Maya Kóvskaya, PhD
The truth is always terrible, unfit for presentation, unspeakable, and difficult for the people to handle; just speaking the truth would be “subversion of the state.”1
—Ai Weiwei
An irreverent maverick with a cast-iron social conscience, Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei has been called many things. He’s been called China’s most famous living artist, while Western headlines have hinted that the defiant political critic just might be “China’s most dangerous man”2 and even claimed that the artist is an “enemy of the state.”3 Of course, in places where regimes monopolize historical “truth”—defending their claims to power by acting as gatekeepers of public culture—the union of art and political critique is a dangerous terrain. Yet through his art, Ai Weiwei fearlessly speaks his truth to power, and it is in this role of the public intellectual that Ai Weiwei’s vocation finds its apotheosis.
Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei in the elevator when taken into custody by the police, 2009 (detail), color photograph
Since his eighty-one-day police detention in China in 2011, global awareness of the political dimensions of Ai Weiwei’s widely acclaimed artistic practice has grown. And although the artist remains in China, his passport confiscated, and unable to travel abroad, he has arrived in spirit—through his artworks—on Alcatraz, California’s notorious island prison. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate setting for Ai Weiwei to create a site-specific intervention than Alcatraz. Now a flourishing national park and sanctuary for nesting birds, the San Francisco Bay island has a history of both unsettling and inspiring incarnations. Once a Civil War–era military fortress that held prisoners of war, from 1969 to 1971—after the infamous federal penitentiary was closed—the island was reoccupied as a site of Native American resistance. @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, organized by the FOR-SITE Foundation and curated by its founder, Cheryl Haines, brings together a new body of works created to engage the historical legacies and significance of Alcatraz and explore the tenuous and tenacious aspects of freedom throughout the world.
What is so compelling about Ai Weiwei is not merely that his artwork is at once both beautiful and critical but also that it is as democratic in form as in message; it is an art intended for people everywhere. Ai Weiwei is a genuine public intellectual not only because he speaks for the public but because he speaks to the public. He is effective because he does so in an intelligent yet accessible visual language that anyone (with a little cultural and historical context) can come to understand. This essay shares key moments in the artist’s development in order to offer such a context. Ai Weiwei’s family background and youth set the stage for the blossoming of a great artist, audacious dissenter, and an exemplary public intellectual—that is, an artist with a commitment to participating critically in public life, even at enormous personal risk.
Born in Beijing in 1957, by the time he was a year old Ai Weiwei was already learning about the vicissitudes of being a political dissenter when his father, the venerable revolutionary-era poet Ai Qing,4 was sent, along with his family, to a series of labor camps for “re-education.” The family arrived first in frigid Heilongjiang Province at the outset of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), an ill-conceived attempt at transforming China into a modern communist paradise that led to the starvation of an estimated 30 to 40 million people. From 1959 onward, they were transferred to a series of camps in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost Central Asian province, including one near Tian Shan, Xinjiang’s “Heavenly Mountains.”
For nearly two decades, Ai Qing and his family endured life in the camps and the political volatility of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Ai Weiwei recalls the day in 1968 when his father “was dragged out across the desert to a labor camp far from the mountains” he loved. The poet was prohibited from writing, forced “to scrub communal toilets, and the Ai family was forced to live in an earthen pit covered with brush and mud.”5 They remained exiled in Xinjiang for sixteen years, only returning to Beijing after Chairman Mao died and the Cultural Revolution ended. Ai Qing was finally politically rehabilitated in 1978 after Deng Xiaoping came to power and initiated the reform and opening up of China’s economy and society.
Years later in 2011, after Ai Weiwei was detained without formal charges for eighty-one days—sometimes hooded and always accompanied by two guards who stayed within close physical proximity, depriving him of even the most rudimentary privacy—he studied the walls of his own small, padded prison, memorizing the details that would later inform his artworks, and pondered the conscience that had helped keep his father’s dignity intact in the camps. The poem “The Wall,” which Ai Qing published in 1979, is uncannily prescient:
Ai Weiwei was just entering his twenties as culture from the West began to flow into China for the first time since the pre-revolutionary era. While the Chinese state still controlled the public sphere, those early days of Deng’s leadership were marked with an enthusiasm for Western goods and culture by officialdom and society alike.
