Arguably,
Ai Weiwei is the single most important artist of our time. One might expect the Chinese government to
take pride in his international preeminence, but instead they are threatening
him with specious bigamy and pornography indictments. While best known for his architecture and
large scale installations, he is also a filmmaker—and rather a muckraking one
at that. Indeed, it is easy to
understand the Communist regime’s relentless campaign against Teacher Ai after
viewing his fearless documentary investigations of the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake. Defiantly exposing the
hypocrisies of the Chinese justice system, Ai Weiwei’s Disturbing the Peace and So
Sorry will screen as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’
enormously timely retrospective, now underway in San Francisco.
Still
prohibited from traveling, the artist will not be present for these
screenings. The series includes several
of Ai’s films recording his ambitious artistic projects that are surely well
worth your time and attention. However, Disturbing and Sorry are particularly relevant to the legal purgatory he now finds
himself in. Following the 2008 quake,
Teacher Ai and his assistants launched a campaign to tabulate an accurate death
toll of the students killed by shoddy so-called “tofu” school construction and
record each name. Yet, every time they
asked the authorities for fatality statistics, they were branded American or
Japanese spies.
While
both Sichuan documentaries cover overlapping events, Disturbing concentrates on Teacher Ai’s direct challenges to the
government authorities. As the film
opens, Ai has returned to Chengdu to appear as a witness at the trial of Tan
Zuoren, an independent researcher also investigating the Sichuan
earthquake. Denied his day in court, Ai
and his party are rousted and detained by the police at three in morning. Teacher Ai is physically assaulted and one of
his assistants is ominously whisked away, without any pretense of due process.
Ai
subsequently returns with the woman’s husband and Tan’s fearless attorney Pu
Zhiqiang to demand answers. Finally
jumping through enough hoops to meet face-to-face with a reasonably high-ranking
bureaucrat, Ai makes it plain they will not leave until they receive a
satisfactory accounting. Frankly, the
meets gets rather ugly, with Ai dropping f-bombs and openly questioning the
integrity of the man across from him. He
had a right to be irritable though, having not eaten for hours on end, as the apparatchiks
stalled and dissembled. Clearly, Ai and
his colleagues believe the only hope they have of securing her release depends
on them staying in that conference and in the authorities’ faces. From what viewers see, they do not seem far
wrong in their judgment.
So Sorry also covers the
Sichuan earthquake and the scandalous aftermath, but the focus is slightly
different. We see more of the
investigation itself and hear from some of the devastated parents, whose grief
is compounded by China’s One Child policy.
While Ai again confronts agents of the state not so subtly surveilling
him, the grim drama in Sorry centers
around Ai’s cerebral hemorrhage resulting from the Chengdu attack, coming while
he is in the midst of preparing a major exhibition in Germany.
Not
surprisingly, Alison Klayman’s forthcoming documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry draws heavily on Ai’s Sichuan films. However, if you have only seen the excerpts,
you haven’t seen the half of it. Disturbing the Peace is particularly
staggering, as Ai “talks truth to power” in a way officialdom is most
definitely not accustomed to. Especially
telling is the way he needles them with the Party’s own rhetoric. It is also chilling to witness, knowing how
dearly he will pay for his boldness.
It
is hard to think of two braver, more revealing documentaries than Ai’s Sichuan
films. They are literally video
dispatches from an Orwellian police state.
Viewed together, the two films conclusively establish tens of thousands
of young lives were needless lost and those who ask questions will find
themselves in serious jeopardy. One
would hardly expect them to meet with the Party’s approval, but they make it
easy to understand why so many everyday Chinese citizens have rallied to
support Teacher Wei during his Kafkaesque ordeal.