artist has said, “I couldn’t care less about the implications.”² 2 - Kerry Broucher, “Reconsidering Reality: An Interview with Ai Weiwei,” According to What?, ed. Mami Kataoka, exhibition catalogue (New York and London: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Mori Art Museum and DelMonico Books, 2012), 39. If there were an artiste indigné célèbre,” Ai would be the man of the hour.