狄雨霏 2014年01月13日
Adam Dean for The New York Times
艾未未在自行车篮里摆放花束，以此抗议政府禁止他出国旅行。
上周，我们讲述了艺术家和异见人士艾未未是如何抗议中国政府对其护照的没收：他在自行车篮里放上鲜花，然后把车停在自己位于北京的工作室外。现在，艾未未在采访中讲述了被困在自己热爱的国家，但却不能离开的感觉。
他担心自己的艺术会受到影响。他说，如果他能到现场策展，就会给将于4月在布鲁克林举办的展览（此次展览是对赫什霍恩博物馆[Hirshhorn Museum]展览的重现，名为“艾未未：凭什么”？）和将于9月在加利福尼亚阿尔卡特拉斯(Alcatraz)举办的展览带来助益。但是，为了对自己自由受限的处境表示反抗，他还在继续筹划在柏林开办工作室一事，他说，至少这样可以表明自己希望某天能在中国之外继续工作。
2011年4月，艾未未被拘捕，在狱中度过了81天。现在他可以在北京自由活动了，但是他说，“我每次外出，都要告诉他们我要去哪儿。”
以下内容节选自对艾未未的采访。采访于某天上午在他的工作室里进行；此前，他再次把鲜花放进了自行车篮里。自11月30日以来，他每天如此。艾未未花一些时间展示了自己收藏的中国和西藏古老的纤维织物。采访结束后，他提到了这些织物，讲到了它们的美和历史，以及它们如何表达了艺术的重要内容。
问：为什么你会在每天早上9点把鲜花摆出去？
答：9点是我开始工作的时间。我把花放到篮子里，拍几张照，然后传到网上。
问：为什么选择花？
答：我认为花是最通俗的语言。首先，花与生活有关。而且我用的是鲜花。每天都换新的。在这种寒冷的天气，它们或许只能维持一天。
问：它们有什么含义？
答：他们是我的一件艺术品，和我的生活有非常强烈的联系。从2011年4月3日我被带走，关在一个秘密地点，直到今天，我都没有护照。我被关了81天，当6月22日我被放出来时，他们说我必须度过一年的保释期。从那时起，每次我问起护照的问题，他们都说会把护照还给我。但是他们根本没还给我，现在已将近三年。今天是我失去护照的第1001天。我不知道这还要持续多久。再来个1000天？甚至几千天？这都有可能。
所以这是一个原因，但不是所有原因。这是一个宣称有法治的社会。我们有宪法、刑法，各种法律。当一个政府像这样强行把一个人关起来时，他们的所作所为就是非法的，至少违背了法律精神。你没有权利对一个人的生活地点，他们旅行的能力进行限制。当我下火车的时候，会有人给我拍照。我去酒店时他们也跟着。
问：这种情况产生了何种深刻的感觉？
答：我们在这个国家最主要的担忧是，我们总是只能看到发生的事，但永远不会知道原因。那辆自行车属于一名德国年轻人，他被抓了，但并没有经过正式的程序。我记得他被关了10个月以上。他当时为一家德国艺术品运输公司工作，德国政府花了很大气力争取让他出来。他现在已经自由，回到了德国。在他离开之前，他把自行车交给一位德国记者，说他想把它给我。于是，我突然就有了这辆车，我知道他受到了极其恶劣的对待。他没做错什么，他们却把他关了这么长时间。政府说他走私，但真正的原因是，官员们想开一个免税艺术区，接手他的生意。那时我自己也刚出来，我就想我该怎么处理这辆车呢？然后我就买了一把很结实的锁，把它跟我大门外的一棵树锁在一起。这种自行车你在世界任何地方都能看到。有时这些车会被弃置；在纽约总能看到这样的。在中国，车主人可能是被政府带走或出什么事了，因此，这很有象征意义。所以，我决定在里面放花，每天都放，直到拿回我的护照。
问：不知道什么时候能拿回护照，这种感觉是不是不好受？
答：这在中国文化里很正常。例如，我们不知道什么时候能投票。60年过去了，我们还是没看到。政府说，看，中国人素质太低，还没准备好，10年或15年后，会好一点。所以我们永远不知道会怎样，每个人都这么活着。怎么说呢？有人说，生活就是日复一日，每个人的生活都一样，但是，当你开始在意那些在5・12四川地震中死去的孩子，当你找到了他们每个人的名字、生日、父母是谁，我觉得，从那一刻起，我们就不能光数数了，我们必须记住每一个鲜活的生命。我可以每天买一束鲜花提醒大家，我们会失去自由，这种可能性是存在的，这种事就发生在我们中间。
问：如果你现在有护照，你打算去哪？
答：我被带走的那一天，他们给我的头上套了一个黑色的罩子，把我带到了一个秘密地点。我当时就想，我怎么那么笨呢？我本可以有一本美国护照的。我在美国生活了12年。但出来后，我倒不急着走了。我觉得自己在这里有很多事要做。我有很多朋友。我的家人在这里。我甚至想，你把护照还给我的那一天，我可能会当着你的面把它撕了。你不能把它拿走。选择权在我，而不在你。