Ai Weiwei, AIDS Protest, 1989, black-and-white photograph
Ai Weiwei, Washington Square Park Protest, 1988, black-and-white photograph
Rock ’n’ roll, blue jeans, and avant-garde art were among the cultural currents that swirled around edgy young Chinese creatives during this early era of experimentation and renewed optimism. At the forefront were people like Ai Weiwei, who was a founding member of one of China’s first avant-garde art collectives, the Stars.7 When their experiments with Western artistic approaches were rejected by the official old guard that then ruled the art world, the Stars responded by staging an innovative, rebellious exhibition of their works on the streets outside the National Art Museum of China in 1979. When this exhibition was declared illegal by authorities, the Stars brazenly took to the streets, organizing a protest march on October 1, 1979, the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. As exciting as this new era in China was, however, Ai Weiwei was a natural cosmopolitan. When the opportunity arose, he migrated to New York City in 1981, only returning to Beijing to be at his father’s deathbed in 1993.
By 1983, Ai Weiwei had found his niche in New York’s East Village. He studied for a time at Parsons School of Design but found the city itself to be a greater source of creative stimulation than the classroom. Ai Weiwei became close to luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg (the poet had met Ai Weiwei’s father during a visit to China), and his place became a crash pad for visiting Chinese culturati. Camera in hand, Ai Weiwei, with his need to bear witness, was already finding expression in his earliest artworks—by the time he left New York, he had amassed 10,000 black-and-white photographic negatives, from which 230 prints were produced for a traveling exhibition that premiered at the Three Shadows Photography Arts Centre in Beijing in 2009.
The New York photographs map the young Ai Weiwei’s social conscience during this formative time with portraits of close friends and images from iconic events that he witnessed and participated in, including major political, social, and cultural phenomena that still resonate today. Marginalization, self-determination, and glorious defiance can be seen in his portraits from New York’s annual outdoor drag festival Wigstock, which capture an important moment in the LGBT rights movement. His documentation of the 1990 protests against George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War, the social conflicts caused by gentrification, the scourge of homelessness in the world’s wealthiest country, and police brutality at the 1988 riots in Tompkins Square Park all reveal the tenor of the times with startling insight. These photographs demonstrate that Ai Weiwei’s work has always been about more than just China. Justice bleeds across geopolitical boundaries; struggles against the abuse of power have always been a concern of the artist.
Ai Weiwei, Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation, 2008–2011 (detail), black-and-white print
When Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing in 1993 to be with his dying father, he was also returning to a changed China—post-1989 China, in which those who had criticized the nation’s course had been forcefully reminded of the wisdom of silent complicity, and the last smatterings of a broken public intelligentsia were nursing their wounds in small underground communities. There was the Yuanmingyuan artist colony on the west side of Beijing, and the smaller, more experimental group of artists and musicians on the east side, which Ai Weiwei would christen the Beijing East Village. There he befriended post-punk musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, photographer RongRong, performance artists Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan, Zhu Ming, Cang Xin, and many others.
Ai Weiwei mentored emerging artists doing provocative work during this era. After the arrests of artists and the crackdown that dispersed the Beijing East Villagein mid-1994, he continued to create space for critical art through his Samizdat-style publications of the White, Gray, and Black Cover Books (1994–1997), which introduced some of the most experimental and important art and aesthetic debates of that era, injecting innovation into the art scene at a time when such art was inaccessible within China’s state-controlled media and museum systems.
Ai Weiwei’s own artwork at the time was wry and down to earth. In his Study of Perspective series (1995–2003), we see the artist’s hand in the classic gesture of defiance toward authority, giving the middle finger to symbols of state power such as Tiananmen and the White House. In the performance sequence Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), three photographs capture the irreverent smashing of an antique—or perhaps a simulacrum of an antique. For Ai, playing with questions of authenticity and authority, of who gets to say what is “real” and what is “fake,” remains an enduring preoccupation. Over the next two and a half decades, as for all Chinese artists of that era, the conscience of the angry young man Ai Weiwei—bearing witness with his presence, his camera, and his attitude—would be tested and challenged by the changing world around him.
