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Ai Wei Wei Part 2

Despite Ai Weiwei’s upbringing in exile and poverty, he has always managed to keep up with trends and technology as in 2005 Ai started his own online blog. He first posted on 19 November 2005 stating, ‘If to express oneself one needs a reason, let me say that to express oneself is the reason.’ He blogged every day, posting photographs and quotes and soon enough he was gaining over 100,000 followers daily however, unfortunately it was shut down by Chinese Authorities on the 28th of May 2009. Nevertheless, Ai’s blog had been viewed by over a million people and so it was a success for it gave him greater publicity that any other exhibition he had done before. Although Ai was prevented to express himself online through his blog he still remained on Twitter. The only restriction therefore is the 140-character limit but fortunately this becomes a 140-word limit when using Chinese symbols, allowing Ai to tweet complex messages to his wide Chinese audience. Ai has stated that he spent eight hours a day on Twitter and has recently restricted himself to posting for three hours a day. This is because Ai considers his work on social media to be a part of his artistic practice, allowing himself to self-express and let people know what is on his mind and why he is doing what he’s doing.

 After the Sichuan earthquake on May the 12th, 2008, Ai began tweeting and blogging more than ever before. The earthquake left over 90,000 people dead or missing and also made another 11 million people homeless. Twenty schools collapsed in the earthquake due to poor construction. It caused the death of thousands of schoolchildren and so Ai loudly called for the government to admit to not pushing the builders of the school to follow safety precautions when making the schools however the government did not react with anything but silence. Later on in 2008, Ai visited the site of the earthquake and took many photographs as well as creating the, ‘Citizens’ Investigation Project’ in December. The purpose of the project was to classify the names of the schoolchildren that were killed in the earthquake. On his blog he looked to the public to seek help to find the children’s names by posting on the 20th of March 2009: ‘People interested in the Citizens’ Investigation, please leave your contact information. Your actions create your world.’ The post gained two hundred civil volunteers and they helped him by going door-to-door to speak to parents in the area. Ai Weiwei posted all the information they found on his blog which resulted in a list of 5,192 names of children that died under the school in the earthquake. Later on the Chinese government eventually released the official list of who had died and then arrested Ai Weiwei’s volunteers and permanently shut down his blog. The local authorities installed security cameras opposite Ai’s house and studio in Beijing and on 12th of August 2009 the police raided his hotel room in Chengdu at 3 o’clock in the morning. They beat him up which then consequently resulted in migraines even months later, they were so bad that he was swiftly taken to hospital in Munich where they discovered he had a cerebral haemorrhage. He shared the events of the beating and his hospitalisation online through social media. Meanwhile, Ai was also documenting the dreadful collapsing of Sichuan schools by gathering the steel bars used to construct the buildings, he then had them remoulded and straightened as they became twisted and bent in the quake. Ai Weiwei then took the bars and used them for his next piece of art, ‘Straight’. He began collecting the bars in 2008 and it took him four years to complete the project, therefore meaning the piece was finished in 2012. Each bar represented a student lost in the quake under the destruction of the schools, therefore making the piece a sort of memorial. Many viewers of ‘Straight’ have been led to believe that nothing had ever happened to the steel bars due to their re-formation, but this is what makes ‘Straight’ so powerful as it highlights the relationship between the restored pre-quake structure and the primary devotion to those who died in Sichuan.

‘Straight’ is one of my favourite pieces of art assembled by Ai Weiwei due to the powerful, unethical picture it represents. The background story to the piece is stronger and more emotional than any other he has made, and this background story really shows off Ai Weiwei’s true colours and deservingly well respected morals.

