Ai Weiwei’s #Refugees: A Transcultural and Transmedia Journey
Date
2018-04
Authors
Strafella, Giorgio
Berg, Daria
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Volume Title
Publisher
ANU Press
Abstract
At least 5,079 people died in the Mediterranean Sea during 2016 while attempting to reach Europe’s shores (International Organisation for Migration 2017). While many Europeans have responded to the struggle of the refugees and other migrants from the Middle East and Africa with either fear or indifference (Poushter 2016; Dearden 2017), a Chinese artiste engagé based in Berlin has employed installations, documentary filmmaking, as well as a sizeable social media presence to try and sensitise the West to this on-going tragedy (Sierzputowski 2016). Ai Weiwei represents one of the most influential figures in the global art scene and his exhibitions attract hundreds of thousands of visitors around the world (Royal Academy of Arts 2015)—since 2015 even in China, although his recent shows in Beijing do not feature his most explicitly ‘political’ artworks. His stature as an artist notwithstanding, it was Ai Weiwei’s advocacy of human and civil rights in China—and the price he paid for his outspokenness, including eighty-one days in jail and a brain haemorrhage (Grube 2009b; Branigan 2011)—that established him as a celebrity dissident in the West at the end of the past decade. Ai Weiwei’s most critical art and activism now address the condition of refugees, rather than Chinese society, putting European governments rather than the Chinese state ‘on trial’ while adding a ‘transcultural’ dimension to his work (Welsch 1999; Ai 2013). Nevertheless, as we shall argue in this essay, Ai Weiwei’s most recent work stems from the same philosophy he has espoused throughout his career.
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Type
Book chapter
Book Title
Gilded Age: Made in China Yearbook 2017
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Access Statement
Open Access via publisher website
License Rights
Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND; creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)