Being China’s most famous dissident artist is almost a job, and Ai Weiwei is good at it. In India for the first time, at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), and in time for the India Art Fair, he announced before an audience during an on-stage conversation this weekend -- “I’m sorry I did it” -- to a collective gasp.
The reference was to a 1995 photo triptych, which shows him smashing a 2,000-year-old Han-dynasty urn, an act that reverberated through the global art world and made him instantly famous. It put him in the league of other global provocateurs of art such as street artist Banksy, Marina Abramović, pioneer in performance art, and Damien Hirst, known for his death-focused works.
However, in India, he was not going to be a China detractor. “I did not do it [breaking the vase] for any big cultural reason,” Wei Wei told Delhi. “But suddenly I get to know that it is being interpreted as one of my most important works. No artist is conscious of what is his important work.”
The conversation, titled ‘The Unfinished Witness’, was a typical Ai Weiwei event from start to finish—respectful introductions by the panelists, talk of his father Ai Qing, the original dissident in Mao’s China, being influenced by Tagore, which he has mentioned in press interviews, the lack of democracy in one-party China balancing it with not giving a clean chit to democracies, a discussion on his brand of political activism, and some jokiness with the audience. It seems the Ai Weiwei way of 'working the room'.
It perhaps also pleased his agent-provocateur heart, to have the evening end with an audience member’s challenge, though he did look stumped, by a rather strange question on the Israel-Palestine conflict, a conflict in which Wei Wei sides with Palestine. It is a stance that cost him the cancellation of his exhibitions in London at the end of 2023.
“If Israel gives me a bulldozer, what should I do with it? You destroyed an urn, I want to destroy something too…,” asked the audience member, who said he was doing a PhD on Weiwei’s art. “You have set up a situation that is difficult for me to answer. Everyone should come up with their own answer,” said the artist.
A material dissenter
‘The Unfinished Witness’ was conducted by Roobina Karode, director, KNMA, and Alexandra Munroe, Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art. Karode referred to the artist’s practice as an art of “truth-telling”, and, at a time of “erasure of history, what it means for an artist to work publicly”.
Weiwei has consistently put his art of readymade objects—French-American artist Marchel Duchamp, a pioneer of conceptual art, is an inspiration—at the service of questions raised by humanitarian crises, including China’s.
He highlighted the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 with ‘Rebar’, an artwork made with reinforced steel to expose the tragic consequences of poor building practices; he came back in 2012 with ‘Straight’, a floor piece using 150 rods of steel rebar straightened by hand after being recovered from the schools in which over 5,000 schoolchildren were killed in the quake. In 2017, he made a monumental refugee raft, titled ‘Law of the Journey’, from PVC material, designed to highlight the global refugee crisis, packed with over 250-300 faceless figures.
Give and take
Munroe, while drawing out Weiwei on various subjects, also underlined his “generosity”. Weiwei, now nearly 70, had certainly set aside past history—his father, a poet, was sent to a labour camp and into internal exile for nearly 20 years — vis-à-vis the Chinese establishment on one occasion; he had co-designed the Beijing Olympics stadium known as the Bird’s Nest in 2008. In 2011, Weiwei was, however, jailed for nearly three months; the official version was that it was for tax evasion and not an issue of freedom of expression.
During the pandemic lockdown in 2022, he made over 20,000 masks referencing his iconic works, such as the one featuring his middle finger from one of his most famous series Study of Perspective – his gesture of defiance towards structures of power such as the Tiananmen Square. But a softening of his position towards China has been noticed. In the talk, he upheld China's progress under the Communist Party, the way it had "lifted up the country", that it faced no famines.
Pragmatic positions
India’s well-known art critic Geeta Kapur, present in the front row at the KNMA talk, told us that she found Weiwei quite “restrained” in his responses.
In Delhi, Weiwei had met the who’s who of the Delhi art circuit—from art entrepreneur and collector Shalini Passi at her home to veteran photo artist and curator Ram Rahman. One of Delhi’s premier galleries, Nature Morte, has brought Weiwei’s first solo exhibition to India (on until February 22 at Nature Morte, Dhan Mill) as part of a programme running parallel to the India Art Fair.
“Bringing Ai’s work to India isn’t about creating a spectacle — for us, it is about urgency. His work speaks to the present moment with total clarity: history, power, borders, memory. India is a place where these questions are lived, (they are) not abstract, and this exhibition invites that conversation without flinching,” Aparajita Jain, co-director, Nature Morte, put up this statement on the gallery website. She also gave the introductory note at the KNMA talk.
Weiwei knows how to move around and what he can say where. “It is a great moment for India now, and it will be one of the fastest economies, it will be as strong as China at a later time. Not now,” he said, while deftly moving onto China’s journey of resisting foreign domination, touching on Deng Xiaoping's ‘Let some people get rich first’ dictum in the ’70s-’80s as a transition in Chinese policy, segueing with his own memories of growing up at a time in the ’70s when China was one of the poorest nations.
However hard you threw the ball at Weiwei, he knew how to throw it back. He knew how to side-step tangential questions. Any message for Indians or advice on the art of speaking out, another audience member asked him. He replied deadpan: “How do you encourage people to eat when hungry? People don’t need advice.”