Ai Weiwei is a big, brawny hulk of an artist who has given his weight as 280 pounds (127kg). He has a tiger's back and a bear's waist, with a bearded face that shows he's from the north. His good-natured smile hides a certain scorn. He is not loquacious but when he speaks, his words are sharp and to the point. He has a vast knowledge of political reality in the mainland. Ai's blog was visited 3.5 million times before it was closed. It was an important sign civil society was growing in the mainland. Ai kept up his dialogue with internet users on Twitter: @aiww had 70,000 followers. Ai enlightened their civil conscience and revealed to them a dark side of one-party rule. To be photographed naked or half-naked is part of Ai's character, and a trait of his artistic career. He began to take nude pictures of himself and others in the mid-1980s, in his basement apartment and on the streets of New York's East Village. It was fun; it was a kind of catharsis, and developed into a deliberate show of scorn, a physical confrontation with state power. WHEN DISCUSSING Ai, you have to begin with his innate wildness. He was born in 1957 in Beijing. When he was two, his father, poet Ai Qing, was banished to the remote western region of Xinjiang. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Weiwei had to help his father clean public toilets every day for five years. He has claimed he did not brush his teeth before he turned 17. In 1978, Ai was accepted into the Beijing Film Academy. In 1981, he quit and flew to New York, in the United States. He enrolled in language courses in Philadelphia and California but didn't like the schools and would not graduate. Nonetheless, in 1983, Ai won a scholarship to Parsons School of Design in New York. After a year, he failed an art-history test because, it was said, he had skipped too many classes. After the school had stopped his scholarship, Ai became an illegal alien. He lived in the East Village for 10 years, along with poets and musicians, punks, Buddhists and Hindus, junkies and thieves, at the mouth of a smoking volcano, as he called it. In October 1988, I arrived in New York for the first time. Poet and painter Yan Li, a member of the Beijing artist group The Stars, took me to meet Ai. He had wild hair, a Chinese army coat and was already gaining weight. Whenever he met someone new, a shy smile creased his face. He even blushed a little. Then he would say, in the most natural voice: 'Let's get naked together! This is New York.' I had just arrived and was completely dazzled by this chaotic city. Yes, I was a rebel at heart, but I wasn't ready for a nude photo. He saw that I was bewildered, smiled his mischievous smile and said again: 'How about a picture? Let's take our clothes off together!' After hanging out with him on the streets for a while, I was quickly persuaded to do it. But then I sobered up, so to speak, and reneged. If I had had the misfortune of staying at his place for a few days, like many of my friends, I wouldn't have been able to escape his camera. When Ai felt bored, he took photos of himself in the mirror. That was the beginning of his craving for 'the naked'. But what he really enjoyed was taking the pictures in the street, where it was forbidden. He would look around for police and if they weren't watching, he pulled down his trousers, took a shot of himself, got dressed again and disappeared. In Ai's basement I saw dozens of photos of naked artists and friends, many of them pictured with Ai. The best one was from 1986: Ai and Yan in the square in front of the World Trade Centre, on what today is known as Ground Zero (see magazine cover). Two skinny naked young men laughing merrily into the camera. In May 2009, Ai told mainland magazine Southern Weekend: 'Yan Li wanted to take a photo of us there; that was too boring for me. I said let's get naked and then take a picture. He hesitated, but he felt that his figure was better than mine, so he did it. This was great. There we were in the sun, nobody else around. That was a time without emperors.' Ai's apartment was also an underground shop for second-hand cameras. He always had dozens of cameras lying around, bought on the cheap from fences and thieves. He became adept at repairing them and would sell them on. After the 1989 massacre in Beijing, I stayed in the US as a kind of literature refugee. I had an invitation from Brown University. I became a resident writer there, with a monthly stipend of US$1,500. I had won the lottery, so to speak, and Ai got wind of this. Whenever I was in Manhattan, he would want me to come to his famous basement. Once, as soon as I was inside, he led me to a bed covered with cameras and introduced me to all kinds of features on every one of them. He was determined to share my fortune and I was overwhelmed by his mer- curial effort, so I pulled out more than US$400 for one of his cameras. As soon as Ai