From the early 2000s, following Beijing’s selection to host the 2008 Olympics, shifts in state cultural strategy and priorities allowed the emergence of a domestic contemporary art market and gallery scene. Chinese contemporary art had become molten hot on the international market, and many former “starving” artists who had once been critical of the Chinese government were now sporting what the Chinese call “success bellies,” boasting record-breaking auction prices and toeing the party line in their Prada shoes and Range Rovers. But unlike his peers, Ai Weiwei, when presented with such seductions, refused that Faustian bargain—to simmer down and shut up, to refrain from making overtly critical art or commentary, all in exchange for the tidy little sphere of “freedom” in which to make money. His international career flourished, and surely it would have been easy to rationalize doing what so many others had done. But Ai Weiwei didn’t. He refused to stop speaking out against corruption and absurd injustice; in short, he refused to stop being a public intellectual. In fact, he was only just getting revved up.
Although he could barely type, Ai Weiwei, recognizing social media’s potential to reach a vast public, became a prolific blogger. From 2006 to 2009, he ruminated and ranted, passing scathing judgments on pathologies of the times and unleashing his wrath on rampant injustice. He wrote about art and architecture, his past, political and social events, government policies, and more. Then, on June 1, 2009, officialdom blocked his blog. After being silenced online in China, he leapt over the “Great Fire Wall” surrounding the heavily censored Chinese intranet and hopped onto Twitter.
Ai Weiwei, Sichuan Earthquake Photo, 2008, color photograph
Ai Weiwei’s social media activities and his writings became as much a part of being an artist as they shaped his way of being a person. Alongside these writings came a flood of documentary photographs (now on Instagram). Some became memes, and many were virally shared. His YouTube channel8 shares documentary videos related to the sociopolitical issues informing many of his recent works. After his arrest, in the face of constant surveillance, he again gave authority the finger and launched WeiweiCam, putting his entire life online live, until it was shut down by officialdom forty-six hours later.
Ai Weiwei’s social conscience was not spawned overnight in the glow of the Olympics, but the 2008 games were perhaps the first in a series of critical junctures in his increasing unwillingness to be silenced. After working with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to design the Beijing National Stadium (known as the Bird’s Nest), he became an outspoken critic of theurban cleansing that had flushed the migrant laborers out of the city before the games like so much detritus—the people who had built the new Beijing and Olympic facilities. On the final day of the Olympics, Ai Weiwei posted the following message on his blog:
For a moment, forget the struggle between tyranny and civil rights; forget the extravagant dreams of referendums or citizen votes. We should struggle for and protect those most basic, miniscule bits of power that we truly cannot cast aside: freedom of speech and rule of law. Return basic rights to the people, endow society with basic dignity, and only then can we have confidence and take responsibility, and thus face our collective difficulties. Only rule of law can make the game equal, and only when it is equal can people’s participation possibly be extraordinary.9
On May 12, 2008, a 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province killed nearly 70,000 people and left almost 20,000 more missing. Millions lost their homes. A disproportionate number of schoolchildren died in the tragedy when their classrooms collapsed, crushing them to death. While the government’s rapid relief efforts were widely lauded, people wondered how so many schools could have crumbled unless substandard construction methods and materials had been used. Parents of the victims rallied for an investigation that never materialized, and some were intimidated or bribed into silence by local officials.
