Ai Weiwei's Challenges and Questions

According to What? is a retrospective that covers twenty years of work in many media by the Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei. Organized by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it is the first North American tour of his work, now showing in Indianapolis through July 21. 

Poster in the parking lot at the IMA. A larger one
faces the major intersection near the Museum gates.

Of Ai, more may be known about his story than his work: how he was surveilled by the Chinese police, attacked in the night and beaten to the point of a brain bleed as retribution for his efforts to document the names of the thousands of children killed in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The government has never acknowledged that the schools that yielded immediately to the shocks were shoddily constructed death-traps for the children. Ai was later detained for several months on fabricated tax evasion charges. He became an international symbol for resistance against the Chinese government's attacks on human rights and freedom of expression. He is now the global symbol and spokesman for freedom of individual and artistic expression. 

Ai's personage was very familiar to me, although his work was not, so I went to this show with great anticipation of the work of the internationally recognized, influential, contemporary artist.

Had I really been looking for the work of "the most controversial artist in the world," I would have been sorely disappointed. As it was, I was deflated. The final work in the show is a documentary film, "So Sorry," made from footage shot by the artist's colleagues and friends, which chronicles Ai's conflicts with Chinese authorities: We witness the political controversies that have made him a key figure in the cause of free expression. There is controversy, yes.

Elsewhere, however, his challenges to authority, mores, and history are almost stunningly jejune. As a viewer, I find myself empathizing with the high school art teacher who sighs over the work of yet another class of freedom-loving adolescents whose lifted fingers, voiced "fucks," or engaged spray cans make them strut with imagined revolutionary inventiveness. How many times has the teacher had to suffer this rite of passage?

Something like that is what I thought when I encountered, early in the show two photographs from Ai's Studies of Perspective series. Alluding in the title to the sketcher's use of an uplifted index finger for gauging spatial relationships, he substitutes the irreverent middle

Ai Weiwei, Study of Perspective, Tiananmen and Study of Perspective, White House, Inkjet prints, both 1995-2003. Courtesy of
Ai Weiwei Studio. Photograph by the author.

finger in a contemptuous and vulgar gesture toward these seats of government. Apparently these photographs are from a series of studies that include the Eiffel Tower and the Reichstag. Were the reductive, inarticulate gesture used in a rich context, there would be no reason for disappointment. But I find nothing beyond the obvious to raise these works beyond the status of one-off. What would incline me to look at them again? What would grow on me? I can't answer that question.

Similarly with a series of photographs that form one face of According to What? and, I believe, is thought to represent a controversial act. In the sequence, Ai drops a Han Dynasty urn, roughly 2,000 years old. Clearly, he doesn't even flinch as he performs as act we are
presumed to witness aghast. ("The steely terrorist!" or, "The toddler in tantrum!" You choose.)

Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995/2009. Image courtesy of the artist. Each photo, 75-3/8 x 70-7/8." Courtesy of the
Indianapolis Art Museum.

These photographs fill up a wall, so the images of Ai loom over the viewer. He is a menacing presence; the series has the feel of stills from a movie in which the assassin reveals to his next victim through visual metaphor, just how easily he can annihilate him or her. I feel no anxiety over the fate of the vase, because the images give us no information that suggests that it is remarkable. That it is ancient comes from a gallery note that gives the title and tells us when the Han period was. Whether an American's assumption that its age indicates high monetary value is not discussed: I just don't know. But I do know that visually, the vase is of secondary interest to the power of this large, fierce man. 

These photos are still, from the film of a performance. The point of the performance was, according to the catalogue (page 89), to be "a work of conceptual art that captures the moment when tradition is transformed and challenged by new values." The performance may well have achieved that.

But there is a chilly violence to this embodiment of the idea that new generations need to transform or challenge traditional values. Wasn't the Cultural Revolution about destroying them? I find this work disturbing. Either one can agree with notes that say it means what they assert it does; or one can look and see a threatening bully smashing a pot with no  appearance of concern for the significance of the vessel, the action, or the spectrum of interpretations.

Ai Weiwei, Colored Vases, 2007-2010. Han Dynasty vases
(206 BCE- 220 CE) and industrial paint. Photo by the author.

Ai uses more Han period vases in Colored Vases, an installation of just that, vases painted in colors of industrial paint so opaque and brilliant that they look like a display in the patio shop at Home Depot or Pier1. My eye makes little more of this aggregation than that: a collection of jolly pots useful for a casual, graphic sort of interior design.

