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Ai Weiwei Picture by Elliott Arkin. |
纪思道 2013年01月01日
北京
中国官方尝试过授予艾未未荣誉，用显赫的地位来买通他。他们也尝试过把他投进监狱、对他进行罚款、并用棍棒狠狠地打他，以至于他需要接受紧急脑部手术。他们在绝望之中还曾恳求艾未未不要捣乱——但全都没用。
像艾未未这样有着全球大批追随者的巨星级艺术家，中共中央政治局能把他怎么样呢？他制作了一段自己戴着手铐跳《江南style》的视频，以嘲弄中国的体制，这段视频很快在YouTube上获得了100多万点击量。
当艾未未发布了自己的一张裸照，把毛绒玩具当成遮羞布，用“草泥马档中央”谐音中文里一句对中共中央的咒骂（更准确地说，是一句国骂）。而中共中央委员会又该做出何种反应呢？
比起被谴责，中国共产党更厌恶的是被嘲笑，而幽默正是艾未未攻击中共的代表性风格。其他异见人士如身在监狱的诺贝尔和平奖获得者刘晓波，写了大量有关民主的雄辩文章，却几乎没有吸引到普通的中国民众。艾未未的艺术作品对很多人来说似乎也是无法理解的，但像草泥马这样的粗俗笑话能引起更多关注——也很难被镇压。
“我觉得他们不知道怎样对付像我这样的人，”艾未未在接受采访时说。“他们好像已经放弃管我了。”
中国共产党面临的一大麻烦是，55岁的艾未未是世界上最著名的艺术家之一。他的出身也和共产党的革命战争紧密相连，其父母曾和中国新一届最高领导人习近平的父母关系友好。
作为反抗政权的标志性人物，艾未未的出现代表着中国的进步，反映出非官方的多元化正在兴起。中国越来越让我想起20世纪80年代早期的韩国和台湾，当时，受过教育的中产阶级也是这样开始一点一点地瓦解独裁政权。
艾未未承认，中国确实出现了进步，他还说，他预计中国能在2020年之前实现民主——但他悲叹现在已经太迟了。“他们已经浪费了整整一代的年轻人，”他说。
艾未未曾在纽约生活过十几年，逐渐确立了他的艺术声誉，而他的叛逆个性似乎也是在那些年中形成的。他在1993年回国，当时他36岁。最初他在政治上循规蹈矩，并参与了2008年北京奥运会宏伟的鸟巢体育场的设计。
2008年发生在西南省份四川省的大地震是让他发生改变的一个因素。当时，许多校舍倒塌，学生家长抗议建筑质量低劣，遭到了政府镇压。艾未未支持这些家长，开始要求政府更加公开。
他的对抗姿态惹怒了当局，他们殴打他，并强拆了他在上海的工作室。去年，政府又将他关押了近三个月。
当局仍禁止他出国，因此他无法出席自己正在华盛顿史密森尼博物馆体系的赫什霍恩博物馆(Hirshhorn Museum)举行的艺术展。
这种压力让艾未未比以往任何时候都更强烈地感觉到，中国最大的问题之一便是专制政府。他不但没有变得有所收敛，反而言论更加大胆。
“每一步，我都是被他们逼的，”他说。“我告诉他们，‘是你们创造了像我这样的人。’”
出狱后，艾未未曾短暂地保持低调了一段时间，但随后又恢复了他的政治恶作剧。为了监视他的举动，当局在其工作室安装了15个摄像头。为了表示对此举的嘲弄，艾未未在互联网上开设了名为“围观草场地”(weiweicam)的网站，播放从自己卧室传出的画面，这样政府就能更密切地监视他了。
“他们几乎是来求我把摄像头关了，”他咧嘴笑着说。
我和他聊了很久。交谈结束时，我问艾未未有没有其他要说的。
“中国仍然需要美国帮助，”他说，“美国要起的作用，就是坚守某种价值。这也是美国文化最重要的产物。当希拉里・克林顿(Hillary Clinton)谈到互联网自由时，我觉得真是太好了。”
这也是传递给美国人的一个信息。的确，我们有强大的军力，但导弹的“硬实力”往往不及我们的理念的“软实力”。在全世界倡导我们的价值观，不可避免地会让人指责我们虚伪、前后矛盾，但做一个前后不一致的民主与人权倡导者，总胜过始终如一地漠不关心。
我问艾未未，奥巴马总统是否做了足够的努力来提高人们对人权问题的关注。我希望白宫能听到艾未未是如何回答这个问题的。
“我不知道他们在私下做了些什么，”艾未未说，“但从表面上来看，他们做得还不够。”
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——纽约时报
Hitting China With Humor
January 01, 2013
Beijing
CHINA’S leaders have tried honoring Ai Weiwei and bribing him with the offer of high positions. They have tried jailing him, fining him and clubbing him so brutally that he needed emergency brain surgery. In desperation, they have even begged him to behave — and nothing works.