  A couple of months before the Sichuan earthquake, the government of Shanghai sent Ai an invitation to build a studio. Originally he denied the invitation, but of course later on Ai could not resist the invitation any longer and changed his mind. He designed the building as asked, nevertheless by the time his project was complete and built in 2010, the relationship Ai had with the authorities had broken due to his internationally publicised criticism of the Beijing Olympics, The Sichuan earthquake and his beating causing hospitalisation. The authorities of Shanghai turned to Ai and promptly told him in August 2010, that he had not applied for the building permits needed and so his studio was going to be destroyed. The authorities knocked down the studio and cleared away the rubble. They stored it away in a warehouse in order to disallow Ai to used is to create artwork. However, Ai did manage to collect concrete and bricks and he used it, along with a Qing dynasty rosewood bed frame to form a reflection of the event called, ‘Souvenir from Shanghai’ of 2012. Ai Weiwei then honoured the studio’s existence further by tweeting to his followers, an invitation for them to join him for a feast of river crabs. The tweet on the 21st of October 2010 read, ‘On 7 November, the Ai Weiwei Studio will have a river-crab feast for its demolition.’ On the 5th of November a tweet came from his account saying, ‘The Beijing State Security and Chaoyang State Security have come to declare the decision of their superiors: Ai Weiwei, immediately until 12:00 on the 7th, is under house arrest. He may not leave his residence. Outside the door of Caochangdi 258 the police are standing guard. Please take care of the Twitter friends of the demolition of Ai Weiwei’s studio in Malu Jiading, Shanghai, and the grass mud horses who have come to the river-crab feast. Accept my greatest apologies.’

Although Ai was prevented to leave his own home due to house arrest, therefore was        not available to attend his own dinner party, about 800 people still turned up to the studio and ate stewed beef, pork and asparagus, fresh bread, white rice, and 10,000 local river crabs. It is astonishing that although Ai himself was so far away he still was able to host a ceremony that broadcast internationally. Ai celebrated the success of the unbreakable force of the feast by transforming its significance into a permanent work of art. He did this by having artisans make very real looking porcelain crabs for a work of art he named, ‘He Xie’ which means ‘River Crab’. The river crab party Ai hosted, ‘He Xie’ the porcelain version of the party and Souvenir from Shanghai all therefore represent Ai’s disobedience to governmental by expressing his individual freedom of expression.

In 2010 Ai created a piece named ‘Surveillance Camera’ to represent the period of time when he was watched by the authorities. He then began monitoring his monitors and tweeted what information he gathered online. In 2011 he was arrested in Hong Kong for ‘subversion of the state’. Ai was kept for 81 days in a secret location where he was watched for 24 hours a day by two guards who stood only 80cm away from him. After he was released he was inspired to create a piece that reflected on this traumatic time he encountered.  He named the piece ‘S.A.C.R.E.D’ which stands for, supper, Accusers, cleansing, ritual, entropy and doubt. The piece consists of six dioramas with holes in them that you can look through to be able to see Ai Weiwei’s recreated memories of the cell he lived in.

Some of the moments of Ai Weiwei’s life were rough and challenging, and they still are today however the traumatic moments in his life such us his 81 day arrest led to the creation of an amazing an successful piece of art work. I believe that Ai Weiwei gives a lot of people hope in their lives, and his work is a reflection of the saying, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’.

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Ai Wei Wei Part 1

Ai Weiwei was born on the 28th of August 1957 in Beijing. He is a Chinese Contemporary artist and activist and as a political activist, he has been very openly critical of the Chinese Government's take on democracy and human rights which by he expresses his opinion through art and social media. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake which I will cover further on throughout this essay.

 Ai Weiwei has had to cope with living under the eye of the government almost since birth, disallowing him to have the ability to exercise personal liberty. This is due to the fact that his father Ai Qing, was an artist who had studied in Paris, but after returning to Shanghai in 1932, the anticommunist Nationalist government deemed Ai Qing a leftist and jailed him for his opposition to the government’s leader, Chiang Kai-shek. Ai Qing was unable to paint during his jail time and began to write poetry, which visiting friends smuggled out of prison and published. Ai Qing was released three years later and when let out found himself as the most famous poet in the whole of China. He then joined the Communist Party of China in 1941 and became close Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976) but although he believed in Mao’s teachings, the Communist Party denounced Ai Qing as a rightist and accused him of being anti-revolutionary, anti-Communist Party. The government forbid him to write, and sent him and his family into exile in 1958. The family remained in exile for twenty years; Ai Qing could no longer publish his poetry and was sentenced to hard labour. The family lived in a hole in the ground covered by brushwood and Ai Weiwei had to learn to make furniture, bricks and clothes. Everything they had was burned; all that Ai Qing managed to keep hold of was a French Encyclopaedia. ‘Every day he took notes from that book. He wrote Roman history, he talked about art, the Impressionists. He loved Rodin and Renoir, and he often talked about modern poetry,’ Ai Weiwei quotes, speaking of his father. This was the only exposure to art and literature until adulthood that Ai Weiwei was given.

