MCLC: Ai Weiwei's freedom by fiat

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Ai Weiwei’s freedom by fiat
Source: The New Yorker (7/23/15)
Ai Weiwei’s Freedom by Fiat
BY EVAN OSNOS
Nearly four years after he was barred from leaving China, the artist Ai Weiwei this week abruptly regained the right to travel. He broke the news via an Instagram selfie. “Today, I picked up my passport,” said the caption, beneath a photo of him and his new travel document. He had reason to rejoice, of course, and yet, in the image, he wears a flat, uneasy expression—a fitting reflection of a moment that opens an uncertain new chapter.
For Ai, the news is, in the first instance, a step closer to the end of a strange purgatory. One of the world’s most famous artists, he has been neither jailed nor free. Ai’s ordeal began on April 3, 2011, when he was arrested and charged with tax evasion, which his supporters interpreted as retaliation by the Chinese government for his mounting political criticism. After eighty-one days in custody, he was released, but he remained barred from leaving his house or resuming his political activities. Whenever he tried to find out how long the conditions would last, he received no reply.
As the years passed, he was occasionally, unpredictably, given back some of his mobility: first, the ability to exit his house; then, the chance to travel to other Chinese cities; finally, earlier this year, the first chance to exhibit a show on Chinese soil, with a relatively soft-edged installation that skirted the pugnacious politics that has made him famous. At each iteration of his detention, he received no explanation for the calculations behind the authorities’ dealings with him. It was a process so opaque that he described it to me as “playing chess with a person from outer space.” Even after recovering his passport, Ai could be denied the right to travel by other bureaucratic means. Liu Xiaoyuan, a human-rights lawyer and friend of Ai’s who has represented him in court, tweeted: “Congratulations to Mr. Ai Weiwei on the return of his passport, but having a passport does not mean one can leave the country freely. Ha ha.”
If Ai is allowed abroad, he will reunite with his family. For much of the last year, Ai’s wife and son have been living in Berlin. When Ai was detained, his son, Ai Lo, was two years old. Over the next several years, the boy became aware of the family’s predicament, and Ai worried what effect that detention would have on his son’s perception of China. “I don’t want to teach my children with hatred, or the sense of suffering,” Ai told me at his home, while he was under house arrest, in 2012. “It’s not necessary. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Ai knows what he was missing overseas; he is an English speaker who lived for a decade in New York City, and, at the time of his arrest, owned an apartment in Chelsea. But life in exile exacts an unmistakable toll: Milan Kundera, who fled from Prague to Paris, in 1975, once worried that, after he left his homeland, his work would become as “meaningless as the twittering of birds.” Already, Ai’s name is barred on the Chinese Internet, and so the vast majority of his influence and following comes from abroad. When Ai was under house arrest, I asked him where he saw his future. He was silent for a while. “I only can say that I will be most functional in China,” he said finally. “Of course, I can live a happy life, or create some other purpose outside of China. Or, for family or my children, [I could] stay outside, which is a very strong reason.”
The option to leave China presents Ai, and other dissident Chinese intellectuals, with difficult questions. When he travels, will authorities allow him to return—not just immediately, but after he has resumed a career of high-profile political and social criticism? Will that risk have an impact on him and his work? (He is scheduled to open a show, in September, at Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts.) Could anyone, honestly, fault him for biting his tongue—even though he, more than any modern Chinese intellectual, has faulted fellow artists who curb their criticisms to protect their freedoms? After years of physical restrictions of one kind or another, Ai now faces a subtler predicament: balancing the pressures to be both a provocative international artist and a mobile Chinese citizen. Chinese leaders are not becoming more tolerant of Ai’s type of liberal activism; on the contrary, the Party has, in recent weeks, detained hundreds of human-rights lawyers in the most widespread sweep of legal advocates in decades.
Curiously, the way in which Ai Weiwei’s freedom was restored—arbitrarily, unannounced, with no formal proceedings—embodies the very force that he has criticized for nearly a decade: the rule of man over the rule of law. Once, recalling his eighty-one days in custody, he wrote, “I was watched twenty-four hours a day. The light was always on. There were two guards on two-hour shifts standing next to me—even watching when I swallowed a pill; I had to open mouth so they could see my throat.” After he was released, he discovered that the authorities’ control endured in his knowledge that others always had the power to bring him back. And so it is today. Ai Weiwei is returning to the world but he is not entirely free.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 25, 2015
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