pocketed the money, he was so happy he took me to Chinatown for dinner. The camera didn't have extra lenses, and I never used it. It got lost somewhere in those restless years. He was boundless and carefree. Those 10 years in New York were, in his own words, 'a time when I opened my eyes in the morning and didn't know what I would do the whole day'. Ai doesn't like to have conversations with serious or boring people. As soon as he encounters serious talk, he becomes uncomfortable, so he has to do something absurd, any kind of practical joke, to turn a boring situation into something funny. He has always thought there are too many serious people in this world, keeping up appearances. So he has to try to make people laugh, show them the naked truth. In the late 80s and early 90s, American beat generation writer Allen Ginsberg set up reading events with mainland poets in New York. Ginsberg organised visits to the US by several Chinese poets he called 'heretic'. They were to take part in a conference with American poets. The invited writers were Gong Liu and Li Gang, from Sichuan province, as well as Bei Dao, Jiang He, Gu Cheng and others from Beijing. Yan and I were already in New York. We had a sort of underground status in the mainland, because Public Security kept tabs on us, so we couldn't be part of any official Chinese team, but Ginsberg let us tag along. The American-Chinese poetry conference took place in a posh building in downtown Manhattan. Because they had grown up in 'the New China', the Chinese poets couldn't speak English. Ai was called in by his friend Ginsberg as interpreter. Every one of the poets, Chinese and American, sat erect around the large conference table as Ginsberg made a serious opening speech. Then came a recitation; it was Gong, reading a prepared thank you note from the National Chinese Writers' Association. And then the conference began. Every poet got his chance to say a few pleasantries to one or all of the poets from the other country. Hardly anybody understood what anybody said, but Ai started to translate everything seriously. This was during a time in the mainland when the official writers' association was very powerful. Any poet or writer who was invited abroad had to be vetted. You had a better chance of being allowed to travel if you held any kind of office in the writers' society. And if they let you go abroad, you had to remain disciplined, you could not go anywhere alone during the day and had to return to your hotel by nightfall. And once you returned to the mainland, you had to write an official report. So the Chinese poets at the conference kept very calm and chose their words very carefully. Ginsberg had eyes only for Bei. The whole conference became a dialogue between these two writers while the others made polite faces, like distant relatives at a wedding. Ai had to translate every question and answer between them. After a while he started to add some spice. When Ginsberg asked Bei about a deeper topic in his poems, Ai began to add the word 'sex' into every sentence. 'What is the deeper sexual topic in your poetry?' The Chinese poets were dumbstruck and started to whisper among themselves. Maybe this was the famous decadent spirit of the beat poet coming out into the open. Bei was embarrassed. He started to explain in Chinese: 'Sex is not the main topic, not the deeper topic in my poems ...' He had not yet finished when Ai began to translate: 'Sex is essential for poetry, everything in my poems points towards sex.' When the American poets heard this, their eyes lit up. They were all in agreement about the power of the poet and his poetry. So Ginsberg was even more interested. Now Ai didn't even have to add anything to the question: 'In what way do you let sex appear in your poetry?' The Chinese poets looked at each other. Bei finally muttered: 'My poetry ... has nothing to do with sex.' Ai kept a serious expression and translated this sentence into something completely different that made Ginsberg and the other American poets even more curious. Several of them asked him something in English. Without blinking an eye, he said in Chinese: 'The American poets would like each of you to recite two poems on the topic of sex. I will try to translate them into English.' The invented request left the Chinese side speechless. Gong and Bei went pale. But everybody in the audience was laughing. Ai had succeeded in turning a serious international conference into a travesty. Then the poets noticed what had been going on. They didn't know if they should laugh or cry. Ai was laughing out loud; he was proud to have brought about the first Chinese-American poetry sex-exchange. In the Southern Weekend interview, Ai said: 'Bei Dao was the most boring person. Sometimes he would pass by New York, then he told me he wanted to see Allen Ginsberg. So I went with him and we all had a little chat. But, [for the