Within the first ten minutes of his interview with The Times, Ai Weiwei’s phone rings. It is the police, who have spotted a foreign journalist entering his compound in the northeastern outskirts of Beijing. The artist sighs, and flicks the policeman’s voice to speakerphone.
Policeman: “Some foreign media have come to interview you. You’d better shun them.”
Ai: “What are they interviewing me about?”
Policeman: “I don’t know.”
Ai: “But I’ve got an exhibition on soon.”
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Policeman: “OK. Old rule then. If the interview is about art, you can accept. If they ask your opinions about recent events, the Chinese leadership or the pursuit of democracy, human rights and freedom, you’d better not do that. Bye.”
Since Ai was released after 81 days of detention almost a year ago, he has been under oppressive, round-the-clock surveillance. Dozens of government cameras scan his home — silent reminders of the aggressive interrogations he suffered while “disappeared”. He was repeatedly threatened, he bitterly recalls, with “a jail sentence so long your mother will be dead and your son will never recognise you when you finally come out”.
When the Serpentine Gallery’s new pavilion — designed by Ai with the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron — opened in Kensington Gardens, West London, yesterday, Ai was conspicuous by his absence. With 20 days still left on his one-year travel ban, all he could do was petition the police to allow him to visit. He was not granted permission — and given the Government’s often arbitrary behaviour — Ai fears the police may hold his passport indefinitely.
It was not so long ago that he was a national hero for another of his collaborations with Herzog and De Meuron – Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium. Ai leans forward from his chair in the garden of his large, walled compound (which includes his home, office, studio and a dormitory for his assistants) and picks up a glass ash-tray moulded to resemble the stadium.
“It’s good isn’t it?” he says, “18 yuan [£1.80] from the souvenir shop outside the stadium. I bought it a couple of weeks ago when I went there.”
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His visit to the stadium is stunning to anybody who remembers his devastating statement in 2007. With exactly a year to go before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, China was starting its relentless crescendo of nationalist pride. Everyone knew that Ai, the son of one of China’s most famous poets, had — at the grand invitation of the state — played a significant role in designing the stadium; a building that, more than any other structure, came to symbolise Communist China’s thundering arrival as an economic titan. To the fury of the Government, and to worldwide sensation, he declared that he would not set foot in it.
It was a protest and an act of provocation that, in the eyes of the Chinese authorities and the world at large, formally converted Ai from artist to dissident. After last year’s tumult, police, friends and family have begged the artist to ditch the activism he describes as instinctive. Now that he has visited his own stadium, has a corner now been turned?
“Yes, yes, I know I said I wouldn’t go to the Bird’s Nest but I have a son now. He’s three years old. He’s old enough to understand that his father helped designed China’s most famous stadium and he said he wanted to see it. So we went to see it,” he says, with the shrug of compromise familiar to doting fathers across the globe.
Unfortunately the boy fell asleep in his pushchair as they crossed the park in front of the stadium. “I didn’t want to wake him, so I just took this picture and bought this ashtray, so I can tell him later he was there,” he says, scrolling through the iPhone and producing a shot of the slumbering child with the Bird’s Nest as background. There are thousands of other pictures from Ai’s daily life on the phone: votive offerings to his near religious faith that communication will ultimately change China.
But, for all his condemnation of the authorities, he has no wish to leave China permanently. As an article of faith, Ai holds that vigorous exchange of information — through social networks, Twitter and the internet in general — is prodding China towards a tipping-point.
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“The country is now on the edge,” he says, denying any wish to be among the final precipitators. “Chinese are learning to communicate fast but the Government has never learnt to talk in anything except one angry voice that treats people as stupid and dangerous. They are just too simple: you love us or you hate us and they think there is nothing in between.”
Despite his evident loathing of all that, he insists that dissident notoriety was never something he sought — no matter how far it has boosted his global profile or the value of his art.
“I became a famous artist. Then a famous dissident. It’s actually not good. Art collectors don’t really like that. They look at an artist like Van Gogh and say, ‘He was a real artist, he cut his own ear, but the police had to cut Ai’s ear for him’ — I don’t want that,” he says.
Asked whether he is, in reality, a cunning manipulator of international media, he frowns and casts around for another way to explain his activism. He pounces on the thick tumblers of tea on the table.
“They [the Government] don’t understand that it is not subverting China to point out things that are terrible. You could look at that cup of tea, with its beautiful green leaves floating gently and let people just enjoy it happily. But if you knew it was bad, that it had been sprayed with poisonous chemicals and that people will get ill from drinking it, how can you keep quiet? I can’t. In China, that is activism, everywhere else, it’s normal communication.”
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The conversation lingers on the continuing crackdown on dissent, the heavy-handedness of China’s internet censors, the escape from illegal house arrest of the blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, and the endless beatings and detentions of ordinary people with which the state asserts its control.
