philip tinari

This article appeared in Parkett 81, January 2008.

The first exhibition I attended in Beijing opened a few weeks after the World Trade Center towers fell, a public sculpture collection curated by Ai Weiwei amidst a new set of towers on what were then the city’s eastern fringes. “SOHO NewTown” was the first development in China to offer a whole lifestyle along with the miniature white cube “small office/home office” spaces that filled its color-coded towers. The apartments had just come on the market, listing at per-square-meter rates that have tripled since that October morning in 2001. The developer couple who built the complex, Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, were on their way to international real-estate fame. And part of the cachet of this-China’s first branded residential experience-was a grouping of works by the city’s major artists installed in the atria onto which each group of four stories let out.

Perhaps an avant-garde still existed in China then-after all, basement exhibitions were still being shut down by police, and no gallery scene or market had yet come into being-but even if it didn’t, it was at least true that the city’s contemporary art world was small and hidden from popular view. Months out of college, I had moved to Beijing to study the language, vaguely interested in the then esoteric category of Chinese contemporary art after some work on Xu Bing’s Tobacco Project (2000) at my university, Duke. Xu Bing, who still lives in New York, had given me the phone number of Feng Boyi, a prominent indigenous curator in Beijing. After getting my conversational Mandarin to the point of less-than-total embarrassment, I called Feng, and he brought me to the exhibition. And it was walking with Feng from SOHO’s Blue Tower to its Green Tower, past the poured-concrete architectural sculpture in the shape of a giant “C,” which was Weiwei’s contribution to his own exhibition, that I had my first sighting: the majestic hooligan, stomach bulging from leather jacket, head shaved, bearded, trailed by a row of acolytes. He stopped the caravan and extended to Feng a warm handshake and a string of pleasantries.

The Ai Weiwei-Feng Boyi-Xu Bing axis was much more complex than I could have known from that exchange, glimpsed at through the fog of unfamiliarity and incomprehension. These three guys had worked together on the Black Cover Book of 1994, the most influential art publication to appear since Tian’anmen. Two years earlier, Xu, newly arrived to New York, lived briefly in Ai’s East Village apartment, where they had recorded the interview that opens the book with Taiwanese performance artist Hsieh Tehching. Xu Bing moved to Williamsburg, Ai moved back to Beijing, and Feng, then a low-ranking editor at an official art magazine with a nose for excitement, was deputized by both to solicit contributions from the circle of experimental artists then active around China. Ai and Feng produced the book over the course of a muggy summer in Shenzhen, staying in a beaten-down hotel near the printing plant, Weiwei with his new love, the artist Lu Qing, in tow. In 1994, one couldn’t print a book in Beijing without licenses. Shenzhen’s liberal, money-first climate allowed the otherwise impossible. The book ended up causing insurmountable tensions among its creators, but also left in place the makings of a system of relations among artists and locales that would mature with the passing decade. And it was just that nexus into which I was unwittingly being drawn.

I did not see Ai Weiwei for another year-a year during which I became something of an apprentice to Feng, moving to Guangzhou to work with him on the upcoming First Guangzhou Triennial. And that is where I next encountered Ai, one afternoon in November 2002, on the long corridor that runs from the lobby of the Guangdong Museum of Art to the elevators leading up to its offices. He and Lu Qing were standing there in front of a poster from a recent exhibition of Picasso drawings, the first in China. It was that famous image of Picasso in his striped shirt, with fingers that look like baguettes. They seemed to crawl out of the poster, patting Weiwei on the back. He had just arrived in the southern city to assemble his work CHANDELIER (2002), a six-meter tall crystal lamp to be mounted in a giant, rusty scaffold at the right of the museum’s entrance. It was one of several new commissions in the exhibition that marked, once and for all, the categorical acceptance of “experimental art” by the state art system. It was also the work that would mark Ai’s onset as an artist of ambition and scale, beginning the current phase of his career. On the night of his arrival, about a week before the opening, he took the museum staff and other artists to a trendy Hunan restaurant where servers in urban uniforms bore peppery dishes across floors of pressed steel. He sat at the head of the table picking at a fish head; I sat to his left. We talked of Philadelphia, my hometown, his early-1980s port of entry to the U.S. The next day, we stood with young factory girls outside the museum and helped to install the piece, putting together strands, crystal by crystal, to hang from the chandelier.