rest of the time,] Bei was at some American university, [as part of] his bread-winning efforts.' Every day, Ai would leave his 800 sq ft basement, for which he paid US$700 rent, and climb up to the surface world, with all its serious business, to create the excitement and adventure he craved. You'd always bump into him in the early 90s, with his typical north China face and his already chubby figure wrapped in an army coat. I suspected he wore nothing under that coat. Maybe he had picked up this habit in his youth, in the Gobi Desert. By the late 80s, Ai's rebellious character had been revealed. He was always looking for trouble. In those years, there were countless demonstrations on the streets of New York and Ai took part in every one. There were the Chinese demonstrations in 1989, but Ai also participated in demonstrations against the Gulf war (1990-1991), against police brutality and in support of homosexuals, the homeless and vagabonds. One time he was in a demonstration that left the East Village and went into Greenwich Village, where the demonstrators were not familiar with the streets. He was cornered by the police, his camera smashed and he was thrown rather far. Ai was also threatened by police with film cameras - they came very close until the lens almost touched his face. Plain-clothes policemen would walk up to him, smiling, and give him a push, or a shove. These experiences proved valuable for him in his encounters with mainland security officials. His fearlessness in his homeland comes from his experiences in New York. 'To be threatened can get you hooked,' Ai told Southern Weekend. 'When state power concentrates its affections on you, you feel important. '[Experiences in New York] made me understand the power structure; the relationship between the government, or the people in power, and the ordinary people. It is a society that propagates freedom and democracy but, actually, power is the same wherever you go. It is completely the same.' At that time, Ginsberg also lived in the East Village. He always carried a little camera, which must have been expensive, but didn't look like much. He would wander around the streets and subway stops, always taking shots. I often ran into Ginsberg in the East Village, he would always keep babbling at me while he photographed everybody; he was hooked alright. Ai and Ginsberg were very close. Ai was also close to African-Americans and street artists. He was always up for practical jokes. The famous Chinese director Feng Xiaogang was in New York in the early 90s doing a television series called Beijingers in New York. Feng wrote about his assistant director, Ai: 'He picked up two different things which had nothing to do with each other, joined them together and had them bring forth something new.' For example, he put a basketball into a bag and threw it from a tall building, just to watch people stop in their tracks and wonder what it was. Another time he bought an LP record from the Cultural Revolution: a collection of Mao Zedong's most famous essays, including, among others, the one about the old man who moved a mountain and the one on Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who became a hero in the mainland. They were recited by a China Central Television announcer with oratorical perfection. Ai found a record player and an amplifier, and treated the whole Village to an impromptu Maoist street oration. In the autumn of 2000, I was deported to the US from a Beijing prison. For the next few years, every time I set foot in the East Village, I would imagine running into Ai again, although he had returned to the mainland several years earlier. I would look for his basement on East 7th Street, between First Avenue and Second Avenue, and walk back and forth around the entrance, expecting him to come out. In my mind, he was a fixture of the place: without that guy in his Chinese army coat it just wasn't the East Village any more. AI IS AN ENERGETIC AND prolific concept artist. The word 'concept' includes for him his own concept of society, of the world in general. In his 10 years as an illegal alien in New York, he spent a lot of time in museums and galleries. He always walked everywhere, so he would pass 40 to 50 blocks walking to the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum, for example. He often talked about his enthusiasm for Andy Warhol. Ai may be one of the very few people who have thoroughly digested and understood Warhol. But he goes further than the pop-art pioneer, because he uses concepts to challenge state power. Ai remains preoccupied with the naked body. After he returned to the mainland, in 1993, his nude performance pieces gradually acquired levels of metaphor and satire. There is a famous photograph from Tiananmen Square, taken on June 4, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the massacre. With the skills he had learned in New York, Ai