 Chairman Mao died in 1976 and the Ai family were allowed to return to Beijing. Ai Qing regained his honour and in 1968 Weiwei entered the Beijing Film Academy, where he studied animation. In 1979 he became one of the twelve original members of The Stars; a group who re-introduced the idea of self-expression to Chinese art. They held an exhibition in September 1979 on the railings outside the China Art Gallery but it was classed as illegal and was pulled down. Two days later it was the thirtieth anniversary of the Republic of China so “The Stars” organised a march for individual human rights, demanding democracy and artistic freedom. It resulted in the artists receiving permission to display their art for ten days in Beijing later that year and the following summer they held an exhibition inside the China Art Gallery, which attracted nearly 200,000 visitors in two weeks.

 By 1981 Ai Weiwei was living in the United States, searching for the artistic freedom that his homeland denied him. He attended universities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Berkeley, California where he improved his English before moving to New York in the winter of 1982. His love for Manhattan, took hold of him quickly as he says; ‘Before I landed, it’s about nine o’clock in the evening, and I saw all of New York start lighting up, I thought, “This is the place I will die for.”’ Ai remained in New York for eleven years. He took over 10,000 photographs of the city and embedded himself in contemporary art, particularly the work of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and, Andy Warhol but Duchamp inspired Ai’s most famous work of his New York period.

 Ai’s future was growing as he held his first solo show in New York in 1988, ‘Old Shoes, Safe Sex’. But news came from China that his father was ill which prompted him to return to Beijing in 1993. Ai produced three books that contained his influences, inspirations and teachings which he learned from the western world: Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995) and Grey Cover Book (1997). 3000 copies of each book sold out, indicating artistic interest in China and laying the foundation for a new wave of contemporary Chinese art. The White Cover Book also included “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” 1995, which may be Ai’s most astonishing piece of work. The three photographs of the ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn’ shows Ai facing the camera maintaining a blank facial expression and body position throughout all three photographs. In the first photograph it shows him lightly holding the expensive, old, rare urn on the end of his fingertips. In the second image and the second stage of the dropping of the urn, his hands are spread wide and away from the urn, allowing it to begin its journey towards its impact on the floor. The final sage and photograph shows Ai’s hands still spread apart however now the urn is shattered by his feet. This work of art simply changed everything for Ai, his work raised to another level for this piece questioned the importance, expense and history of the urn. Horror broke out due to the piece as many saw it as an act of violation nevertheless, Ai out smartened his opposes by announcing, ‘General Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one’.

 Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei’s father, died in 1996. This was a huge loss for Ai Weiwei as both him and his father held a strong belief for self-expression and individual rights which they expressed through their work. After his fathers dead he decided to begin making furniture. Ai also designed and built his own house and studio in Beijing, although he had not ever studied architecture. Then in 1998, he co-founded, designed and constructed the China Art Archives and Warehouse. In 1999 he was featured in the 48th Venice Biennale and in the year 2000, he helped create  Shanghai’s ‘Fuck Off’ exhibition, which soon became the most famous and revolutionary exhibition in China. Some of Ai’s own work from 1995-1996 was included in the exhibition, we contributed a series of photographs of him giving the middle finger to different monuments such as the White House and Tiananmen Square which really related to the name of exhibition and also practiced the love for free expression that he and his farther had. He also added his ‘Dropping of the Han Dynasty Urn’ and objects from his furniture series into the exhibition. His furniture was inspired by his newly growing attention to Chinese history and culture. Between 1997 and 2002, Ai expanded his new furniture series by buying pillars from dismantled Qing dynasty temples. He used one of the pillars to construct a piece of his work named, ‘Table and Pillar’. He completed it in 2002, and it now stands today in the Royal Academy gallery. The table was made using no nails or glues with the intention to rebirth China’s history of craftsmanship.