Once more, it is only through external information that we learn that these have been transformed; that Ai painted them with industrial paint so that, if the note has any authority, "the vases challenge the viewer to consider questions about authenticity and the value and meaning of original artwork." If this is indeed so, why would he have to alter more than one to make the point?

Ai Weiwei, Colored Vases, 2007-2010. Image courtesy of the artist
 and courtesy of the Indianapolis Art Museum.

Without the gallery note, I would have no reason at all for the questions it suggests, since nothing about this installation leads me to think that I am dealing with an original artwork of any period, let alone any of historical note. The histories of the vases are entirely effaced. The altered vessels are simply mundane, which is deplorable as a message about challenging cultural values of the past. Again, I feel like Ai plays the naughty boy who has not thought very deeply about his simplistic actions. 

Ai's conceptual work seems to me either simplistic or so engaged with the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and with the Minimalist artists of the 1960s as to be of no unusual significance. There is certainly no controversial content, for he covers ground well-covered for decades.

His best work, though, is when he brings something that feels heart-felt to his conceptual and Minimalist—his very cerebral—forms. This may, in fact, account for my overall disappointment with his work. 

Politically, Ai is testy, aggressive, and histrionic. His modes of art-making, however, are hyper-rational, controlled and cool. While his work is all about culture, history, and to a lesser extent, politics, the personal doesn't so often appear. It is difficult to make personal connection with much of the work. 

Ai Weiwei, China Log, 2005. Tieli wood
(ironwood) from dismantled temples of the
Qing Dynasty (1644-1911.) Photo by the
author.

The art with warmth is work in which materials matter, not to be effaced, but to be revered and admired. Where Ai uses ancient ceramics only to destroy or deface them, he salvages and preserves antique and rare woods. Many works in the show were fabricated by master woodworkers out of ancient or rare woods, using historical joinery techniques.

China Log joins five ironwood beams from dismantled historical temples and joins them into a log, the cross-cut ends of which form gaps that describe the map of China. If there's a commentary about the relevance of the past, it seems to be that the history and culture define and secure the country's definition. The ancient wood is in color and texture well-named: It appears to be an unassailable material. The log, which one is urged not to touch, in fact is so sturdy and beautiful, that it appeared to me as beautiful place to rest and let one's hands enjoy the satiny finish of the wood.

As a commentary on China, I felt this a positive, even nostalgic work, about duration and durability; about its indelible presence in the mind of the artist. An amusing impression from my American childhood that further endeared this to me: Any holes we dug when we were little would eventually "lead to China" on the other side of the Earth. Here, at last, was the perfect fulfillment of the conviction I'd secretly cherished for so many years. I found a bit of myself in this as I was feeling something warm and contemplative coming from Ai.

Ai Weiwei, Kippe, 2006. Tieli wood (ironwood) from dismantled temples of the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) and iron parallel bars. Photo by the author.

Ai's Kippe, too, was another work that stands out for its warmth, beauty, and personal qualities. Appearing to be an enormous pile of wood stacked for the fireplace or oven, it is packed perfectly tightly to form a flawless block. It incorporates architectural ornaments, mere splinters, and slices from cross-cuts of the beautiful ironwood trees. It forms a wall almost like  an oven glowing a steady heat. Who would need anything the woodpile itself does not give?

The notes connect the work to Ai's memories not only of the family's woodpile, but of the village basketball hoop (the uprights) and parallel bars, which are easily read into the structure. Is the success of this piece—its accessibility to the sensoriums and imaginations of others—a result of its genesis in Ai's lived experience?

Similarly, Ai's Teahouse thrilled me because I think of connections made through his use of charged materials. The house itself is a brown, Western style, boxy house without windows or doors, placed on a bare, flat yard of brown leaves. Every aspect of this installation is made of tea leaves—of Pu'er tea from Yunnan, fermented and aged. The house is composed of tightly compressed leaves; the floor is of scattered loose ones.

Ai Weiwei, Teahouse, 2011. Compressed and loose tea. Photo by the author.

Visually, this is certainly not representing the location for a traditional ceremony, or for a rite of any sort. It is a reinterpretation of a Minimalist style tableau in a new material, creating a punning title. What makes it special, though—and seems not to be commented on—is the fragrance of the tea. The area of the gallery surrounding the installation is saturated by the sweet, moist scent of tea that warms every aspect of the senses. The entire body responds to this work in a way it would be impossible to 

react to the same shapes made of a scent-neutral material. It's hard to believe that the aroma wasn't part of Ai's plan, that it wasn't his own escape route from the formal rigors of a discipline he's trapped himself in?

