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01-12-15

Book Excerpt: Maya Kóvskaya on Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei placing flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his studio in Beijing, June 2014

Ai Weiwei placing flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his studio in Beijing, June 2014; photo: Jan Stürmann

Below are excerpts from Maya Kóvskaya’s essay in the exhibition catalogue for @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. The extended essay places the exhibition in the context of Ai Weiwei’s life and work as an artist and activist. Read the complete text in the book — order a copy today!

An irreverent maverick with a cast-iron social conscience, Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei has been called many things. He’s been called China’s most famous living artist, while Western headlines have hinted that the defiant political critic just might be “China’s most dangerous man” and even claimed that the artist is an “enemy of the state.” Of course, in places where regimes monopolize historical “truth” — defending their claims to power by acting as gatekeepers of public culture — the union of art and political critique is a dangerous terrain. Yet through his art, Ai Weiwei fearlessly speaks his truth to power, and it is in this role of the public intellectual that Ai Weiwei’s vocation finds its apotheosis. . . .

What is so compelling about Ai Weiwei is not merely that his artwork is at once both beautiful and critical but also that it is as democratic in form as in message; it is an art intended for people everywhere. Ai Weiwei is a genuine public intellectual not only because he speaks for the public but because he speaks to the public. He is effective because he does so in an intelligent yet accessible visual language that anyone (with a little cultural and historical context) can come to understand. . . .

With great fame often comes a distorted sense of self-importance, but rather than being intoxicated by fame, Ai Weiwei is intrigued by what fame can leverage. His sees through the gimcrack glitz of celebrity and finds its rituals risible, yet understands that his high profile is partly what keeps him from disappearing into the bowels of a disgruntled state apparatus — a state impatient with his public provocations. Yet instead of convincing him to pack those contentious skeletons back into tidy closets, as so many of his peers have done in exchange for the right to make money, each effort to bully Ai Weiwei into self-censorship has only amplified his sense of outrage.

Indeed, each attempt to show Ai Weiwei that he is puny and powerless before the mighty state has only crystallized the artist’s understanding of the necessity of speaking out. As Edward Said suggested, a public intellectual is “someone whose place is to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations.” Being a public intellectual is neither parallel to nor separate from Ai Weiwei’s practice as an artist but inextricably intertwined. For Ai Weiwei, being an artist is a way of being a person. And being a person he can face in the mirror has become synonymous with being a public intellectual.

A line from one of his father’s poems, “Living Fossil,” foreshadows the principled resistance that animates Ai Weiwei’s life’s work: “. . . any fool can see: / We cannot live unless we can move. / To live is to struggle, / to advance / We must expend our all / Before the advance of death.”

Perhaps more unambiguously than any exhibition of his work thus far, @Large transcends both the larger-than-life myth of Ai Weiwei as art world celebrity and the poignancy of his own predicament as a critic of one of the world’s most powerful states. In doing so, this exhibition becomes something greater than simply a testament to individual will and a display of his personal struggles and achievements. Created in dialogue with the multiple histories of Alcatraz, the works in @Large are an embodiment of how Ai Weiwei’s art can speak across nations and cultures to all of us, drawing us into a conversation about resistance and persistence and, in doing so, offering visitors to this prison island a humbling, uplifting vision of the potential power of the powerless.

— Maya Kóvskaya

@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, Ai Weiwei

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Happy Birthday to the brilliant Ai Weiwei (@aiww) 
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Image: Ai Weiwei @Large exhibition curator Cheryl Haines consults with Ai Weiwei at the artist's studio in Beijing, June 2014; Photo: Jan Stürmann
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Happy Birthday to the brilliant Ai Weiwei (@aiww) ⠀ Image: Ai Weiwei @Large exhibition curator Cheryl Haines consults with Ai Weiwei at the artist's studio in Beijing, June 2014; Photo: Jan Stürmann
15 hours ago
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Occupying a suite of former military structures in the Presidio overlooking the San Francisco Bay, Home Land Security (2016) brought together works by contemporary artists and collectives from around the globe to reflect on the human dimensions and increasing complexity of national security, including the physical and psychological borders we create, protect, and cross in its name. 