 Ai made himself a home and studio in 1999 although he had no architectural experience, apart from his challenging childhood where he and his parents made a home by making bricks out of clay. Since then however he has now become an award-winning architect. In 2003 Ai set up an architectural business named, FAKE Design allowing him to do architecture aswell as art. In 2008 Ai joined forces with Herzog & de Meuron, another architectural firm, to design the ‘Bird’s Nest’, Beijing’s Olympic Stadium. Despite hi designs he soon became dissatisfied with the stadium they had created as he felt the Chinese government used the building ‘to advertise its glory to the world’ when Beijing was the host of the 2008 Olympics and so he stopped designing buildings after that year. Ai, however did go on to create a series of cubes to draw attention to the architectural measurement of one metre that is the same worldwide. His most famous piee from this series was named, ‘Ton of Tea’. He formed a cube of one ton of compressed pu’er tea from China’s Yunnan region in 2008. Ai’s ‘Ton of Tea’ was inspired by artists; Donald Judd and Robert Morris as their artworks were made to an exaggerated scale, this also highlighted the large history of China’s exportation of tea. This was the extent to which Ai’s architectural experience lived.

 I have learnt a lot about China’s history and current morals through studying Ai Weiwei and his work. I really enjoy and appreciate how he looks at the world and how he uses his art to express such a strong and provocative view of his home country. Out of the works of art that I have studied by Ai Weiwei my favourite piece is his ‘Dropping of the Han Dynasty Urn’ due to the after-shock it produced and how he expresses his opinion on how and urn is just an ornament and piece of furniture and there for its 2000 year old history and multiple thousands of pounds expense does not really exist and he resembles this opinion not only by capturing himself smashing the urn, but by maintaining a completely monotone facial expression and stance throughout the process as if to show that he is not effected by the destroying of historical ornament for he looks at it as the urn simply changing form.

  Bibliography

Royal Academy of Arts- Ai Weiwei Exhibition in focus     booklet

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/ai-weiwei

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei

http://aiweiwei.com/

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Zaria Forman

Artist, Zaria Forman, daughter of Rena Bass Forman, was born on the 29th of October 1982 in Massachusetts, United States of America. Zaria’s art work has always been inspired by her mother Rena, and her landscape photography. Rena became greatly fascinated by the cold Arctic in 2001, which further inspired Zaria’s art as well. Zaria’s landscapes mainly consist of water images; she creates them with the use of pastels and great attention to detail. Zaria has travelled all over the world to create these powerful works of art, to places such as; Antarctica, Hawaii, the Maldives, Greenland, Nosara, Svalbard and Israel. The purpose of her work is to promote the recognition of the planets issue of global warming and rising sea levels and she does this through her features in magazines such as Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, Smithsonian and the National Geographic. She also featured on ‘Good Day New York’, Fox News and ABC7 Eyewitness News, however probably her most impressive opportunity she was given to project her views through displaying her work to a large crowd and all over social media was her TED Talk. I personally found it very inspiring to hear her story and learn how she creates her artwork through the process of travelling to countries and continents struggling with global warming, then taking thousands of photographs of the landscape, meanwhile learning from her own experience and from the locals as to how global warming is negatively effecting the environment and the planet as a whole, before travelling home to her studio where she recreates the images she saw through memory and the help of her photographs to create a stunningly powerful image that takes about 200 hours to create as all of her pieces of art work are large scale.

 I love the power that her drawings bring, not only because they are large scale works of art and so accurately detailed but also because the message they deliver is so important for the preservation of the health of the planet. Water is such a powerful aspect of nature as not only is it what feeds and nurtures the earth but it cannot be controlled and this can sometimes be very scary. The melting ice glaciers in the Arctic may be the cause for the whole of the Maldives to be underwater in the near future and Zaria’s work so beautifully but immensely captures this worry.

