MCLC: on "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: on "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"
***********************************************************

Source: Hyperallergic (6/5/12):
http://hyperallergic.com/52419/ai-weiwei-never-retreat-retweet/

Ai Weiwei: "Never Retreat, Retweet"
By Ellen Pearlman

Alison Klayman’s 90-minute film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
<http://aiweiweineversorry.com/> set out to be a portrait of the Chinese
artist Ai Weiwei and along the way morphed into a highbrow, jaw-dropping
reality show about fumbling, corrupt governments (China), social media
(Twitter), democracy and art (Weiwei) and the power of the state (courtesy
the Chengdu police), with cameo appearances by Truth, Justice and the
American Way (Weiwei as a quasi Superman), brought to you by the
insightful commentary of Evan Osnos of the New Yorker (among others).

Weiwei spent his formative years with his famous poet father, Ai Qing,
banished to the Chinese equivalent of the Gulag. His parents were victims
of the twists and turns of the incessant purges that rocked the country’s
political system. Despite being unable to partake of a formal Chinese
education, Weiwei became one of the founders of the influential Stars
Group, which held a spontaneous, illegal art exhibition outside the
National Gallery (now Museum) of China in 1979.

In 1981 he arrived in New York, where he spent the 1980s being one of
those Chinese guys in Times Square who draw portraits of tourists on the
street. He hung out in the East Village, photographed the Tompkins Square
riots and palled around with Allen Ginsburg. He watched the Berlin Wall
come down and the protests in Tiananmen Square unfold on TV news,
inspiring him to stage a hunger strike in front of the UN to protest his
government’s tactics. He also watched the very public airing of the US
government’s dirty laundry with the Iran-Contra hearings, an event
inconceivable inside China.

After 12 years, he returned home to be with his father, who died shortly
thereafter. By 1994 he was, by his own admission, a “clean slate” with no
career and no prospects. He began hanging out in Beijing’s own version of
the East Village <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_East_Village> and
published Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book(1995) and Gray Cover
Book (1997), which highlighted the then-unknown (to Chinese artists)
Western artists Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. In 2000, he
curated the dissident and groundbreaking show Fuck Off with Feng Boyi in
Shanghai.

“Maybe to be powerful is to be fragile.”

Weiwei became internationally prominent as the artistic consultant for the
2008 Olympic National, or “Bird’s Nest,” Stadium, collaborating with the
Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron. But he thenwithdrew his support of the
Olympics to protest the massive ejection of migrant workers from Beijing
before the opening ceremonies and guilt-tripped director Steven Spielberg
to follow suit.

That same year, the devastating Sichuan earthquake killed 70,000 people,
including over 5,000 schoolchildren, due in no small part to the shoddy
“tofu construction” of schoolhouses, whose construction costs greased the
pockets of myriads officials at the expense of paying for
earthquake-resistant fortifications. The government cover-up was
immediate, and in August 2009, Weiwei, Klayman and crew set out to Chengdu
to document the aftermath and record and publish the names of each and
every child who perished.

This so infuriated the powers that be that they sent the Chengdu police,
who came pounding on the crew’s hotel door at 3 am. Klayman caught most of
the panic and confusion on tape. Weiwei also documented their attack with
the now famous phone photo taken in an elevator. The police beat him and
charged him with inciting political subversion. He said, “Chinese law is a
big joke — they said they did not beat me and it is lawful … and a whole
system covered it up.”

It is at this point that Klayman’s foray into this whiplash-invoking
reality, a made-for-prime-time movie that no one knew would turn out this
way, smartly makes social media the co-star. In the aftermath, Weiwei
turns to Twitter, tweeting the fracas out to the whole world before
leaving for Germany, where he undergoes cranial surgery for an internal
hemorrhage caused by the attack.

All the backpedaling and propaganda offensives in the world can’t erase
Klayman’s proof. As a foreign woman discreetly filming in the background,
she heroically captures damming, irrefutable footage of corruption and
beatings in action. However, she has no hero worship of her subject, just
a healthy respect. She doggedly follows Weiwei into his studio, and the
more human parts of the film emerge: hapless moments with his nagging,
clueless mother, supportive wife and dutiful mistress, and touching
interactions with his out-of-wedlock toddler son. He is careful to
criticize his own foibles while playing clever intellectual buffoon to the
camera’s unflinching eye. When asked if he thinks he is becoming a brand,
he answers, “Yes, for liberal thinking.”

In between international art shows, including the infamous sunflower seed
show <http://hyperallergic.com/11132/ai-weiwei-seeds-hazardous/> at the
Tate Modern, Weiwei returns to Chengdu a year after the attack with camera
crew in tow, to confront his tormentors and file a lawsuit. Klayman tracks
his rounds from office to office and his successes and failures navigating
the maze of bureaucratic procedures, about which he tweets incessantly. At
one point he rips the sunglasses off the smug face of one of his former
police-officer attackers so that his face can be filmed, thereby turning
social protest into an art form. He scuffles yet again with the local
police, an encounter filmed by Klayman’s steely eye. Local people call him
“teacher” and come to sit with him as he eats dinner at an outdoor
restaurant. He is being watched and filmed by the city police, though, who
keep asking him to leave the restaurant. He astutely comments, “The police
don’t know the power of the image. Their camera will not be exposed to
public but ours will. The Communist party is hooligans, and you have to
think like them.”

The Shanghai municipal government invited Weiwei to build a studio
complex, but when it’s completed, in November 2010, he is informed it will
be torn down, most likely as an act of retribution. “There is no
discussion, no rationality, no evaluation,” he says of the authorities.
Instead he decides to throw a party celebrating the destruction. Word goes
out on Twitter and spreads like wildfire, but he is placed under house
arrest to prevent him from attending his own party. Despite the danger,
people in Shanghai come out and celebrate by eating cooked river crabs,
whose name in Chinese sounds like the propaganda term “harmonious
society.” Released the next day, Weiwei states the reason for his
provocative behavior: “I did it because my father’s generation did not do
a good job.”