[Character Search] Ai Wei Wei's Life and Philosophy of Work
“I myself am an international issue. My life, my situation, is part of the global problem.”
According to Chinese author Ai Wei wei (64). Since the 1990s, he has published various works on the subject of freedom of expression and refugee life, and has always been in conflict with the government of his home country. Arrest, house arrest, and arrest were routine. he is someone When environmental activist Tan Zhuoren was tried in Chengdu for remarks related to the 2009 Sichuan earthquake, he ran to Chengdu and was taken away by the police at 5 a.m., but he took a 'selfie' piece ('light') in a narrow elevator and got the world's attention. . It is far from an artist who is stuck in the studio and only creates. He actively participates in interviews with the world's media as he lacks social media such as blogs, Twitter, and YouTube. In other words, the author who put everything on 'freedom of expression', he is Ai Weiwei.
Ai Weiwei's childhood
In fact, before he was an artist, he was known to the world as the son of the famous Chinese poet Ai Qing.
His father, Ai-qing, who was a poet and oriental painter, was blacklisted by the Mao Zedong regime, which was established after the People's Republic of China in 1949, for being a 'right-wing intellectual'. exiled together
Not only that, he carries stones from the construction site every day and night there, and is ridiculed and humiliated by the Red Guards just because he is an anti-government person. After Mao Zedong's death and his power weakened, his arduous exile ended and he returned to the literary world to continue his creative activities. However, his health deteriorated considerably and he was eventually admitted to a hospital in Beijing in 1996. will end one's life
Ai Weiwei, who was a child at the time, lived a nomadic life with his family in a distant and distant land, and watched all the humiliation his father suffered. Due to that influence, he also decided to live a life as an artist, and since then he has continuously presented works that criticize the current issues of the Chinese government.
When Ai Weiwei became known to the world
There is a decisive opportunity to publicize him to the world. In 2009, the great earthquake in Sichuan Province, which killed 4,851 young lives, caused the world to be grieved, and what was wrong with this incident? Feeling Ai Weiwei, he discovers that many more innocent lives have been sacrificed due to the poor construction of a school. And shortly thereafter, he found the rebar stolen from the construction site by inquiring with his colleagues, and with <Straight>, a media work on the same theme as an installation made of about 90 tons of rebar, a sad heart to commemorate the innocent lives that were sacrificed. presented through an exhibition.
Furthermore, together with his students, he will produce a documentary that captures the process of digging up the cause of the incident, and through this, he discovers the hidden secrets of the government one by one.
Of course, through this exhibition, he established himself as a world-class artist, but at the same time, he was placed on the government's blacklist and under full surveillance. After being demolished and imprisoned, he was officially banned from collaborating with his students.
Chinese government pressure
These pressures continue to this day. In front of his Beijing studio, 12 CCTVs of the same type are installed, monitoring his every move 24 hours a day. However, Ai Weiwei did not give in to this, and in his first solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in England after his imprisonment, he reproduces his prison life, which was a horror itself.
Indeed, one day he was imprisoned without anyone, even his family, being interrogated for a long time every day. In the exhibition held immediately after his release, he presented sculptures of a surveillance camera made of marble, showing signs of China's control and pressure on him. It was openly exposed.
Tate Modern Sunflower Seed Exhibition
As time passed, Ai Weiwei, who was well over 50 years old, visited an area called Jingdezhen (景德镇), where he used to make porcelain for the former imperial family, to produce works for the Tate Modern, and sent model sunflower seeds to more than 1,500 simple laborers. commission the work
The bright workers who do not know English successfully produce 100 million sunflower seeds over two years with the hope that they can avoid bankruptcy. Actually, this 'sunflower seed' is not only a snack enjoyed by Chinese people, but also has another symbolic meaning. , the Chinese people are often represented by sunflowers and their seeds who look up to him.
Ai Weiwei took advantage of this and tried to publicize the political repression that has been passed down from the old Chinese government through this exhibition through her own metaphorical method.
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art <I Weiway: The Future of Humanity> Exhibition
A world-famous artist, film director, architect, and activist, his solo exhibition 'I Wayway: Human Future' opened at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul on the 11th. Although he was widely known as an artist, there were not many opportunities to see his work in Korea. The 126 pieces to be exhibited this time show his aspect widely in Korea for the first time. We looked into the reasons why he became an uncomfortable writer for the Chinese authorities and what made him the most influential writer in the world with five keywords.
1). work without boundaries
The true identity of the man he met in the exhibition is a heretic who travels all over the East and West. He freely crosses genres such as painting, photography, video, architecture, installation, ceramics, and publication. He worked with world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron to design the stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he recruited volunteers online and formed a citizen investigation team to record the total number of casualties and names of victims. He made a new adaptation of Puccini's opera 'Turandot' (scheduled to perform next year) in Rome last year. In this exhibition, three documentaries including 'Coronation', which were produced based on the Wuhan Corona situation, will be presented. As for the reason for making the documentary, he said, “There is nothing else. I want to leave a testimony in history.” National boundaries don't mean much to him. In a written interview with Korean reporters prior to this exhibition, he said, “I live in Portugal now, and I recently went to Italy. I often go to England and Germany for work. I am a wanderer,” he said.
2). Freedom of expression
It is impossible to discuss him without the project photo series 'Perspective Study', which he continued from 1995 to 2017. It is a work that has been continued in front of historical monuments around the world, including the White House, after announcing the act of showing the middle finger as a photograph in front of Tiananmen Square. In a written interview, he criticized, "Under China's National Security Law, cultural institutions under the Hong Kong government cannot have an independent voice."
3). cultural revolution
He was born in Beijing in 1957. His father, Ai Ching, was a famous poet. During the Cultural Revolution, his father went downstairs (a political movement that sent urban youth and intellectuals to the countryside) and he grew up in the western Xinjiang region. In an interview with The New York Times in December of last year, "His father was forbidden to read and write at the time. Owning a book could seem counter-revolutionary and anti-communism, so I had to burn both poetry and novels. made it,” he said.
4). provocative tradition
After moving to New York in 1981, he met the works of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol and established his own perspective on contemporary art. He has no boundaries between tradition and modernity. He boldly combined contemporary art with Murano glass crafts in Venice and the blue and white porcelain technique of Jingdezhen (景德鎭), a Chinese porcelain producing region, while he created a large zodiac head painting out of Lego blocks.
The 3.1m-high 'Refugee Motif Porcelain Pole' presented in this exhibition delicately depicts modern refugees floating in the sea on a sculpture boat. It is his own way of provocatively raising contemporary social issues while using traditional media. The 'black chandelier' made with the glass craft technique is also worth noting. He explained, “This work was made with a human skull and human skeleton,” and “It depicts humanity in the dark facing death.”
5) Refugees and Human Rights
There is also a persistent interest in refugees and human rights. 'Laundry Room' is a work that fills an exhibition hall with clothes and shoes of refugees collected in a refugee camp on the Greek-Macedonian border in 2016. At the time, when the Greek government moved the refugees, he moved the leftovers from the camp to Berlin to launder it and catalog it. He also created the installation 'Life Jacket Snake' by connecting 140 life jackets left by refugees on the island of Lesbos.
This journey shows Ai Weiwei's artistic view. In a written interview, he said, "Art comes from problems and contradictions and is an effective way to deal with them," he said.
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