我4月份在布鲁克林有一个展览。我在纽约生活过，当然想去那儿。这是我生命中非常重要的一个地方。我希望能让它很出色，希望能和观众互动。9月，我在加州的阿尔卡特拉斯也有一个展出。那个展出很特别。我想去现场。如果真正努力，展览会更好。但现在，我不知道我能不能做到。
问：阿尔卡特拉斯曾经是个监狱。那个地点对你意味着什么？
答：我觉得，对许多所谓的政治犯，或者说因为政治观点而入狱的人而言，他们想要的始终是更多的自由。他们中多数这么做不是为了自己，而是为了一个群体，为了他人。他们因为这么做而失去了一项基本自由。对我来说，为他人和自己的良心做了点事，就让他们陷入不自由的境地，这种处理问题的方法不是文明、现代的。
问：你放弃在柏林开工作室的想法了吗？
答：没有。因为我觉得我可能需要在海外有一个工作室。这样就会更多机会进行更多交流。思想领域的交流。但因为我当时被关押，那个计划一度基本停顿。
问：听说柏林艺术大学(Berlin University of the Arts)授予你了教职。
答：是的。但我没法告诉他们我什么时候能接受这个职位。他们还在等。我还是认为柏林是一个非常活跃的地方。是艺术家能够生存下来的地方。那里的生活成本相对较低，还有其他许多艺术家。那些东西真的都非常重要。我们还在修复工作室，还没结束。不过快了。再有一两个月就好了。
问：如果你人在这里，你计划怎么使用柏林的工作室呢？
答：我觉得，工作室即便空着，也是一种象征。我想去，但去不了。世界上有很多这样的人。许多人因为各种原因都处在这种情况。我是因为政治原因，但对很多人来说，则是经济原因或其他复杂的原因。它是一个存在的基本象征。
问：因此，在一个合适的地方有一间空着的工作室也自有其含义？
答：是的。我感觉，我的艺术作品在很大程度上表达的都是永远无法实现的愿望。但这并不影响我们为了实现它而付出的努力。就像我觉得，对自由的主张很大一部分在于为自由而进行的斗争，而不仅仅是把它作为一个目标。我觉得，奋斗的过程才是生命的真正价值所在。在生活中，不管是艺术家、理论家还是哲学家，我们都会做一些艰难的事情。
问：如果你人不在北京，会有其他人帮你放花吗？
答：会。
问：警方介入过你放花的事情吗？
答：没有。他们不会再来给我找麻烦了。他们过去每天都会打电话，但现在不了。
问：你会觉得与世隔绝，会觉得孤独吗？
答：我不觉得孤独。从艺术的角度来说，我也没感到有很多限制，因为我的艺术基本上就是以限制为主题的。我认为最重要的是这种贯穿每个中国人生活的不确定性。没人对社会或法律有坚定的信仰或信任。你不能构建一个这样的现代社会。因为所有文明社会都是建立在基本的价值和信任的基础上的。如果没有信任，就没有文明。而且信任也会为权力提供合法性。
问：这就是这里的人经常说到的缺乏安全感吗？
答：没错。因为，那种安全感从何而来？肯定是权力，而且这种权力必须是合法的权力。如果都是现在这种情况，每个人都有这种感觉，这是一个稳定的社会吗？没人想让事情变成这样。社会上没有诚信和信任。
问：你已经快三年没出过国了。你觉得自己被边缘化了吗？你觉得自己错过了国际上的发展了吗？
答：我认为，如今对艺术家来说，边缘化这个概念很有意思。作为一个当代艺术家，我们总是会寻找各种让我们处在边缘状态的理由和可能性。一旦说到可能性，我们实际上是在说边缘化带来的问题。有了互联网，这根本没有问题。如果没有互联网，倒真是很恐怖。但有了互联网，我们都有机会可以快速、准确地和处在不同困境中的其他人讨论我们自己的困境。当我们的感受和其他人的感受结合起来时，就有了放花这个行动。这些花是为了建立一种必要的联系。
问：所以你上传了图片，让全世界看到它们。
答：是的。因为人们只知道我不能旅行，和他们每天都能看到这些花，结果会很不一样。因为所谓艺术，就是如何把各种情绪转化成他人可以理解的东西。不然的话，这就不是艺术。不论这传递情绪的是一件美丽的织物，还是一个图案。这种情绪可能是600年前的，也可能是1000年前的，但是没有这件织物，我们就无从想象这种感觉。它传递了一种信息。媒介即是信息。
本文最初发表于2014年1月1日。
狄雨霏(Didi Kirsten Tatlow)是《纽约时报》驻京记者。
SINOSPHERE
Q. & A.: Ai Weiwei on Creating Art in a Cage
January 13, 2014
Adam Dean for The New York Times
Ai Weiwei placed a bouquet in the basket of a bicycle as a protest against the prohibition on his travel abroad.