What is the Politburo to do with a superstar artist with a vast global audience like Ai (whose name is pronounced EYE Way-way), who makes a video of himself dancing “Gangnam style” with handcuffs — parodying the Chinese state — that quickly ends up with more than one million views on YouTube?
How should the Central Committee of the Communist Party react when Ai releases a nude self-portrait with a stuffed animal as a fig leaf? The caption was “grass-mud-horse in the center” — a homonym in Chinese for a vulgar curse against the Communist Party’s central leadership. Or, more precisely, against its mother.
One thing the party detests even more than being denounced is being mocked, and humor is the signature element of Ai’s assaults. Other dissidents, like the great writer Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner now in prison, write eloquently of democracy but gain little traction among ordinary Chinese: Ai’s artistic work also seems incomprehensible to many people, but obscene jokes about grass-mud-horses can get more traction — and be difficult to quash.
“I think they don’t know how to handle someone like me,” Ai said in an interview. “They kind of give up managing me.”
One challenge for the Communist Party is that Ai, 55, is one of the world’s great artists. He also comes from a family with close ties to the Communist revolution, and his mother and father were friendly with the parents of China’s new top leader, Xi Jinping.
Ai’s emergence as an icon of resistance represents progress in China, a reflection of an unofficial pluralism that is gaining ground. China increasingly reminds me of South Korea or Taiwan in the early 1980s, when an educated middle class was nibbling away at dictatorship.
There is real improvement in China, Ai acknowledges, and he says that he expects democracy to reach China by 2020 — but he laments that it is already overdue. “They have wasted a whole generation of young people,” he said.
Ai’s irreverence seems shaped by the dozen years he spent in New York City burnishing his artistic reputation. He returned to China in 1993, at the age of 36, and initially behaved himself politically and played a role in designing the magnificent Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
One factor that changed him was the terrible earthquake of 2008 in Sichuan Province in the southwest, when schools collapsed and the government clamped down on parents protesting shoddy construction. Ai backed the parents and began to demand more openness from the government.
Angered by his antagonism, the authorities had Ai beaten up and then destroyed his studio in Shanghai. Then last year the government detained him for nearly three months.
The authorities still block him from traveling abroad, so he is not able to attend a major exhibition of his work now under way at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.
The pressure left Ai feeling more strongly than ever that one of China’s biggest problems is autocratic government. He became more outspoken, not less.
“At every step, they pushed me into it,” he said. “I told them, ‘You create people like me.’ ”
After briefly lying low after his imprisonment, Ai has resumed his political pranks. Mocking the authorities for installing 15 cameras to monitor his movements, he broadcast a public “weiweicam” on the Internet with a feed from his bedroom so the government could keep an even closer eye on him.
“They almost begged me to turn it off,” he said with a grin.
At the end of a long conversation, I asked Ai if he had anything else to say.
“China still needs help from the U.S.,” he said. “To insist on certain values, that is the role of the U.S. That is the most important product of American culture. When Hillary Clinton talks about Internet freedom, I think that’s really beautiful.”
There’s a message there for Americans. We have a powerful military, yes, but the “hard power” of missiles is often exceeded by our “soft power” of ideas. Speaking up for our values around the world invariably raises questions of hypocrisy and inconsistency, but it’s better to be an inconsistent advocate of democracy and human rights than to be a consistent advocate of nothing.
I hope the White House listens to how Ai responded when I asked if President Obama was doing enough to raise human rights concerns.
“I don’t know what they’re doing under the table,” Ai said. “But on the surface, they’re not doing enough.”
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