In a 30-year career he has combined, often at calculated personal risk, both aspects of his persona to create a role as an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, delivering his most stingingBuy nike running shoes online rebukes from within China itself. In light of his arrest and detainment, however, his ability to sustain this role, in China at least, would seem to be in serious doubt.
From a Western perspective, Mr. Ai’s career fits a familiar profile. We tend to like our contemporary Chinese artists to come across as aesthetic tradition-busters. (This is one reason that Pop-style Mao paintings by the likes of Wang Guangyi remain big-selling auction items.) In this regard Mr. Ai has not disappointed. In the 1990s he painted Coca-Cola logos on ancient Chinese pots, broke up classical Chinese furniture and photographed himself making a single-digit rude gesture in front of the White House, the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square.
But gradually such Duchampian moves have given way to large-scale, socially critical projects. For a conceptual piece called “Fairytale” at the 2007 Documenta in Kassel, Germany, he placed 1,001 antique Chinese chairs, available for use, throughout the exhibition. He built an outdoor structure from 1,001 doors salvaged from Ming and Qing houses that had been eliminated by rampant development in Chinese cities. Through the Internet he recruited 1,001 Chinese citizen-volunteers to come to Kassel to live for the duration of the show.
In short, he brought a sense of China that was at once inviting, puzzling and pathetic. The chairs were nice to sit in. It was hard to know what to make of the mini-army of temporary residents, who seemed equally uncertain of why they were there. The structure built from old doors finally just collapsed. Over all, “Fairytale” was not a winning picture of his homeland.
Politically, he was coming to be known to the Chinese authorities as a loose cannon with a suspect history: a late-1970s free-speech agitator, later a member of renegade art movements,Fivefingers Kso-Vibram fivefingers Kso online and a full-time resident of New York from 1981 to 1993. But as an international celebrity he was still a feather in China’s cap at a time when the country was making an all-out effort to become a major cultural presence prior to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
With this in mind the Chinese government asked Mr. Ai to collaborate with the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron on the design for the Olympic stadium, known the Bird’s Nest. He did so. The result was a triumph.
Then something startling happened: He denounced the Olympics as a feel-good whitewash on China’s repressive, market-hungry government. And after the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, which killed thousands of children who were crushed when their shoddily built schools collapsed, he became an intrepid antiestablishment activist.
As China’s official news channels broadcast upbeat videos of earthquake rescue operations, Mr. Ai was in Sichuan making his own films of the destruction, talking with distraught parents of dead or missing children and using his widely read daily blog to accuse the Sichuan officials of financial corruption that resulted in structurally faulty schools. His accusations of a cover-up extended to the highest levels in Beijing.
To anyone familiar with China’s hardball official politics, Mr. Ai’s aggressive words sounded suicidally aggressive and the silence from the government in Beijing was perplexing. But at this juncture,Buy nike cheap mens acg sandals black both parties were almost ceremonially enacting ancient roles. In Chinese culture, going back to Confucius, there has been a tradition of individual scholars and intellectuals denouncing rulers for wrongdoing that was bringing disharmony to society, and particularly if that wrongdoing was injurious to innocence.
Examples of such face-offs recur in traditional literature and painting. And often, but not always, the self-sacrificing honesty of the accuser has rendered him immune to retaliation.
From the beginning of the intervention in Libya the encouragement of defections has played an absolutely central role. nike running shoes online Indeed it has been the constant refrain of prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers as they sought to explain how they thought the coalition would achieve its aims in north Africa. Libyan civilians of course had to be protected from attack. But otherwise the military measures, the economic sanctions and even the threat of international legal proceedings were not ends in themselves.
They were instead means, as William Hague, Hillary Clinton, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama repeatedly made clear, to signal to Libyan soldiers, civil servants and high functionaries that the regime had no future – and nor would they, if they stuck with it. The important thing was to peel away from the Gaddafis the supporters without whom they could not maintain their rule. The defection of the Benghazi garrison in the early days of the protests brought about the swift collapse of the Gaddafi government's authority in the east, while the resignations and declarations of many Libyan diplomats undermined what little was left of the regime's legitimacy abroad. Defections were the way to go, and the prospect of more was relished.
When it was a matter of barely known military officers changing sides, or western-educated diplomats whose unease at representing the regime had long been noted, or even of Gaddafi ministers migrating to the Benghazi camp in Libya itself, all was grist to the mill. But there was a contradiction looming. When defection is vital to success,cheap nike mens acg sandals 2011 can amnesty be far away? This is the problem dramatised by the defection of Moussa Koussa to Britain this week. Koussa has both harmed and helped Britain in the past, with the emphasis in recent years more on the latter than the former. And, with his knowledge of the workings of the Gaddafi inner circle, he can still help us now by pinpointing its weaknesses and identifying other figures who might come over soon.
Some are demanding he be put on trial if evidence emerges of responsibility for attacks on western targets. But it would be amazing, whatever David Cameron says in public, if Koussa had not been given assurances about his own future. And it would be foolish not to listen to what other Gaddafi associates who come to Britain have to say.
One does not have to look far in regional history for examples of the practical taking precedence over the ideal. General Eisenhower confirmed the Vichy Admiral Darlan as chief in north Africa in order to secure the allegiance of Vichy army units. Later the second world war allies installed Field Marshal Badoglio, a general who had fought in Libya but abandoned Mussolini, as head of an interim Italian government.
The short history of the international criminal court, which has since earlier this month been investigating the possibility of charging members of the Gaddafi regime with war crimes, shows that an indictment can have the effect of isolating a head of state, as it did in the case of Slobodan Miloševic. The wider the criminal net is cast, however, the more it may stiffen rather than undermine a faltering regime. There is sometimes, in other words, a choice to be made between absolute justice and bringing a desperate and dangerous phase in a nation's affairs to an end.
Ultimately the decisions about who should be punished, who pardoned, and who allowed, in spite of past sins, to continue to play a part in Libya's political life, should be made by Libyans themselves.Buy nike cheap mens acg sandals But the coalition has for the moment the responsibility of measuring how high a price we should pay for the defections we encourage. The line should surely be drawn at the ruling family itself. How much wider it should go is a hard question. But there may be some unpalatable compromises ahead.