Wo Ai Ni, Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and photographer, is one of the most outspoken critics of the Communist government. He is internationally known for his witty and almost taunting art which challenge not only the methods and ideologies of the Chinese government but also our ideologies. Principles we hold so dear, he brushes aside as useless or foolish.

One of my favorite pieces of his is the series of pictures (“tripartite photograph” for all the photography buffs out there) he took of himself breaking a Han dynasty urn (approximately 2000 years old) in 1995. This piece is (aptly) named “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”.

This was the first Ai Weiwei piece I saw, featured in an article when he was first arrested, back when I didn’t even know who he was. When I first saw it, I winced. Who did this man think he was, dropping such a precious urn, which holds so much history and heritage, as if it was nothing? But, as I later learned, that’s the point. He was bashing our obsession with idols and images, our idea that by worshipping an image or an object, we worship what it stands for – culture and civilization. This image has become, ironically, an icon of iconoclasm.

But perhaps, it goes deeper than that. Maybe he was bashing the Chinese government, demonstrating how carelessly it destroyed temples and historical artifacts to more effectively deliver its narrative of China’s past and future. Or maybe he was making a statement, showing how old culture must be destroyed in order to make way for the new. Here’s part of the caption of this picture on its online auction page:

While the triptych gained notoriety as an iconoclastic gesture, it encapsulates several broader constants in Ai’s work: the socio-political commentary on the random nature of vectors of power; questions of authenticity and value (vis-à-vis the artist’s comment that the value of “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” has today exceeded that of the once-prized urn itself), and the cycle of creative destruction necessary for any culture’s survival and evolution.

Damn.

So, I support Ai Weiwei not only because he epitomizes free speech at its best and not only because he is a much needed activist in China but because he is a provocateur – something very few people are bold enough to be and something many more people should be.

Wo ai ni, Ai Weiwei.