In the magazine this week, I write about Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist who has acquired an additional and improbable role as one of China’s boldest political activists. (Subscribers can read the full text; others can buy access to the issue via the digital edition.) His cultural and political footprint is unique in a country where people generally face a choice between thriving within the confines of the system or shouting from the shadows outside it. For the moment, he is attempting to do both, and nobody is at all sure where that leads. As Chen Danqing, a fellow artist, puts it: “He is doing something more interesting, more ambiguous…. He wants to see how far an individual’s power can go.”
Ai Weiwei is an evangelical believer in transparency: He chronicles his own life online and on film and, in particular, he has taken to documenting his interactions with officialdom with blunt precision. Alison Klayman, a Beijing-based filmmaker, has been following Ai for months, both at Ai’s studio in Beijing and on his constant travels. (Her documentary about Ai’s life and work is scheduled for release next year.) As depicted in this video, and explored in the magazine, Ai visited a police station in April in order to file an official complaint about being beaten by local police last year. The police officers he encounters become the unwitting participants in a work of art that is Ai’s life itself.
