Inspiring Change
“Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art.”
- Ai Weiwei, n.d., The Art Story Foundation
Regardless of the resistance he faced, Ai continues to use his artwork to communicate his advocacy for human and civil rights
Trace, 2014, Jan Stürmann
"The viewer was confronted with a field of colorful images laid out flat across the expanse of the floor: portraits of 176 people from around the world who have been imprisoned or exiled because of their beliefs or affiliations, most of whom were still incarcerated at the time the artwork was made. Ai Weiwei has called them 'heroes of our time.'
If the sheer number of individuals represented is overwhelming, the impression is compounded by the intricacy of the work’s construction: each image was built by hand from LEGO bricks...Assembling a multitude of small parts into a vast and complex whole, the work may have brought to mind the relationship between the individual and the collective, a central dynamic in any society and a particularly charged one in contemporary China."
- Excerpt from "@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz", n.d., FOR-SITE Foundation
"Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s interest in studying human rights around the world led to his meeting with relatives of the 43 college students who disappeared in southern Mexico in 2014. That encounter led, in turn, to his new exhibit in Mexico’s capital. The 43 Mexican students disappeared Sept. 14, 2014, in the Guerrero city of Iguala after local police allegedly turned them over to a local drug gang. The federal government maintained the gang killed the students and burned their bodies at a garbage dump. But international experts raised doubts about that scenario and Mexico’s new administration has created a commission to re-investigate.
“This is an example of the very interesting conversation that exists today between the aesthetic and the political...The human rights crisis in Mexico has become a global topic in a radical way, so that we can’t pretend anymore that the disappearance of dozens or thousands of people or the deaths of more than 200,000 in recent years are secondary.'”
-Berenice Bautista, senior editor for the Associated Press, "Ai Weiwei Remembers Disappearance of 43 Mexican Students"
"People stand under the portraits of 43 college students who went missing in 2014 in an apparent massacre, by Chinese concept artist and government critic Ai Weiwei at the Contemporary Art University Museum (MUAC ) in Mexico City", April 13, 2019, Claudio Cruz
REFUGEE CRISIS
"Ai Weiwei Creates Art Installation From Refugee Life Vests", 2016, Clemens Bilan
"21st Biennale of Sydney Media Preview", 2018, Mark Kolbe
"Ai Weiwei’s “Laundromat” is an installation consisting of 2,046 items of clothing abandoned by refugees who were forcibly evacuated from Lesbos, a Greek island.", n.d., New York Times
"When the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei moved from Beijing to Berlin in 2015, he vowed to steer away from what had been the primary focus of his creative practice until then: China...In the two and a half years since, Mr. Ai has found an acutely challenging topic to take on: the global refugee crisis — sparked by the civil war in Syria and the migration of more than 5.4 million of its people... In an email interview with Mr. Ai, who replied from Berlin, he recalled that when he arrived in Berlin in 2015, he saw many refugees and decided to make a short trip to Lesbos to meet some of the men, women and children who were making the perilous Mediterranean crossing in the hopes of resettling in continental Europe...'I saw the ordeal they went through, and how Europe hesitated and neglected to act,' Mr. Ai said. 'That moment felt like being struck by a moving vehicle: It destroyed my belief in the establishment.'..."
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Farah Nayeri, author of
Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age,
2018, "Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Project Moves to Qatar"
