Ai Weiwei: Beloved by the People, Hated by the Censors

"Every human or citizen needs, if they travel, they need a passport. And mine was taken away with no clear reason. And now it is back. […] My heart is at peace. I feel quite relieved "; Chinese contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei (Beijing, 1957) recently commented on having had his passport returned without warning by Chinese authorities on 22 July, in an interview with CNN in Beijing . The Chinese authorities had confiscated and withheld it for more than four years.

Ai Weiwei inherited his subversive disposition directly from his father, Chinesepoet Ai Qing who was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-59) and exiled until 1979. Ai was witness to his father’s determined subversion in fighting political extremism and racism. As such, he set his sights on the same aim of his father and he achieves it. “It is a tradition for intellectuals to speak out against power”, he says. “This is why artists and poets are so valued by society”.

The Communist Party of China obviously hates him, but incredibly loves him too: as a matter of fact, Ai was appointed artistic consultant on the BeijingNational Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. All this while he was in the midst of his new-generation personal fight against the Chinese government’s censorship and its refutable stance on human rights, such as in defence of a large number of Christians being oppressed in China.

Just a few years before, in 2005, he posted his first blog, which was reaching 100,000 people every day, on the advice of Sina Weibo, the biggest Internet platform in China. The same platform that shut down Ai’s blog just four years later, mainly due to his numb and critical mind on events such as the Sichuan earthquake, where there were over 5,000 confirmed dead students due to substandard school campus constructions, while the Chinese Government tarried, showing a lack of transparency.

The police often beat him and hisbank accounts were investigated by state security agents who claimed he was under investigation for "unspecified suspected crimes", as revealed The New York Times in 2011, just as Ai was arrested at Beijing Capital International Airport for 81 days accused of tax evasion. His passport was also taken from him.

Upon his release, Ai kept on doingwhat he did before: he released a music videomocking the guards and their abuse of him in prison. Therefore, he makes his arta form of political activism, as he said to The Telegraph last September : “I would not separate my art from my so-called activism. I think I am a lively artist. And whatever I do is part of my art, and art is part of my life, so they are inseparable”.

In this respect, social media plays a significant role for Ai, who has always kept in touch with the whole world as far as his condition allowed it. During last four years, when he was forced to stay in China because of his passport being taken by the Government, he was able to organize many exhibitions all around the world and to showcase his masterpieces from Canada to Italy , where he is known as the most internationally-recognized representative of China's contemporary art scene.

Furthermore, he has received several awards and honours for his standing for human rights, some people and governments are scared by his defiance of the Chinese government’s attitude and have tried to hinder him: for instance, in July 2015 after having had his passport returned, Ai was ready to flight from Berlin to London for the opening of his exhibition at the Royal Academy.Although hesubmitted an application for a six-month business visa to Britain, the application was rejected: “That was a big surprise for me, I was very frustrated”, he recently said. The reason given in a letter from the British embassy in Beijing was that in his application Ai had not declared a criminal conviction: “They used the same accusations as the Chinese government: they accused me of being a criminal,” says Ai, who decided to go public about the spat by posting the letter on Instagram. Overnight, the Home Office granted the artist the full visa.

To understand the influence of Chinese censorship on other countries, one need only think that, only few years ago in 2010, Ai had his memorable installation Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern, which received huge praise from critics and the public at large. Now, lookingback to these days, he mocks this kind of two-faced and ridiculous political attitude: “In 2010 if I walked on the street, not a single person would say ‘Oh, that’s the artist’. Nobody would say that because nobody knew me”, but nowadays things are so different that he says to the Telegraph: “So I would always tell the police in Beijing: «It takes a monster as big as the state to turn me, an ordinary artist, into an innocent hero, just because I’m standing there, not scared». This is Ai Weiwei.