The exhibition extended FOR-SITE’s focus on provocative art about place, inviting viewers into decommissioned batteries, an administrative building, and a chapel — some open to the public for the first time — that served for decades as key sites in the US Army’s Coastal Defense System. #ArtAboutPlace

Image: DÍAZ LEWIS, 34,000 PILLOWS, 2016–ONGOING (VIEW FROM OUTSIDE BATTERY BOUTELLE); USED AND DONATED CLOTHING AND KAPOK FIBER FILLING; COURTESY THE ARTISTS AND ASPECT/RATIO, CHICAGO; © DÍAZ LEWIS; PHOTO: ROBERT DIVERS HERRICK
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Occupying a suite of former military structures in the Presidio overlooking the San Francisco Bay, Home Land Security (2016) brought together works by contemporary artists and collectives from around the globe to reflect on the human dimensions and increasing complexity of national security, including the physical and psychological borders we create, protect, and cross in its name.  The exhibition extended FOR-SITE’s focus on provocative art about place, inviting viewers into decommissioned batteries, an administrative building, and a chapel — some open to the public for the first time — that served for decades as key sites in the US Army’s Coastal Defense System. #ArtAboutPlace Image: DÍAZ LEWIS, 34,000 PILLOWS, 2016–ONGOING (VIEW FROM OUTSIDE BATTERY BOUTELLE); USED AND DONATED CLOTHING AND KAPOK FIBER FILLING; COURTESY THE ARTISTS AND ASPECT/RATIO, CHICAGO; © DÍAZ LEWIS; PHOTO: ROBERT DIVERS HERRICK
2 days ago
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2/9
@anateresafernandez’s Sanctuary rug design, titled Erasure, showcases a work from a series of the same name for which the artist documented a performance of erasure: painting her body black with thick acrylic paint in front of a black background. The resulting video and suite of signature large-scale, hyperrealist paintings leave only glimpses of color—in this case, a searing pair of eyes. Fernández performed this act of removal and mourning in response to the 2014 disappearance and presumed murder of forty-three young male student-activists in Ayotzinapa, Mexico. For the artist, this unconscionable act raises critical questions: “Whose life can be erased so quickly? Why are some sectors of our community treated in such a disposable way? What do we need to do as a society to be seen and treated equally, like valued human beings?”

In 2017 FOR-SITE invited 36 artists from 21 different countries to design contemporary rugs reflecting on sanctuary, offering visitors a multiplicity of perspectives on the basic human need for refuge, protection, and sacred ground.
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@anateresafernandez’s Sanctuary rug design, titled Erasure, showcases a work from a series of the same name for which the artist documented a performance of erasure: painting her body black with thick acrylic paint in front of a black background. The resulting video and suite of signature large-scale, hyperrealist paintings leave only glimpses of color—in this case, a searing pair of eyes. Fernández performed this act of removal and mourning in response to the 2014 disappearance and presumed murder of forty-three young male student-activists in Ayotzinapa, Mexico. For the artist, this unconscionable act raises critical questions: “Whose life can be erased so quickly? Why are some sectors of our community treated in such a disposable way? What do we need to do as a society to be seen and treated equally, like valued human beings?” In 2017 FOR-SITE invited 36 artists from 21 different countries to design contemporary rugs reflecting on sanctuary, offering visitors a multiplicity of perspectives on the basic human need for refuge, protection, and sacred ground.
4 days ago
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3/9
Titled Here we die, @mpane.aime’s design for Sanctuary was based on one of his carved plywood portraits from a series of the same name. He creates these portraits with an ancient tool called an adze, which allows him to scrape away layers of wood and reveal his subject by reduction. Each panel is roughly twelve by twelve inches: the equivalent of a human head’s surface area. “Because my work deals with problems of race and the stereotypes of black people, the three layers within four-millimeter-thick plywood make me think of the three layers within human skin,” he explains. Despite the dark histories underlying his work, Mpane’s portraits are not somber: his embrace of bright color lends an air of inextinguishable hope and promise.

In 2017 FOR-SITE invited 36 artists from 21 different countries to design contemporary rugs reflecting on sanctuary, offering visitors a multiplicity of perspectives on the basic human need for refuge, protection, and sacred ground.
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Titled Here we die, @mpane.aime’s design for Sanctuary was based on one of his carved plywood portraits from a series of the same name. He creates these portraits with an ancient tool called an adze, which allows him to scrape away layers of wood and reveal his subject by reduction. Each panel is roughly twelve by twelve inches: the equivalent of a human head’s surface area. “Because my work deals with problems of race and the stereotypes of black people, the three layers within four-millimeter-thick plywood make me think of the three layers within human skin,” he explains. Despite the dark histories underlying his work, Mpane’s portraits are not somber: his embrace of bright color lends an air of inextinguishable hope and promise. In 2017 FOR-SITE invited 36 artists from 21 different countries to design contemporary rugs reflecting on sanctuary, offering visitors a multiplicity of perspectives on the basic human need for refuge, protection, and sacred ground.
7 days ago
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4/9
@hankwillisthomas Sanctuary contribution, titled Keep the Faith Baby, comes from a series invoking buttons and slogans from political campaigns and social movements from the last 50 years, removing them from their original context to allow audiences to reinterpret the messaging through a contemporary lens. Thomas remembers encountering a button bearing this particular wording as a child. The phrase, used by New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, originally served to communicate the hope and profound faith that fueled the American civil rights movement. “It may sound trite, but commercialism is the new religion. We are all believers. Even the most radical of us,” Thomas has said. “It’s not propaganda anymore.”

