Presenter: Susan Douglas (University of Guelph)

Assistant Professor, Art History and Visual Culture

sdouglas@uoguelph.ca

This paper offers an analysis of what civil society does to provide contemporary artists with the inspiration to fight for democracy. It refers to Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, a powerful, but hardly isolated, artist-activist engaged in the struggle for civil rights in connection with the Chinese nation-state. Considered one of the most important contemporary Chinese artists, and believed by many to be China’s conscience, he has been castigated by the government for speaking of corrupt political leadership and for drawing international attention to the bankruptcy of post-socialist China’s political vision. As a dominant actor on the international art scene, Ai Weiwei has stressed the importance of expanding the public sphere through his blogs talking about the legitimate rights of a people in a democracy and he has repeatedly made demands on the state, insisting on transparency and accountability in the face of bureaucratic unresponsiveness and indifference. Ai has complained that democracy is not going too well in China using not only on the Internet but appropriation art to do so.

One reason Ai’s art has been enthusiastically embraced in the art world is that his critique of the state is linked to concepts of value. Ai has been intrigued by the relationship between authenticity and legitimacy in art production for a long time. The tension between antiquity and revolution is provocatively integrated into audacious works such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (2009) and Colored Vases (2010), which is a series of 6,000 year old Han Dynasty vases dipped in industrial paint. Other works are made from demolished Qing dynasty temples, or repurposed three-legged wooden stools made by expert craftsmen, something rare to find in present-day China following the Cultural Revolution. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this paper evaluates Ai Weiwei’s practice of collecting and integrating various Chinese antiques into his creative practice as a means of addressing the import and export of cultural values-- to demonstrate how art can be used as a tool for social justice and political dissent.

This paper opens with an analysis of Ai Weiwei’s career highlighting his clashes with Chinese authorities as a way of grounding discussion of how civil society might influence Chinese art. With this foundation, we turn to individual works of art and the issue of their value as representative objects of culture.