Cultural revolutionary
He’s China’s equivalent of Andy Warhol, but the artist who inspired Beijing’s Olympic Stadium won’t be attending the opening ceremony. An outspoken critic of the government, he has never forgiven them for sending his father into exile. By Rachel Cooke
Rachel Cooke, Observer
Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous living artist, lives and works in Caochangdi, which used to be a village to the east of Beijing but is now, thanks to the city’s endless creep – locals call Beijing Tan Da Bing, or spreading pancake – just another crowded suburb. It takes a long time to get anywhere in Beijing, and in our taxi, April, my translator, is getting more and more excited. ‘He’s like the king,’ she says (she has met him before). ‘And we will be like… the servants. The people who work for him, they’re like his servants, too. If he doesn’t want a drink, no one gets one.’ She smiles. Being received by Ai Weiwei, you understand, is an honour, no matter how gnomic his pronouncements, nor how desperate you might be for a cup of tea.
In the West, Ai’s name was once known only in art circles. After his collaboration with the architects Herzog & de Meuron on Beijing’s Olympic stadium – it was his idea to make it look like a bird’s nest – his fame spread, especially when he gave an interview in which he announced that he had ‘no interest’ in the Olympics or in the Chinese state’s propaganda – and that, no, he would not be attending the opening ceremony. Even so, it remains hard to convey the extent of his fame in China. The New York Times has described Ai Weiwei as a ‘figure of Warholian celebrity’ in Beijing, but I’m not sure even this does him justice. Warhol did a few screen prints and hung out in a night club with other famous people, in a country where he was free to do pretty much as he liked. Ai Weiwei is not only an artist but also an influential architect, a publisher, a restaurateur, a patron and mentor, and an obsessive blogger (he is read by 10,000 people every day).
And then, on top of everything else, there are his politics. Ai Weiwei’s father was Ai Qing, the great poet who, during the Cultural Revolution, was exiled to a desert labour camp for being the wrong kind of intellectual. For many years his son lived in another kind of exile, in America. Then, in 1993, Ai returned to Beijing to the bedside of his dying father.
But if the authorities imagined he would now retire quietly to his studio, they were wrong. In the years since, he has been outspoken about issues like democracy, hoping that his international reputation as an artist would keep him safe but, even if his status doesn’t protect him, caring for silence and complicity far too little to shut up.