Last week we described how Ai Weiwei, the artist and dissident, places flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his Beijing studio in protest against the Chinese government’s confiscation of his passport. Now Mr. Ai discusses in an interview what it’s like to be trapped in a country he loves, but may not leave.
He’s concerned that his art is suffering. An exhibition scheduled for April in Brooklyn (a reprise of a show at the Hirshhorn, titled “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”) and another in September at the former prison at Alcatraz, in California, would benefit if he could curate them on site, he said. But in a gesture against his confinement, he is proceeding with plans to open a studio in Berlin, saying it would, at least, stand as a symbol of his desire to work outside China again one day.
Mr. Ai was detained in April 2011 and served 81 days in jail. Now he is allowed to go about in Beijing, though “every time I leave, I’m supposed to tell them where I am going,” he said.
Following are excerpts from the interview with Mr. Ai in his studio, conducted one morning after he placed flowers in the bicycle basket as he has every day since Nov. 30. Mr. Ai spent some time showing his collection of ancient Chinese and Tibetan fabrics. At the end of the interview he referred to the fabrics, their beauty and history, and how they express something important about art.
Q. Why do you put the flowers out at 9 every morning?
A. Nine in the morning is when I start work. I put the flowers in the basket, take a couple of photographs and upload them to the Internet.
Q. Why flowers?
A. I think flowers are the most common language. For one thing, they’re about life. And I use fresh flowers. New ones every day. In this cold weather, they may only last a day.
Q. What do they mean?
A. They are an artwork of mine that is very powerfully tied to my life. Starting on April 3, 2011, when I was taken away and detained in a secret place, until today, I haven’t had a passport. I was detained for 81 days, and when I was released on June 22, on that day they said I would have to have a year on bail. Every time since then that I’ve asked about my passport, they’ve said they’d give it back. But they never have, nearly three years now. Today is the 1,001st day since I lost my passport. I don’t know how long it will go on for. Another 1,000 days? Thousands more days? It’s all possible.
So that’s one reason, but not the whole reason. This is a society that claims to have rule of law. We have a constitution, criminal law, all sorts of rules. When a government forces a person into detention like this, what they are doing is not legal, at the very least it’s against the spirit of the law. You don’t have the right to restrict where a person lives, their ability to travel. When I get off a train, there are people there to photograph me. They follow me if I go to a hotel.
Q. What is the deeper feeling that this situation produces?
A. Our basic worry in this country is that we only ever see what happens, we never know the reason. That bicycle, it belonged to a young German, he was arrested, but never officially. They detained him for I think more than 10 months. He worked for a German art shipping company, and the German government made a real effort to get him out. He’s out now, back in Germany. Before he left, he gave it to a German journalist, saying he wanted to give it to me. So suddenly I had this bicycle, and I knew that he had been really badly treated. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and they locked him up for so long. The government accused him of smuggling, but the real reason was that officials wanted to open a tax-free art zone and take over his business. I was just out of detention myself and I thought, what can I do with this bicycle? So I bought a very strong lock and locked it to a tree in front of my front door. It’s just like the kind of bicycle you would see anywhere in the world. Sometimes these bicycles are abandoned; in New York you see that all the time. In China, the owner may have been taken by the government or whatever, so it’s very symbolic. So I decided to put flowers in it, and I will do it every day until I get my passport back.
Q. This feeling of not knowing when you’ll get your passport back, is that hard to live with?
A. In Chinese culture, it’s very normal. For example, we don’t know when we will get the vote. Sixty years have passed, and we still haven’t seen it. The government says, hey, Chinese people are too low quality for that, in 10 or 15 years, it will be a bit better. So we never know and everyone just goes on. How to express that? People say life is day by day and everyone’s life is the same, but when you start caring about the children who died in the May 12 [2008] Sichuan earthquake, when you discover their every name, their birthday, their parents, that moment I say we can’t just count the numbers, we have to remember every fresh life. I can buy a bunch of fresh flowers every day to remind everyone that loss of freedom happens, that it’s a possibility, and that it happens amid all our lives.