The notion of sanctuary—both physical and psychological—has been fundamental in shaping a sense of selfhood and social identity throughout human history. But in an era of increasing global migration and rising nationalism, the right to safe haven is under threat, and the necessity for compassion is greater than ever. Seeking to address these issues and ideas, In 2017 FOR-SITE invited 36 artists from 21 different countries to design contemporary rugs reflecting on sanctuary, offering visitors a multiplicity of perspectives on the basic human need for refuge, protection, and sacred ground.
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@hankwillisthomas Sanctuary contribution, titled Keep the Faith Baby, comes from a series invoking buttons and slogans from political campaigns and social movements from the last 50 years, removing them from their original context to allow audiences to reinterpret the messaging through a contemporary lens. Thomas remembers encountering a button bearing this particular wording as a child. The phrase, used by New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, originally served to communicate the hope and profound faith that fueled the American civil rights movement. “It may sound trite, but commercialism is the new religion. We are all believers. Even the most radical of us,” Thomas has said. “It’s not propaganda anymore.” The notion of sanctuary—both physical and psychological—has been fundamental in shaping a sense of selfhood and social identity throughout human history. But in an era of increasing global migration and rising nationalism, the right to safe haven is under threat, and the necessity for compassion is greater than ever. Seeking to address these issues and ideas, In 2017 FOR-SITE invited 36 artists from 21 different countries to design contemporary rugs reflecting on sanctuary, offering visitors a multiplicity of perspectives on the basic human need for refuge, protection, and sacred ground.
1 week ago
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5/9
Deinstall continues! While we are on hiatus, keep in touch by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.
Deinstall continues! While we are on hiatus, keep in touch by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.
Deinstall continues! While we are on hiatus, keep in touch by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.
Deinstall continues! While we are on hiatus, keep in touch by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.
Deinstall continues! While we are on hiatus, keep in touch by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.
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Deinstall continues! While we are on hiatus, keep in touch by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.
2 weeks ago
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6/9
Susanne Cockrell’s (@aradicalstitch ), Indwelling invited students to move their toolkits, studio, and lens of production to the Sierra Nevada and work through their own experiences of being on the land. Through guided walks, and meetings with local artists, community groups, herbalists and trackers students focused on understanding the complex relationships between their art practices and a sense of indwelling.

Since 2003, FOR-SITE’s education program has enriched the experience of graduate-level art students with learning opportunities that extend beyond the traditional academic curriculum.

Image: Susanne Cockrell’s, Indwelling, 2016, California College of the Arts
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Susanne Cockrell’s (@aradicalstitch ), Indwelling invited students to move their toolkits, studio, and lens of production to the Sierra Nevada and work through their own experiences of being on the land. Through guided walks, and meetings with local artists, community groups, herbalists and trackers students focused on understanding the complex relationships between their art practices and a sense of indwelling. Since 2003, FOR-SITE’s education program has enriched the experience of graduate-level art students with learning opportunities that extend beyond the traditional academic curriculum. Image: Susanne Cockrell’s, Indwelling, 2016, California College of the Arts
3 weeks ago
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7/9
Established in 2003, the FOR-SITE Foundation is dedicated to the creation, understanding, and presentation of art about place. Our exhibitions and commissions artist residencies, and education programs are based in the belief that art can inspire fresh thinking and important dialogue about our natural and cultural environment.

Image: Artist Chris Drury at work
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Established in 2003, the FOR-SITE Foundation is dedicated to the creation, understanding, and presentation of art about place. Our exhibitions and commissions artist residencies, and education programs are based in the belief that art can inspire fresh thinking and important dialogue about our natural and cultural environment. Image: Artist Chris Drury at work
3 weeks ago
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8/9
Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
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Reflections from preschool students who visited #LandsEnd
4 weeks ago
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