He is asked how, in an environment where even a simple complaint is viewed as dangerously seditious, can an artist know that his work is truly provocative.
“That is absolutely the question. Yes. I think you have to look first at how the Government here works. They face huge obstacles they cannot overcome, so they take the solution to the individual and make sure every individual knows they can disappear at any time. For decades they’ve taken out the loudest voices. They even tell me how easy it is for me to disappear and I believe them. The artist cannot give up against that threat. I could never allow myself to be the victim of a voluntary vanishing.”
He slumps back into the chair, savouring the early Beijing summer and a garden that has been the mise-en-scène for a run of extraordinary Ai-based dramas over the past year, all stemming from the fact that he is clearly viewed in Beijing as a threat.
It was here, on the outskirts of the capital and with the world’s media slavering for his first words, that he returned in June last year after 81 days of terrifying, traumatising disappearance into secret detention.
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It was into this garden that thousands of silent supporters hurled tightly balled banknotes — nominally loans to help Ai pay a punitive RMB 15 million (£1.5 million) tax bill concocted by the Beijing police, but seen by the donors as “votes” for free speech.
Behind the artist, overlooking the garden, is a camera. Surprisingly, it is not one of the many rigged up by the police. It is one of four that Ai briefly used on the anniversary of his detention to stream live footage of his daily life on to the internet — a protest against the intensive police scrutiny he has endured since his release. Of course, it drew the ire of authorities who have banned his name from the internet and Chinese media for several years.
Ai denies that he has any clear political goal or agenda — beyond a fervent hope for greater political openness, greater communication by officials and the establishment of a judicial system entirely independent of the Communist Party.
Such is Ai’s global political presence, however, that it sometimes overshadows his artistic work. Was Ai’s disappearance into secret police custody and his 81 days of threatening interrogation a work of art?
“Everything is a work of art if my consciousness is there,” he says, “but I really didn’t want to disappear.”
He describes police storming across the garden in March 2011 at the exact time he was being hooded and bundled into the hands of the authorities at Beijing airport. It came as a broad and ferocious crackdown was being carried out around China on bloggers, lawyers, activists, religious leaders and other figures feared by the state. It was a time of particular lunacy for a state that lives in futile, patronising dread of what it has created.
“This peaceful garden was filled with police. They came and turned everything over. They looked between every page of every book. They even checked inside the individual pills of cat medicine. They took cameras, computers, hundreds of documents. And what could they get? Nothing. I’m not a criminal. I’m not working for any force or organisation.”
It is a recollection that visibly ignites something dark in the artist.
In the course of two interviews with The Times separated by a fortnight, Ai barrels through a rich variety of metaphors to des-cribe the Chinese Communist Party and the authorities that mistreated him, continue to crush all voices of criticism and (among countless other failings he has especially highlighted with his art) allowed thousands of children to die as their shoddily built schools collapsed around them in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
At any given moment in Ai’s conversation, the state may be a scared child, an ignorant school bully or a helpless fool. He displays disgust cut with pity.
“It [the state] is programmed to be bad. For 60 years you play cards with somebody: if you steal cards and you always change the rules in your favour, how can you improve? You’re always a beginner. You never have interesting people in the system because you never really challenge yourself,” he says.
His tone suddenly moderates: in his desired world of overwhelming communication, even condemnation is nuanced.
“They do terrible things all the time. But you have to remember the situation for the Government is very complex. I will never say I am right, I just promise that I will ask the right questions. And that means questioning everything. How can I ask the Government to get everything right when I cannot even lose weight?” he says, patting a considerably larger belly than the one he had on his release from detention.
Does this regular tempering of his criticism perhaps reveal the patriot beneath the provocateur?
“I’m not a patriot,” he says quickly, recalling his poet father, Ai Qing — a man whose revolutionary poetry once drew the resounding praise of Mao Zedong, but who suddenly fell out of favour and was exiled to Xinjiang in the far northwest. Ai, now 54, was born in the first year of that exile, and ascribes much of his character to those harsh formative years, five of which were spent in a cave.
“My father was a patriot. Too much of one. He drew too much patriotism from the bank and when he died we were deep in patriotism overdraft. For me, it has to be earned back.”
During Ai’s own three dark months in oblivion, with his family denied any information about where or why he was being held — and with The Times, among others in the UK, campaigning for his release — his son was told that Ai was working in England. “So of course now he tells me he never, ever wants me to go to England again,” he says.
Ai, however, would love to visit his Serpentine Pavilion — which, because of his travel ban, he designed with Herzog and De Meuron over Skype. But the documents that he has submitted to ask for an early exemption from the ban have yielded no response.
“I would like to go to London. They might not let me. But I sit in this beautiful garden and I really can’t think this home is a prison.”
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London W2 (020-7402 6075), by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, is open daily until Oct 14. Admission is free