A month later, back in Beijing, I spent a morning showing the New York Times bureau chief around the post-industrial “Factory 798″ gallery district that had sprouted not far from Ai Weiwei’s village of Caochangdi that autumn. The journalist wanted to meet Ai, and so we walked through the village to his home, following a Xerox of a hand-drawn map given to us by the attendant at the China Art Archives and Warehouse, then an active gallery Ai directed on the other side of the neighborhood. We darted under a railroad bridge and across a major avenue under construction, arriving at the gray studio gate just around lunchtime on a drab December day. In this first encounter with a ritual that would become routine, the peasant butler answered the doorbell, as Ai Weiwei emerged from his living room and escorted us into the studio chamber where the first MAP OF CHINA sculpture (2003) had just been put on display. Lu Qing sat at the long living room table drawing squares onto silk, a work she had continued for over a decade. Ai served us green tea and steamed buns. We ate together, sitting around a table in his kitchen on wooden stools like the ones he sometimes makes into art. Danny the cocker spaniel and a few local cats paraded back and forth amidst the antique furniture and sculpture adorning the hallway.

There was an ineffable sense, that gray afternoon, that old hierarchies were on their way toward obsolescence, that it wasn’t quite as much of an honor as it might once have been for a Chinese artist to be visited by the New York Times. This is not to say Ai Weiwei was not a gracious host-the buns were simple but savory, the conversation laconic but astute-or that he was not, in some way, flattered by his guests’ presence. And yet it was becoming clear that even if the boxy volumes of brick and concrete that he inhabited-gray on the outside and red on the inside-were one man’s modernist fantasy, that fantasy was beginning to gain some traction. This home, his first building then already five years old, offered an archetype for a radical subversion of style, an argument for ordinary materials as manifestos, and a strategy for giving the Chinese capital a distinct design sensibility. It was certain, that afternoon, that things were going to happen-for Weiwei, for Beijing-if not entirely clear how.

Then, after a SARS-induced social hiatus and a few summer months of periodically bumping into Ai Weiwei at Nam Nam, a Vietnamese restaurant in the diplomatic quarter, I left China for two years. It was during these years that Ai began to focus completely on art and architecture. He worked on the Olympic Stadium design and mounted his first solo museum show at the Kunsthalle Bern, but also undertook a number of more quixotic urban projects, such as dividing the area inside the Fourth Ring Road into fifteen sections. With a team of assistants and students, he drove and documented every street that lay within. When I arrived again in Beijing in September 2005, things had changed. The Airport Expressway had been modified to connect directly to the Second Ring Road, and the foundations had were being dug for the CCTV Tower and the Olympic Stadium. Instead of hanging out in other people’s restaurants, Weiwei now had one of his own: a sparely designed eatery of concrete and glass panels in an alley just south of the Agricultural Exhibition Center, serving the cuisine of his hometown, Jinhua. He ate there nightly at a long table pieced together only in his presence, facing a wall hung with a few color-wheel paintings by his friend Yan Lei. There, surrounded by the core members of his architectural studio, he would hold court for a rotating cast of critics, clients, collectors, curators, poets, singers, directors, and the occasional returnee entrepreneur from his New York past. Artists with projects to discuss would form a waiting room at a table just to its right, drinking tea and picking at cold appetizers as they waited for their audience with the Godfather. The nameless restaurant became known in his growing orbit simply as “the cafeteria.”

Ai Weiwei’s home, meanwhile, had become another sort of public space. The long table in the foyer was now a miniature museum of discourse, displaying catalogues, magazines, blueprints, posters, all either borne by supplicants or carried back from trips abroad. His blog, (http://blog.sina.com.cn/aiweiwei) which he began keeping in November 2005, progressed within a few months from a rote rehashing of completed works to the photographic diary of comings and goings-many of them set in his living room-that has garnered some 3.5 million page views. The museum groups began to arrive at his door one after another, leading him, at one point, to rig his residence with surveillance cameras to capture one particularly high-profile delegation. Galleries began to open elsewhere in the village, almost entirely of his own design, as Caochangdi becomes the new 798. His studio’s productivity in both art and architecture expanded dramatically, but still he could usually be found on any given morning between April and November sitting at the glass table by his front door drinking tea, chatting with friends and contacts and lieutenants, pausing only to read an email or look at a plan printed out and brought over by an assistant, or to answer his constantly ringing phone.

And that is the state in which things remain now. The city grows at his doorstep-today the street out front is widened, tomorrow that elevated train line to the airport that runs nearby will open-and, particularly in his immediate neighborhood, Ai Weiwei intervenes in that growth. Having just turned fifty, Ai is only now hitting his creative stride. In all likelihood, the Caochangdi residence will remain a destination for a few more years, welcoming visitors and satisfying their fantasies of a Chinese renaissance until either it becomes a parody of itself or enough other spaces and interlocutors in China rise to a level of sophistication and complexity to render these pilgrimages superfluous. For now though, the courtyard, the studio chamber, the living-room table all bear host to a subtle rotation of visual and intellectual delights, removed from the city beyond by a gray brick wall.