and his girlfriend, Lu Qing, were able to move through rows of police and plain-clothes detectives, to the middle of the square, opposite the portrait of Mao. Lu, who became Ai's wife, positioned herself in front of a fence, with Mao's face between her and another woman. Ai's camera captured the moment she raised her skirt and revealed her underwear, with one of her feet drawn up, as in a dancing pose. The challenge to the authorities is obvious when you see the picture but there's hardly anything illegal in it. The photo was published in underground art publications throughout the rest of the 90s. After 2000, in the age of the digital camera, Ai became more forthright when photographing his own body. His pictures became more vulgar, flouting aesthetic standards and feelings of shame. In September 2008, he took shots of his bulging belly and posted them on his blog. These images were meant to be shocking and make the observer reflect on ugliness. The burning cigarette in his navel certainly looked vulgar enough. But there was no hidden intention to be discerned behind the vulgarity. All you can see is a shameless ageing man, who has never changed the naughty ways that have always been natural to him. The peak of Ai's nude online presence was reached with a series of photos of himself alone or in a group, each with characteristic titles. In May 2009, Ai took five pictures. One of the pictures' titles could be translated as 'the grass mud horse blocking the centre', another one as 'flying high, don't forget to hide the central authority'. 'Hiding' and 'blocking the centre of power' are puns, because 'hiding' and 'blocking' sound like 'party' in Chinese, and 'the party centre' always means the Communist Party's Central Committee. 'Flying high, don't forget the party centre' and 'flying high, don't forget to hide the central authority' sound exactly the same (tengfei bu wang dang zhongyang; 'flying high' is a phrase often used in state propaganda to celebrate economic or political successes). The phrase 'grass mud horse' is another pun, being phonetically similar to 'f*** your mother'. Here, it could be seen that the Central Committee is being encouraged to do just that. The use of a 'grass mud horse' toy to cover your privates thus becomes an obscenity aimed at the most serious and sacred body at the centre of state power. Ai went further. He took pictures of more and more people together, all naked except for a grass mud horse. They were artists, internet users, lawyers and activists, and included Shanghai civil rights campaigner Feng Zhenghu. Ai's creative talent and his inclination to nudity reinforced each other through the use of political metaphors. On April 3, Ai was seized by security agents at Beijing airport, as he was about to board a plane to Hong Kong. After he disappeared into incarceration, internet users, including government-paid agents (the '50-cent crew') searched frantically for nude pictures of Ai. One series of images became widely known under the online moniker 'One Tiger, Eight Breasts'. Many interpretations of these images have been offered. The classic interpretation of the group image runs like this: Ai sits in command at the centre. His manner is straightforward, but almost accidentally his hands cover the vital parts, which evokes an illusion to the Central Committee. Ai's hands rest on his left knee, indicating a resolute leftist stance. The long-haired young woman on the left of the picture sits with her legs crossed on a backless chair. She symbolises the intellectual, since she has her own position and posture, but she has no backing and cannot be relied on. She's playing with her hair while her body is inclined towards the party centre, which means whatever intellectuals are playing at, they will always be dragged away by the government. The woman on the right (Ye Haiyan, an activist from Wuhan, Hubei province) has a well-rounded figure and wears a jade pendant and a watch, so she's the bourgeoisie; she has a position, which can be relied on. Her hands are kept at her right side, hinting at her rightist standpoint. In the composition of the whole picture, there is an obvious distance between the party centre and the bourgeoisie. They are on polite and formal terms. The figures of the bourgeoisie and the party centre can be seen in other pictures, with different postures, meaning they have secret dealings. The short-haired woman in the centre, sharing a seat with Ai, doesn't have her own position to sit on, so she must have been standing and smiling politely before she was pulled in and made to rest with the Central Committee. She is the media, kept in her place by the party. Finally, the girl at the back having to hide all the way behind the chairs is a migrant labourer and therefore in a classless position. It's all in the eye of the beholder, whether you see moral turpitude, a romantic situation or