Ai Weiwei is a Chinese activist who uses art to enable and enhance the message he tries to convey. Detailing his life and some of his works; the film does a great job at showing the many different messages he tries to convey through his artwork and installations he creates. Ai Weiwei himself is very against the Chinese Communist Party, and many of the works and the actions he takes in the film helps to reflect that. However, the criticism he carries for the CCP leads to many different confrontations with authority, putting him at risk of jail and perhaps worse.
The film itself takes the form of a documentary on his life, going into details about his family and his upbringing, detailing all the way to modern day. The film’s main focus is on the artist himself, and how the messages he spreads can and will land him in trouble with the Chinese authorities. However, he isn’t scared of the government at all, and treats it as the act of a responsible citizen to criticize the way things are in the country, rather than becoming compliant and accepting things for how they are. One of the scenes from the film that helps to demonstrate this is when he is assaulted by local Chinese police and has to have surgery done later. He knows that filing the complaint about police abuse is pointless, but goes out of his way to try to report it to as many different government offices as he can, regardless of the outcome. One of the things that Ai Weiwei uses to an extreme extent is social media and blogs to help to spread his message and artwork. He calls social media and the communication that can come from it extremely powerful, and uses it to help educate the public on what the government is and isn’t doing, sometimes doing the same through his art. His main goal is to act within the system, but create as much tension as possible, and this is reflected in his work, such as the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project involving the children who died in an earthquake. He also is not afraid of possibly irking the public as well, such as in the case of his work that involved the destruction of historic pots and ceramics, or painting over them. In doing so, he means to convey the message that historical artifacts and art are constantly being destroyed and bring that to attention in the viewer’s mind. This is connected to the period in which he grew up during the cultural revolution, a turmoil filled period of Chinese history, where the past was deemed as not necessary for the future and historical items were destroyed.
One of the projects that Ai first starts on addresses the deaths of the students who died in an earthquake due to the shoddy construction of the schools by the Chinese government. The records of the deaths are kept as a secret from the general populace, but he decides to dedicate a year of his life to researching who died and creating a piece out of all the names of the children. The end result is a massive wall of names, similar to a memorial. One of the people who is close to Ai Weiwei stated that this is work that the government is supposed to be doing, and Ai Weiwei is doing it for them and spreading the information to the public while they do nothing. Many people including his fans have this opinion of him, and support him and his efforts. For the second anniversary of the earthquake, Ai creates a project for the names he recorded, using his reach on social media to have his fans record and send in them reading the names, as a means of remembrance. The acknowledgement and support of Ai Weiwei’s work in China could possibly prove to be dangerous, as he is seen as a political dissenter. However, the artwork and message that Ai Weiwei displays in his artwork is able to reach and affect so many people on a global scale that it ceases to matter to his fans, who are fine with risking themselves for the same cause. Another piece that is prominently displayed in the film is the sunflower seeds exhibit. In it, one of the people being interviewed stated that the piece was meant to reflect that China holds many differing and diverse opinions and thoughts, and that those people who hold those thoughts make the collective whole what it is. Its important to the entirety of the film and the message that Ai is trying to convey, that it’s the individual that helps to makes up the society, not the other way around. The piece also subtly mocks the conformity of China, and creates a piece that subtly mocks the invariability of the modern Chinese population under the CCP’s rule.
The film itself is a very interesting look into what peaceful political dissent can look like under a corrupt and authoritarian government, while also balancing it out with the life of the artist who is featured in the film. The film does a great job at showing the life of the artist, and the sacrifices he has had to make over the course of his career for something that he really cares about. One of the things I would have personally liked is more examples of some of the artworks that he has created and worked on over the years and the meaning or message behind them, as they did with the sunflower seed exhibition in the film. The film does a great job at explaining who he is, but personally I felt it could have benefited from a couple more segments showing his work and its importance. I feel that sometimes the pieces he created occasionally got put to the side to talk about Ai’s political struggles. By incorporating more art pieces into the film, they could have possibly tied Ai’s activism and artwork together stronger, and the audience could have a deeper understanding of his work and how it ties into his message and activist activities.