Ai Weiwei, Grapes, 2011. 40 antique wooden stools
 from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Photo
by the author.

There are several pieces in which Ai disassembles antique furniture only to reassemble it in non-functional ways intended to call attention to the beauty of traditional joinery and construction techniques, as in Grapes, an assemblage of three-legged stools. Qing woodworkers secured joints without nails or glue. In this piece and others, Ai evidences his respect for high-level craftsmanship. There is even a meter-square Minimalist cube covered in sheets of rosewood carving of great intricacy, which we compare to an exquisite tiny rosewood box once carried by the artist's father. It is touching and inspiring to see this interest in the continuation of traditional values of fine craft despite his crude and shallow gestures elsewhere that assert the need for new cultural values at the expense of fine works of the past. But it leaves this viewer wondering where he draws the line and why; and whether we expect too much philosophy from an artist who may actually be in the formative stages of his thinking about the intersection of cultural legacy and regime in his mercurial country.

Ai Weiwei, Names of Student Earthquake Victims Found by the
Citizens' Investigation, 2008-2011. Inkjet print, exhibition copy.
Photography by the author.

I was uneasily aware, too, that Ai, like many conceptual artists, depends on legions of anonymous experts to fashion the work that comes to us above his name. His Citizens' Investigation project that works still to uncover the names of the students killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai  believes, like Maya Lin, that to name a name is to acknowledge the importance of an individual life. 

This principle is dear in times of tragedy, but not so much when it comes to ascribing artistic credit. On recordings by symphonies, it would be considered churlish to withhold the names of the instrumentalists and give credit only to composer and conductor. In art, there seems to be no issue with crediting Ai as the brains and never naming the master craftsmen who executed his works in wood shops or forges. There are few works (photographs aside) in the show one that one imagines coming from the rough hands of the artist himself.

In the last gallery of According to What? we encounter work surrounding the efforts to name the students lost in the earthquake. On the wall is a reproduction of the spreadsheet kept in Ai's studio, listing the names, birth dates, ages, and sexes of the children discovered so far (over 5,000). On the floor is the installation, Straight, made from straightened rebar rods recovered from the disaster sites. The room also displays Ai's documentary photos of the region 

Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008-2012. Steel rebar (38 tons). Photo by the author.

and its rubble. Beside those, a video shows the process of straightening and replicating the rods one by one in preparation for Straight. On another wall is the cellphone photo Ai took of himself surrounded by police as he was taken away in an elevator. This is hung next to an X-ray from which his cerebral hemorrhage was diagnosed. 

The single gallery, then,  deeply mixes documentation, dramatization, and what is meant to be artistic response. In this one room, we have the bare list of the names of deceased children; and black and white photos of the crime scene. The memorial rebar installation lies low on the floor. A movie about its making makes noise in the atmosphere. In fact, everything on the walls distracts from its solemnity: It feels rather in the way.

So we come to the end of Ai Weiwei's show with an unfocused gallery and a documentary made by the artist's group about its own efforts. It leaves us wondering whether the show is meant to honor Ai's art itself, or his art as the work of a political dissident whose efforts have placed him on the world stage. Clearly, his art reputation has benefitted from his political action. In So Sorry, we witness his engagement with the cause of the families of missing children; we are given to understand that the title "references the apologies of governments and corporations when their negligence leads to tragedies." 

Yet he films spends very little footage on interviews and testimony from bereft families, devoting quite a lot to producing the hagiography Ai seems intent from the beginning to secure. I found it distasteful, as the focus seems far from the apparent issue of the dignity and safety of the earthquake zone families, and much more on the visibility of Ai and his need to outfox and humiliate the police. While I never question the justice of his cause, I never feel sure that the hero is much better than an adolescent bully either.

So, go see According to What? in Indianapolis or at one of its subsequent stops—the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Miami Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. When I saw it, well into its Indianapolis run, the galleries were very busy. Is Ai the world's most controversial artist? Not by a long shot. His controversy is in other spheres, and it's mistaken to try to transfer his importance as a supporter of rights to his importance as an artist. I suspect that in ten or fifteen years, curators will look back and blush. 

For now, take a look at some interesting, sometimes good work and then think about it. If your pulse remains low, remember that Indianapolis also has fine American decorative arts, and their 100 Acres sculpture garden is open...

Ai Weiwei, China Log, detail.