From Ai Weiwei, Sichuan Earthquake Photos, 2008– ; series of 16 black-and-white photographs
This tragedy was another critical juncture for Ai Weiwei and became one of the central themes in his art and activist interventions since 2008. He formed a team, including over one hundred volunteers, to carry out his “5.12 Citizens’ Investigation” in order to compile a comprehensive names list commemorating the children killed in the quake, recording their ages, birthdates, places of residence, and places of death. One resulting artwork, The Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation (2008–2011), transforms this data into an enormous, neatly typed grid of names and personal data, bringing to mind Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, DC. Ai Weiwei’s stark video 4851 (2009) is a tribute to those children his team had identified by September 2, 2009,10 as is his film Little Girl’s Cheeks (2012).11 Later, these investigations confirmed the deaths of at least 5,192 children and led to confrontations with the Chengdu police, which escalated when Ai Weiwei tried to appear as a witness at the trial of activist Tan Zuoren, who was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.12 After being beaten by police and prevented from attending the trial, Ai Weiwei suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He had just flown to Munich for an exhibition and received emergency brain surgery there.13 These events, and his related films Disturbing the Peace (2009) and So Sorry (2009), show the mounting tension between the artist and the state.14
Ai Weiwei, Snake Bag, 2008; 360 backpacks, 27.5 x 670 x 15.75 inches
In So Sorry, Ai Weiwei notes that his team and the officials refusing to cooperate during his citizens’ investigation or provide information about schoolchildren killed in the quake are actually in the same predicament. According to the artist, the officials are “stuck in a system” and doing “their duty” from within that system, while he is doing his duty from within his own belief system. “Why does power exist as a necessity in virtually any society?” Ai Weiwei asks, before concluding that “every society must have the right to monitor and restrain power.”15
Ai Weiwei, He Xie, 2010– ; 3,000 porcelain crabs, dimensions variable
Ai Weiwei, Shanghai Studio, 2011 (before demolition); color photograph
Ai Weiwei, Shanghai Studio, 2011 (after demolition); color photograph
In response to the earthquake, Ai Weiwei has also created a number of visually wrenching pieces, including Snake Ceiling (2009), made from children’s backpacks coiled along ceilings, and the audio work Remembrance (2010). He procured over two hundred tons of the steel rebar that was supposed to reinforce concrete buildings from out of the rubble of Beichuan Middle School, where so many children perished. From this found material he has created works such as the precisely carved Rebar in Marble (2012), a replica of a mangled steel rod; Forge Bed (2008–2012); and Straight (2008–2012), in which 150 tons of twisted rebar rods were restraightened and assembled to resemble a “fissure in the ground, and a gulf in values.”16
On the Chinese intranet, where sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and many others are blocked by the Great Fire Wall of China, legions of state employees are paid to police websites, identifying and deleting—a process euphemistically called “harmonizing”—content deemed inappropriate by state censors. Tech-savvy netizens find ways to scale the wall, using coded language to evade censors: usually innocuous homophones with meanings that are obviously incorrect given their context. The Chinese word for “harmonious,” he xie, is one such homophone. The word, which gained currency following the Communist Party’s 2004 self-proclaimed goal of creating a more “harmonious society,” sounds similar to the Chinese word for “river crab”; thus the river crab has become a symbol through which Chinese netizens can slyly refer to censorship while avoiding the mechanisms of silence they are critiquing.
Before Ai Weiwei had become critical of the Olympics, in early 2008 officials in Shanghai had invited him to build a studio there, only to claim later that he had no permit and suddenly demolish the space in January 2011. The artist saved the brick and cement rubble for a later artwork, Souvenir from Shanghai (2012), but first he decided to hold a river crab feast at the studio in symbolic protest. After being placed under house arrest to prevent him from attending, the artist made a series of porcelain river crabs for the work He Xie (2011). These crabs appear again in his heavy metal video Dumbass (2013).
As China scholar Geremie Barmé puts it, Ai Weiwei must have made a conscious decision to keep pushing, knowing where it would lead. He places Ai Weiwei in lineage with “a long line of modern Chinese thinkers and cultural figures whose moral outrage in the face of tyranny has taken the form of lambast, irony, or biting satire.”17
On April 3, 2011, Ai Weiwei was taken into state custody and held without being charged until June 22, 2011. Over those eighty-one days, during which the world did not know where the artist was or if he would ever be seen again, cultural and political figures such as acclaimed writer and champion of free expression Salman Rushdie rallied to his defense, calling for his release.18 Art world people organized events to draw attention to his missing status, and journalists wrote articles asking, “Where Is Ai Weiwei?”19
In 2012, after his release, Ai Weiwei was charged with a series of offenses, including tax evasion; online dissemination of pornography, based on an artwork featuring nudity; and bigamy, presumably due to having a son out of wedlock. His website contends that these charges were trumped-up “political retaliation for his outspoken criticism of the government.”20
Many new works explore Ai Weiwei’s experience of incarceration, such as his carved jade Handcuffs (2013), which references being cuffed during interrogation sessions. Some political dissidents in solitary confinement have preserved their sanity by memorizing the physical details of their cells. While Ai Weiwei was not allowed solitude during his confinement, the site of his interrogations is also imprinted on his memory and restaged as several artworks featuring his cell. The cell displayed at the 2014 exhibition Ai Weiwei: Evidence, at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, is based wholly on Ai’s memory:
The outside of the door is labeled with the numbers 1135, making it resemble a hotel room. The room itself is quite large, at 26 square meters (269 square feet), the flooring is imitation parquet and there are two damask-patterned curtains. The window, however, is high, small and barred. The walls are also covered in foam plastic, which is covered with foil. It’s a provisionary padded cell. A few openings in the coating enable a glimpse of the actual wall covering, flower-patterned wallpaper. There’s a small bathroom in the corner.21
This theme also animates the six diorama works that compose the installation S.A.C.R.E.D. (2011–2013) that premiered in conjunction with the Venice Biennale in 2013. The acronym represents the subtitles of the six dioramas—Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy, and Doubt, each one depicting harrowing experiences from his incarceration. He has also used one of the cellblocks of the historic Alcatraz penitentiary to house installations featuring the voices—reading poetry, singing, and speaking—of creatives of conscience imprisoned across the world during various periods, from contemporary Iran to apartheid-era South Africa.
