CULTURAL REVOLUTION

The Multimedia Art Museum displays the photo archives of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. "New York. 1983-1993" is the first solo exhibition in Moscow of the most influential figure in contemporary art in 2011, according to Art Review magazine.

The column is hosted by Maria Mazalova and Maria Semendyaeva

In his native China, 54-year-old Ai Weiwei is like the Voina group, Alexei Navalny and Andrei Erofeev rolled into one. It wasn't always like this. Until 2008, the world-famous artist was loyal to the Chinese Communist Party in both the form and content of his works. For the prestigious exhibition documenta-12 in Kassel (2007), he came up with the project “Fairy Tale”. The artist brought 1001 compatriots to Germany and settled them in a special barracks, giving them special clothing previously sewn according to his sketches. The European public regarded this gesture as yet another criticism of who knows what, although Ai Weiwei’s idea was clear: “The Tale” is a demonstration of the strength of the Chinese people and the inexhaustible human resources of the country.

For the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Ai Weiwei, together with the architects Herzog and de Meuron, built the national stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest. Imagine that the main stadium in Sochi is being built by the same Herzog and de Meuron under the artistic direction of, say, Oleg Kulik.

Ai Weiwei and Andrei Yerofeyev, the curator of the scandalous exhibitions “Forbidden Art” and “Beware of Religion!”, are brought together by origin. Both are from the elite. Erofeev - from the Soviet diplomatic service. The father of the Chinese artist Ai Qing is considered one of the greatest poets of modern China. He suffered during the Cultural Revolution, but after Mao's death he gradually rose to the top of the hierarchy and even served as deputy chairman of the Chinese Writers' Union. His father's high position allowed Ai Weiwei to leave China in 1981 and go to the United States. From 1983 to 1993, the artist lived in New York. The photographs he took then formed the basis of a traveling exhibition, which came to the current photobiennale in Moscow.

Ai Weiwei's archive contains more than 10,000 photographs from New York, and about two hundred are shown at the exhibition. This is a detailed travel diary. Ai Weiwei films everything that seems unusual to him: as you might guess, on the other side of the Earth, for a native of communist China, every piece of sidewalk in Manhattan is a wonder. Probably, the ideal audience for this exhibition would be Russian emigrants of the third, Brezhnev, wave, which occurred precisely at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. They would recognize Ai Weiwei's endless curiosity as their own shock, mixed with fear and delight. The modern viewer may be shocked by photographs of Manhattan except for their incredible similarity to American films depicting the everyday life of the New York police. And it’s not at all clear what the connection is between the photographs and Ai Weiwei’s worldwide fame.

The transformation of a conceptualist with outstanding organizational skills into a news star remains beyond the scope of the exhibition. At the end of 2008, Ai Weiwei became interested in the high-profile earthquake case in Sichuan Province. During the disaster, several newly built schools collapsed and buried thousands of children under the rubble. The culprit is corruption in the construction industry. As soon as Ai Weiwei decided to dig deeper, that is, to become Navalny, problems began. He was beaten by the police, a case of tax evasion was fabricated against Ai Weiwei's studio, Ai Weiwei finally served 81 days in prison, causing massive protests from the European and American public. Meanwhile, his art has not changed at all. At the beginning of March it became known that the Tate Gallery had acquired part of the Sunflower Seeds installation made for the gallery's Turbine Hall. These are millions of life-size porcelain seeds, handcrafted by Chinese workers. Ai Weiwei has once again shown what everyone knows: China is the only superpower that can afford craft work on this scale for the sake of pure art.

In pictures from New York, everything is different: America is still a superpower, and Ai Weiwei is a provincial from a country with an uncertain future.

Valentin Dyakonov

These are not seeds for you