Sun Wanling, Traditional Chinese Painter

In his official photograph, Sun Wanling’s face is serene and noble, with deep brown eyes, and a well-cut chin and nose. His long black hair swept back from his brow, dressed in a traditional Chinese shirt with an embroidered Mandarin collar and frog closings, he fits Western hopes for the Chinese man who will greet them as they stumble from the tour bus.

Sun Wanling, September 2012

It’s a very amusing photo—almost unrecognizable to anyone who has met and worked with Wanling (his familiar name; Sun is the family name) at the Anderson Center artists' colony in Red Wing Minnesota this month. His face is infinitely mobile within the range of wryness and laughter; his whippet thin body moves between Tai Chi and break dance with the élan of a comedian. He is never without his camera, the dance partner whom he dips, bows and twirls in an endless ballet scored by shutter and zoom lens.

Sun Wanling is a traditional Chinese painter, trained specifically in brush painting of animals and plants. At first, I found it difficult to believe that a man so constantly in motion, so loose and amenable at the drop of a hat to any American experience, could be a master of this venerable art form. In many museums I’ve stood breathless among these exquisite, enchanting jewels of natural observation. They are slow and careful, I think, made without revision, with complete focus, in a state of mind that must be like grace.

Potter at Red Wing Pottery forming pots at Sun
Wanling's request

Red Wing is home to several potteries, being located in an area of fine clays. I accompanied Wanling one day to the famous Red Wing Pottery, whose owner, Scott Gillmer, had invited him to paint pots. Wanling brought sketches of Chinese forms, which a potter set out to produce for painting at a later date, so Wanling took up for decoration several small vessels in the pottery’s traditional German heritage shapes. For him, this was an interesting opportunity, to work with ceramic forms novel to him.

With Scott Gillmer, owner of
Red Wing Pottery

Sun Wanling, Chinese vase completed
in China

There were several limitations for him, the greatest of which was that the only color available was blue. He always uses red for the stamp with which he signs his work, but he shrugged this off and went to work. He simply took up a pot, examined it all around, then dipped one of his three brushes in a plate of colored slip and he painted. He worked swiftly and surely, as if the designs poured from his hand, as when one releases sugar in a steady flow from one's filled palm. His eyes were focused on his work, and his face was immobile until he finished, when he broke into victorious smiles and stood back for Scott, the potter, and me to see his work. Suddenly, he was the maestro; he was the beaming school child; he was happy with his work, his whole body transformed. 

The unfired pots showed the traces of blue slip only faintly, but Sun Wanling's fresh designs were nevertheless clear and animated and miraculous to all of us. Though the pots were very small by his standards, he adapted well and his imagination shone. On a bowl with an oscillating pattern raked into its rim, Wanling painted diving fish, thereby turning the rim into ocean waves with playful fish swimming beneath.

Fish beneath the waves.

Sun Wanling, Chinese vessel, painted
in China

 At Shandong Polytechnic University in Jinan, where he is Director of the Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Institute, Sun Wanling is also a member of the Purple Sand Institute. Purple sand (pounded from a multicolored mineral) is the basis for extremely prized clay used for pots and caddies that yield perfectly brewed tea. Where he paints on porcelain, he carves purple sand with the same finesse that he paints, but with tools and a medium even less forgiving. His purple sand vessels command high prices all over Asia.

Sun Wanling, purple sand tea caddy with painted carving



One day Sun Wanling and his most hospitable and enthusiastic stateside hostess, Yanmei Jiang, sat down with me to discuss the specifics of his work in the context of traditional Chinese painting. Wanling had brought gifts of his catalogues as well as many digital images, so it was a tremendous learning opportunity for me.

Since his work is primarily ink on paper, I asked if Sun Wanling distinguished between drawing and painting, as we in the West do. This question resulted in a history lesson in Chinese painting and its two streams, one of which is a realistic, full-color painting tradition more like ours, which aspires to recreate reality and is related to a scientific world view. The brush tradition departed from that in the seventh or eighth century, the first having come to be associated with the official and royal worlds. Brush painting, using only ink, aspires to reveal the soul, and became a communication of the literati. Wang Wei, the famous poet of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), is considered the father of brush painting. In tribute to Wang Wei, Su Dongpo, a statesman and poet during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), declared, “There’s poetry in painting, and painting in poetry.” This is the goal to which traditional painters have aspired since.

Poetry of a high order: Unity of nature painting and calligraphy


In brush painting, you will always see calligraphy, one of painting’s four essential elements: the painting, the artist’s seal, the poem, and calligraphy. How, I wondered, do I distinguish the calligraphy from the poem itself? In response, Wanling pointed me back to Su Dongpo: “There’s poetry in the painting, and painting in the poetry,” is to be taken literally: The entire image, with all its elements, is the poem. There is nothing that limits poetry to language, although when there is verbal poetry, the words are the painter’s, produced as spontaneously as the images. But in every painting, the artist is the poet: there isn’t a distinction between the roles.