As a form of personal exorcism, Ai Weiwei released a heavy metal CD in 2013 with post-punk musican Zuoxiao Zuzhou. The Divine Comedy is accompanied by videos, including Dumbass.22 It features scenes depicted in the S.A.C.R.E.D. dioramas, except here he uses the cathartic power of music to enact additional, alternate scenarios in his jail cell. Flanked by two guards as he showers, uses the toilet, eats, and sleeps, a defiant Weiwei also dances, singing roguishly as he showers, as if to taunt his captors that they can bind his wings but cannot keep his soul from flight. Ai Weiwei explains:
During my detention, the conditions were very restrictive, but the guards would often secretly ask me to sing for them. . . . I felt deeply sorry that I couldn’t do it, either I was not in the mood or I didn’t think I can sing. The only songs I knew were the revolutionary ones. It is the same for many Chinese people; we had to memorize every Red song. Creating music is a way to break through that situation.23
Likewise, in his intervention in Alcatraz’s psychiatric observation rooms, Illumination, the chants of Tibetans resisting colonial rule are paired with the singing of Hopi men, who were once imprisoned on the island for resisting colonial oppression. This work also pays tribute to the Native American Red Power occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971 and, more generally, to resistance to oppressive power everywhere.
Still under constant surveillance and no longer in possession of a valid passport, Ai Weiwei continues to live and make his work, defying attempts to intimidate him into docile silence. Using the language of art, he continues to struggle publicly for justice, making the world around him beautiful in his own sometimes small and sometimes momentous ways. For example, his #aiflowers Twitter hashtag invited people everywhere to make flowers memorializing the children killed in the earthquake.24 Since late 2013, he has left a bouquet of fresh flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his studio each morning, and plans to continue doing so until his right to travel freely is restored. The porcelain flowers making up his intervention project in Alcatraz’s Hospital cells expands on this language, using flowers as a universal symbol for both freedom and remembrance.
Ai Weiwei, Accusers, 2011–2013 (detail); fiberglass and iron, 148.5 x 78 x 60 inches; one of six dioramas from the work S.A.C.R.E.D.
Ai Weiwei, With Wind, 2014 (detail); installation: handmade kites (paper, silk, and bamboo); part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Island, 2014–2015
Indeed, many of Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz interventions explore the meaning of freedom in conditions of constraint—not unlike the experience of flying with fettered wings. His imposing piece Refraction evokes this tension, as does his With Wind installation. Flying kites was a beloved pastime for the residents of old Beijing, but kite making is now a dying craft. As evidenced by his previous collaborations with the traditional porcelain craftspeople of Jingdezhen, Ai Weiwei has an abiding interest in giving dying crafts new wings by using traditional techniques and artisans to render contemporary artworks. Kites in a prison pose the paradoxical image of the caged flight. Yet the resilience of creative dissenters throughout history suggests that no power is great enough to pin down freedom itself. As Ai Weiwei puts it: “When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight. . . .” Perhaps these kites are another embodiment of Ai Weiwei’s tenacious hope inherited from his poet father, Ai Qing, who writes in his 1979 poem “Hope”:
Dream’s friend
Illusion’s sister
Originally your shadow
Yet always in front of you
[. . .]
Like flying birds outside the window
Like floating clouds in the sky
Like butterflies by the river
She is sly and lovely
[. . .]