a tableau of political hints. This picture continues the style of Ai's other nude art projects. There is a natural and carefree attitude in the poses and expressions of the models. The pictures are not indecent - and the interpretation above does seem to be rather far-fetched, on the whole. The group picture was taken when Ye Haiyan (her name means 'sea swallow') visited Ai in his atelier last year. The other women were online fans. They had come to know about each other on Twitter. Ye was deeply impressed by Ai's documentaries from the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and also by his film on Yang Jia, who had broken into a police station and stabbed six policemen to death. Yang was sentenced to death but received a lot of public sympathy, pointing to widespread anger and frustration. After seeing those documentaries, Ye searched the web and learned about Ai's art - chairs with three legs, modified ancient tables and coffins - and found pictures of Ai and his (male) artist companions in the nude. She was impressed by his approach and took her daughter to a gathering for earthquake victims, organised by Ai and his friends. Later, Ye went with a friend to Ai's Beijing studio. The artist often invited visitors to take part in his performance pieces. When her friend suggested it, Ye agreed to do it. 'Apart from the photographer, there was no one else around,' Ye wrote in an internet posting, on April 20. 'We took our clothes off there at the atelier. It was a serious occasion for us. We felt natural, as if we were wearing clothes, but if you've never had such an experience, maybe you can't even face a human body, because you feel weak, or filthy. We were very proud when we had finished. Ai named it Open Encounter.' About the picture, she wrote: 'I don't think there is any allegory, it's very simple, just about the human body; but I don't reject any interpretations, you can try out how far your thoughts will take you.' Ai's nude projects may have some spiritual common ground with aspects of Zen and chivalry in ancient China. Some Zen monks liked to bare their chest and shed their clothes. Zen carries a tradition of seeking direct access to the heart and soul, stripping away anything else. 'See the basic nature and attain Buddha-hood' is a known phrase. There is a certain theatrical aspect in Zen Buddhism, with abrupt language and actions. Irreverence is very important. The spontaneous and carefree attitude exhibited in Ai's performances comes close to this clownish aspect of Zen. And the chivalrous tradition, originating about 2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty, stresses a few basic values, which I also see expressed in Ai's championing of basic rights. WHO IS AFRAID OF AI WEIWEI? Ai has many names. 'Wei' is a basic character, one of the 12 earthly branches used for time-keeping; commonly, 'wei' means 'not yet'. The family name Ai is also a simple character, a name Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, chose for himself at the beginning of his artistic career. To confuse government-paid internet agents, Ai has used the Chinese characters for 'ai' and 'wei' in many combinations. The most common abbreviation in roman letters is aiww, as used for his Twitter account. Who is afraid of Ai Weiwei? Well, one thing is clear: Ai himself acted as if he feared nothing and no one. Ai does not just like to get naked by himself or with friends, he has also helped to lay bare 'China', from the Central Committee to regional administrations. His approach is different from the serious mien of the traditional dissident intellectual. He has his own brand of indignation, mixed with an easy humour, to face the violence of state power. Ai knew prison was waiting for him, that he could even lose his life. 'Who says I am not afraid? I am very much afraid, but if I stop and do nothing, it would feel even more terrible,' he told me in 2009, at the opening of an exhibition of his in Munich, Germany. Ai had a bandage on his head after having had emergency surgery as a result of a beating he'd received from police in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Ai's 40-odd collaborators have a strong team spirit. In 2009, artist Yang Licai, who worked at Ai's studio, told Taiwan's China Times: 'Ai Weiwei is not just one man on a quest. There is a band of fellow Don Quixotes riding along with him, and behind every one of them is a very dedicated crew. And behind all of them are untold and unseen masses of people. They have no other common goal than to lead a decent life.' Ai has two historic achievements: he is the most well-known and internationally influential Chinese artist and he is the most well-known protester and opposition force in mainland politics. In these dark days, he has become a mythical figure, riding forth, naked on his trusted grass mud horse. Translation by Jacqueline and Martin Winter