 Rena Bass Forman, Zaria’s mother held many expeditions around the globe which is part of what made Zaria’s life so special and the artist she is today for she was allowed to travel with her. Unfortunately in 2012, Rena was supposed to lead an expedition to Greenland but sadly passed away soon before she and Zaria were due to leave as she suffered from a brain tumour. Zaria promised to her mother that she would lead the ‘Chasing the Light’ expedition to Greenland and so she did. Zaria took many artists along with her and saw some amazing but shocking scenes of the effect of global warming and used the images she took to create her most spectacular pieces yet. Zaria scattered her mothers’ ashes amongst the melting ice during the expedition as she believed this was where she belonged, surrounded by a beautiful landscape.

  My favourite pastel drawing of Zaria’s is from her Antarctica collection, a piece named ‘Deception Island’. The reason for ‘Deception Island’ being my favourite piece of hers is because she has captured such a large section of the landscape in her image however, still managed to include every single intricate detail to make the image so life like. This fine detail is common in all of Zaria’s work which is why it could be said that she is a realist artist, but the reason that I find this piece from Antarctica so special is for it was the first image I saw of hers and I truly believed that it was a photograph. Every ding in the ice is perfectly in place and even reflected in the running water below. The image is so crisp and pure, really giving the viewer a feel for what it was like to be there in Antarctica. The rest of this collection is very powerful also as they all are so defined and show how so much of the ice up north is melting.

 The most powerful images though, in telling the tale of extreme global warming and rising sea levels is two pieces from the Greenland collection. The pieces are named ‘Greenland no.60’ and ‘Greenland no.68’. They both really show how the ice is melting so quickly and from Zaria’s words, ‘She could see the ice sweating under the heat of the sun’. Greenland is Zaria’s biggest collection of art work as she believes it is so important for her to show the world what global warming is doing and how it is occurring so rapidly.

 Zaria’s main focus on rising sea levels began when she visited the Maldives in 2013, the lowest lying country in the world. It is believed that the whole of the Maldives could be totally underwater by 2020 if the polar melt continues at the rate it is going. Zaria uses this Maldives collection also as a big part of her attempt to raise awareness of the rapid climate change around the globe, and especially places like the Maldives, Antarctica and Greenland.

 After this trip, she took another in 2015 to Hawaii; this was supposed to be a holiday but of course, soon she became inspired and ended up creating three beautiful pastel drawings out of it. These drawings were not made with the intention to bring about awareness for and change in climate but purely to celebrate the beauty of the country. The drawings do in some aspects portray rough seas and I like this because it reflects the power of the ocean. Although it is beautiful it is also dangerous, mysterious and unpredictable, which is what reflects such great power and strength of water and as water and ice is Zaria’s focus in art this is what also makes the drawings powerful and strong. The drawings from the Hawaiian collection are also very light in colour, she mainly uses white and light blues which could be a reflection of the Hawaiian lifestyle that is fun, relaxed and happy. When Zaria visited Hawaii she believed that this was the lifestyle that she would like to live one day, so when creating these pieces of work, she may have had this bright lifestyle in mind, even though she was recreating a scene that consisted of rough violent seas.

 Zaria has done a few pastel drawing also of storms as well which really emphasises her interest in the power of nature. This is the reason that I chose to look at Zaria Forman for my study on power as she not only creates beautiful pieces that are powerful but also as I also share an interest in the power of nature. Zaria is very inspiring to many people through her publicity online, through Ted talks and magazines such as the national geographic. She really appeals to those who love nature but I think that her work is so great and strong that it should be publicised even more which would also hopefully increase a raise in awareness of the polar melt and the damage that it is doing to countries all over the globe. I am going to continue my study of the power of water and nature by educating my self further and writing another essay about artists other than Zaria who have the aim to achieve greater things than just recognition of their art and themselves but to aid the health of the earth by how the control of climate change effects sea levels.