She is always with you
To your dying breath.25
With great fame often comes a distorted sense of self-importance, but rather than being intoxicated by fame, Ai Weiwei is intrigued by what fame can leverage. His sees through the gimcrack glitz of celebrity and finds its rituals risible, yet understands that his high profile is partly what keeps him from disappearing into the bowels of a disgruntled state apparatus—a state impatient with his public provocations. Yet instead of convincing him to pack those contentious skeletons back into tidy closets, as so many of his peers have done in exchange for the right to make money, each effort to bully Ai Weiwei into self-censorship has only amplified his sense of outrage.
Indeed, each attempt to show Ai Weiwei that he is puny and powerless before the mighty state has only crystallized the artist’s understanding of the necessity of speaking out. As Edward Said suggested, a public intellectual is “someone whose place is to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations.”26 Being a public intellectual is neither parallel to nor separate from Ai Weiwei’s practice as an artist but inextricably intertwined. For Ai Weiwei, being an artist is a way of being a person. And being a person he can face in the mirror has become synonymous with being a public intellectual.
A line from one of his father’s poems, “Living Fossil,” foreshadows the principled resistance that animates Ai Weiwei’s life’s work: “. . . any fool can see: / We cannot live unless we can move. / To live is to struggle, / to advance / We must expend our all / Before the advance of death.”27
Perhaps more unambiguously than any exhibition of his work thus far, @Large transcends both the larger-than-life myth of Ai Weiwei as art world celebrity and the poignancy of his own predicament as a critic of one of the world’s most powerful states. In doing so, this exhibition becomes something greater than simply a testament to individual will and a display of his personal struggles and achievements. Created in dialogue with the multiple histories of Alcatraz, the works in @Large are an embodiment of how Ai Weiwei’s art can speak across nations and cultures to all of us, drawing us into a conversation about resistance and persistence and, in doing so, offering visitors to this prison island a humbling, uplifting vision of the potential power of the powerless.
1. Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009, ed. and trans. Lee Ambrozy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 218. Original blog post, April 13, 2009.
2. Mark Stevens, “Is Ai Weiwei China’s Most Dangerous Man?” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2012.
3. Ulrike Knöfel, “The Unrelenting Ai Weiwei: Show Evokes Danger and Urgency of Art,” Spiegel Online International, April 2, 2014. http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/ai-weiwei-exhibition-underscores-dangers-and-importance-of-art-a-961990.html
4. For some of Ai Weiwei’s father’s critically acclaimed poetry in English translation, see Ai Qing, Selected Poems of Ai Qing, trans. Eugene Chen Eoyang (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).
5. Beige Wind, “Dispatches from Xinjiang: The Legacy of Ai Qing’s Chinese Central Asian Poetics,” Beijing Cream, November 21, 2013. http://beijingcream.com/2013/11/dfxj-the-legacy-of-ai-qings-chinese-central-asian-poetics and http://beigewind.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/a-smile-of-recognition-a-look-of-disdain-sharing-a-uyghur-frame
6. http://zocalopoets.com/category/poets-poetas/ai-qing
7. The Stars included Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, and other major artists still noteworthy today.
8. https://www.youtube.com/user/diaocha
9. Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog. Original blog post, April 13, 2009.
10. http://aiweiwei.com/projects/5-12-citizens-investigation/name-list-investigation
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. http://aiweiwei.com/documentaries/so-sorry
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/ai_weiwei/#!lb_uri=straight.php
17. Geremie Barmé, “A View on Ai Weiwei’s Exit,” The China Beat, April 27, 2011. http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=3371
18. Salman Rushdie, “Dangerous Arts,” New York Times, April 19, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/opinion/20Rushdie.html
19. Adrian Searle, “Where Is Ai Weiwei?” The Guardian, May 9, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/may/09/ai-weiwei-arrest-protest-exhibition
21. Knöfel, “The Unrelenting Ai Weiwei,” 2014.
22. http://aiweiwei.com/mixed-media/music-videos
23. http://aiweiwei.com. Posted May 22, 2013.
24. http://aiweiwei.com. Posted May 9, 2013.
25. http://zocalopoets.com/category/poets-poetas/ai-qing
26. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 11.
27. Barmé, “A View on Ai Weiwei’s Exit.”