Q. If you had a passport, where would you go?
A. The day I was detained they put a black hood over my head and took me to a secret location. I thought, why am I so stupid? I could have had an American passport. I lived in the U.S. for 12 years. But after I came out, I wasn’t anxious to leave. I feel I have so much to do here. I have a lot of friends. My family is here. I’ve even thought, the day you give me back my passport, I might tear it up in front of your eyes. You can’t take it from me. That choice is mine, not yours.
I have an exhibition in Brooklyn in April, and I lived in New York, of course I’d like to go there. It is a very important place in my life. I’d like to make it really good and to interact with the audience. In September, I have an exhibition in California, in Alcatraz. It’s such a special event. I’d like to go there. Exhibitions are better if you work really hard at them. But right now, well, I don’t know if I can.
Q. Alcatraz was a jail. What does the location mean to you?
A. I feel that many so-called political prisoners, or people who are jailed for their politics, what they want is always more freedom. Most of them aren’t doing it for themselves but for a group, or for others. Because of that, they lose a piece of basic freedom. To me, that’s not a civilized or modern way to handle things — to force people into that kind of unfreedom because of their work for others, their conscience.
Q. Have you given up the idea of having a studio in Berlin?
A. I have not. Because I feel I may need a studio outside China. I’d have more opportunities for more exchanges. Intellectual exchanges. But because of my detention here, that plan pretty much stopped.
Q. You were offered a professorship at the Universität der Künste Berlin, or Berlin University of the Arts.
A. Right. But I couldn’t tell them when I’d take it up. They are still waiting. I still think Berlin is a very active place. It’s an environment an artist can survive. It’s relatively cheap and has a lot of other artists. Those things are all really important. We’re still doing the restoration on the studio, it’s not finished. Soon. A month or two.
Q. If you are here, how do you plan to use the studio in Berlin?
A. I feel that even standing empty it is a symbol. Being willing to go, but not being able to, there are a lot of people like that in this world. Many people are in that situation for all kinds of reasons. Mine are political, but for a lot of people the reasons are economic or other complex reasons. It’s a basic symbol of existence.
Q. So the empty studio in a good location also carries a message.
A. Right. I feel my artworks, to a great degree, they are desires that will never be fulfilled. But that doesn’t impact on what we do manage to do. Just as I feel that the great part of the demand for freedom lies in fighting for it, and not just in it being a goal. I feel that the process of striving is where value lies in life. In the process of living our life, whether it’s an artist’s, a theoretician’s or a philosopher’s, we’re doing something very difficult.
Q. If you are out of Beijing will someone else place the flowers for you?
A. Yes.
Q. Have the police interfered with the flowers yet?
A. No. They don’t come by to make trouble for me any more. They used to ring every day, now they don’t.
Q. Do you feel cut off from the world, lonely?
A. I don’t feel lonely. I also don’t feel that many restrictions in an artistic sense, because my art basically deals with restrictions. The most important thing I think is this uncertainty which accompanies every Chinese person’s life. No one has a solid belief or trust in society or the law. And you can’t build a modern society like that. Because all civilized societies are built on basic values and trust. If there’s no trust, there’s no civilization. And trust, it provides the legitimacy for power.
Q. Is this the lack of a sense of security that people here often talk about?
A. Correct. Because where does that sense of security come from? Definitely power, and that power must be legitimate. With things the way they are, if everyone feels that way, is that a stable society? No one wants things to be like this. There’s no credibility in society and no trust.
Q. For nearly three years now you haven’t been outside China. Do you feel marginalized? Do you feel you are missing international developments?
A. I think that today the concept of marginalization is a very interesting one for an artist. As a contemporary artist, we’re always looking for reasons to exist in marginalization, for the possibilities in marginalization. The minute we talk about possibilities, in reality we’re talking about the question of marginalization. With the Internet, it’s all not a problem. If there weren’t one, it would be really scary. But with the Internet, we all have opportunities to discuss our plight, quickly and accurately, with other people who are in their own plight. When our feelings and other people’s feelings join up, well, that’s the action of placing flowers. The flowers are about putting in place a necessary connection.
Q. And then you upload the pictures and send them out to the world.
A. Right. Because it’s different if all that people know is that I can’t travel, and if they can actually see the flowers every day. Because so-called art is about the possibility of turning emotions into something that other people can understand. Otherwise it’s not art. Whether it’s looking at a beautiful fabric, or a pattern, that transmits emotion. The emotion may be 600 years old or 1,000 years old, but without the fabric we have no way to imagine what that feeling was. It’s a message. The medium is the message.
——纽约时报，读者推荐
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