Chronic. Is creating with a bit of freedom still possible in a China opening its Winter Olympics in splendid isolation? We can doubt it by reading 1000 years of joys and sorrows (Buchet Chastel, 432 pages, 24 euros), remarkable autobiography of Ai Weiwei, 64, the most famous artist in the country, a refugee in Europe since 2015, which is already an answer.
This book, of which we published an extract concerning his 81 days of detention in 2011, is a frightening and very well written testimony on his role as an artist in a dictatorship. How he engulfs himself in the smallest interstice of freedom, testifying to a lively situational agility.
Ai Weiwei has little taste for abstract paintings. When he visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the city where he lived in the 1980s, his judgment was severe – elitism, waste, vanity, snobbery – while he witnessed, through an interposed screen, the massacre of Tiananmen. His conviction is made: “If art does not engage in life, it has no future. » He returns home then stands on the symbolic Tiananmen Square, he takes a picture of a friend raising her skirt high or her own hand punctuated with a middle finger.
Striking shift
Ai Weiwei thinks an artist should hit where it hurts. But the discrepancy is striking. In his country, which he loves so much, he is seen as an activist, “a thorn in the side of the regime”in the sense that his art scripts his life and the faces of the dictatorship – attacks on freedoms, corruption, bruised ecology… – by means of various media: drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, video, performance, song, up to his blog, which he feeds day and night from 2005 before it was closed.
In the West, he is an artist exhibited in major museums, which give themselves with him a good conscience and a rebellious image. Ai Weiwei is not fooled by his double image, not really synchronous. He even maintains it: he praises freedom in America or Europe, while denouncing social injustices and the situation of migrants. He is a rebellious difficult to recover. In this, his book is universal.
Ai Weiwei knew how to build his notoriety at home to make it live outside, in order to be a little spared. His activity as an architect, without a diploma, is exemplary here. From three lines on a piece of paper, he builds his workshop in a village around Beijing. The building is so popular that it subsequently responds to a hundred architectural commissions in the country, up to the spectacular Beijing stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games, in the shape of a bird’s nest, designed with the Swiss agency Herzog & DeMeuron.
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