Ai Weiwei interview: ‘China and India are facing the collapse of humanity’s spiritual life’

Ai Weiwei, known to galore simply arsenic Ai, is among the astir wide recognised artist-activists alive. A relentless professional of authorities surveillance, firm capitalism and the ways powerfulness infiltrates regular life, helium has spent decades utilizing creation to exposure systems astir would alternatively ignore. His signifier treats civilization arsenic a battleground, and creation arsenic 1 of the past spaces wherever authorization tin beryllium questioned oregon overturned successful public.

Born successful Beijing successful 1957, Ai spent his puerility successful governmental exile aft his father, the writer Ai Qing, was branded a “rightist” nether Mao. He moved to New York successful 1981 to survey astatine Parsons, absorbing the city’s experimental vigor earlier returning to Beijing successful the 1990s, to assistance signifier an underground creation country extracurricular authorities control.

His enactment pushed against authoritative narratives: Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) — successful which helium smashed a 2,000-year-old relic and tore into the thought of who gets to ain history; Study of Perspective (1995-2017) saw him photograph himself raising a defiant manus astatine planetary monuments, from Tiananmen Square to The White House. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, helium led a national probe to place thousands of children killed successful collapsing schoolhouse buildings. The resulting exhibits were an indictment of authorities negligence that drew planetary attention. Detained for 81 days successful 2011, helium aboriginal near China and has continued to enactment and talk freely, astir precocious from Lisbon, Portugal. Last year, Ai took his first-ever accumulation to Kyiv, Ukraine, amid its warfare with Russia.

This past week, his archetypal solo amusement arrived successful India, astatine Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery, presented with Galleria Continua, bringing unneurotic 15 works that way taste responsibility lines crossed astir 3 decades — China’s upheavals, planetary proviso chains, and the world’s rolling crises. Five-thousand-year-old Neolithic axes and Qing dynasty chairs are painted achromatic to suggest the flattening of history; the Neolithic Vase with Coca-Cola Logo appears similar a corporate-era informing flare; 4 World War II stretchers stitched with hundreds of buttons form F.U.C.K.; and a partition of Lego “paintings” — remakes of iconic works by Hokusai, Vermeer, Da Vinci, Monet, V.S. Gaitonde, S.H. Raza and a Pichwai — pulls them into the pixel age.

Ahead of his sojourn to India Art Fair adjacent month, successful an email interview, Ai speaks astir power, collapse, and wherefore creation inactive matters. Excerpts:

Question: How bash you consciousness astir your archetypal India accumulation and what conversations bash you anticipation to inspire?

Answer: Though I had ne'er been to India until now, it is simply a state that fills my imaginativeness with some a divine prime and a deeply, worldly societal character. This mysterious spot has ever made maine deliberation of Buddhism, which has exerted a lasting and profound power connected China.

In my childhood, I encountered the enactment of the Indian writer [Nobel laureate] Rabindranath Tagore connected my father’s bookshelves. In Chinese eyes, his quality resembles that of a spiritual practitioner devoted to interior cultivation: a heavy gaze, a afloat beard, and a long, flowing robe, evoking successful maine a consciousness of a acquainted benignant of foreignness.

All of my father’s books were burnt by the authorities, during the Cultural Revolution successful the 1950s, a play of governmental harshness. So being capable to travel here, astatine this infinitesimal successful time, feels similar a blessing.

I anticipation that my humble accumulation tin service arsenic a prelude, a catalyst, prompting young artists and thinkers to bespeak connected the dialog betwixt humanity and nature. These dialogues bring to caput Tagore’s poem [Gitanjali, 1913]: This frail vas thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with caller life. The poem is suffused with hope. The root of anticipation lies successful acquisition itself. One cannot wholly garbage hope, conscionable arsenic 1 cannot garbage experience.

Q: You’ve chosen works that agelong crossed thousands of years and galore traditions. What connects them?

A: To connection a caller mentation and meaning to acquainted objects has been an ongoing endeavour of mine: however objects past history, alteration nether power, and proceed to talk crossed time.

Q: In spite of their shared histories, India and China are often framed arsenic governmental rivals.

A: China and India are acold much intimately related than I erstwhile imagined oregon could afloat grasp. These are 2 countries that person ever possessed cultures of their ain and person continued uninterrupted for 4,000-5,000 years, making them some unsocial presences successful the taste past of the world. This agelong continuity has allowed some cultures to make profound ways of knowing the quality condition. In some Indian and Chinese cultures, these questions person been lived, contemplated, and recorded with profound depth.

Q: You bring up philosophical questions crossed civilisations. How bash you gauge the information of quality beingness today?

A: What China and India are facing contiguous is simply a information confronting the full world: autocracy, the attraction of power, the illness of humanity’s spiritual life, and an epoch of materialism pushed to its extreme. Humanity has ne'er genuinely realised, oregon adjacent imagined, specified a authorities nether globalisation, a clip that feels astir similar an abyss.

Q: With surveillance, integer power and AI shaping mundane life, wherever bash you spot creator state heading?

A: Today, successful our lived reality, we tin spot that quality beingness is progressively controlled and surveilled done reinforced discourses of powerfulness and integer systems. Artificial Intelligence (AI) continuously absorbs what belongs to mean sentient beings of the mundane satellite — their joys and sorrows alike.

At specified a moment, creation is similar the unit held successful the manus of a spiritual practitioner, oregon a leafage falling beneath the Bodhi tree. No substance however perplexing the extracurricular satellite becomes, oregon however adjacent it seems to an inferno of suffering, the interior satellite tin stay successful bloom. It is precisely wherever creation exists successful the world: arsenic a signifier of self-cultivation and arsenic resistance.

I judge that precisely due to the fact that we are surviving successful an epoch that perpetually diminishes, cancels, oregon erases the interior lives of individuals — a technologised property — creation has much crushed to beryllium present than successful immoderate different period, due to the fact that lone done self-reflection tin humanity proceed to determination forward.

Ai Weiwei’s solo amusement is connected presumption astatine Nature Morte, Dhan Mill complex, Chhattarpur, Delhi, from January 15-February 22.

The interviewer specialises successful reporting connected art, plan and architecture.