When I had watched Sun Wanling at Red Wing Stoneware, I was very impressed by the naturalism and personality of each animal that he painted. As we looked through images of his paintings, this observation was reinforced over and over. No two birds of the same species looked alike and each radiated personality. Nothing appeared stock; every iteration was fresh and alive, as if the bird, the duck, the fish were a beloved pet, lovingly observed just at the instant. There is an inventory of plants and animals the traditional artist paints, each with symbolic association. How, after twenty years as an artist with twenty years of prior training, can he continue to animate every single one? This alone seems like an astonishing display of his heart and skill.

But before dinner one day during our first week, the other three of us had to hunt for Wanling to be sure he came to eat. We found him outside among the giant oaks with computer paper and ballpoint pen, completely absorbed in filling sheets with sketches of leaping squirrels. The drawings were amusing and fresh, but accurate too—just like the squirrels I’ve seen in his work. He has also, during his month here, taken literally thousands of photographs of nature—not only of the squirrels, but all kinds of birds, including the many bald eagles that live along the neighboring Mississippi River. His momentary awareness of nature is hawk-like; no animal movement, no rustle of the grasses, no beauty of sunset or September’s changing colors escapes his eye or camera. It is from years of exquisitely trained observation that the twinkle of curiosity comes to the eye of Sun Wanling’s bluebird.

Against this absorbing naturalism, the traditional painter places his flora and fauna in the least Western of landscape perspectives. The extended forms of long or tall and narrow papers allow the painter multiple focal points without regard for literal distances or measurements; the relationships of feeling and symbols are what count. The attenuated papers also reflect an aesthetic that permeates a cultural worldview of which fine art is only one aspect. Horizontal paintings allow for a long, swooping arc to enter from the top right and cross toward the right, where it always stops, blocked by vertical lines of calligraphy or other design elements. As we looked through several images in which this was borne out, Wanling sprang from his chair to execute Tai Chi movements that were exactly the same, the comprehensive, circular spanning of the arm, brought to the center of the body and arrested. “The circle!” he told me, smiling.

"Tai Chi." Circle-based composition using the bamboo branch.

As we discussed the paintings I had chosen for their appeal to me, or for questions they raised, Sun Wanling began each specific discussion with a diagram of the composition’s central thrusts—of branches, grasses, the directions of a fish’s glide, the inclination of bird or dragonfly wings. Composition is clearly primary—the viewer feels it at once—but after years of training it must become part of the poetic instinct. Sun Wanling paints horizontal papers as long as extended dining tables, but explained that earlier poets who made monumental paintings worked with their paper scrolled, painting only a small patch at a time. Yet they were able to execute grand and graceful compositions.

I love the painting to the left, of the fishes swimming by the bank of some body of water. Sun Wanling explained that in this style of painting, sky, air, and water are represented by no more than blank paper; nor are horizons represented. So the ambiguity that I feel about the placement of the fish is quite natural in a tradition in which perspectives aren't fixed, as they are for Westerners. 

What's more, what Sun Wanling has painted—and this he burst upon me to the greatest delight of both—is a mere fragment of a landscape that encompasses the whole world. He took my pen and showed me the house on the land above the river with its ground that sloped down to this rock. We saw the village on the other side of the river and the mountains behind. And it didn't take all that long for our imaginations to complete the circle and stop before our hearts and eyes, in Red Wing, Minnesota, where we could see ourselves in the painting too. 
Point well made! Viewers: You are in this picture. It is a fragment of the world we all inhabit; our eyes, imaginations, and responses are part of what completes the circle. 

A traditional Chinese painter, Wanling told me, has four treasures in his studio. He has his brushes, his ink, his paper, and his ink stone on which he grinds his colors. Of himself, the most important thing he brings is his calmness. Sun Wanling achieves this by grinding ink on his stone. He grinds it very slowly, in a circular motion. He told me that it, “puts his heart in a peaceful state.” 

The vivid spontaneity and life of Sun Wanling’s painting come from the source of all artistic life, through deep discipline so profoundly integrated into his heart and mind that they can be commanded in an instant. Sun Wanling is the camera’s snap, and the bird, and the brushstroke; he is the still, integrated embodiment of ancient tradition, and the diving squirrel that always gets the nut.