They always say there is silence before the storm'

CHINESE LEGEND:China's most controversial artist, Ai Weiwei, talks to CLIFFORD COONANabout his work, his socio-political beliefs, and his concerns for the rising generation.

AI WEIWEI IS the most famous artist in a country of 1.4 billion people, but it is his sense of the individual lives and destinies behind China’s gargantuan population statistics that sets him apart.

His finest work, Sunflower Seeds, currently in at the Tate Modern in London, is intensely compassionate and, as the documentary alongside it shows, focused on the people who made and painted its over one hundred million porcelain pieces.

Sunflower Seedsis made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique, with each life-sized sunflower seed husk individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands; the project rejuvenated the porcelain industry in the city and provided much-needed employment. Ah! If such a project could be realised in Ireland (and sponsored, as this one is, by a corporate giant such as Unilever).

Another of my personal favourite works by Ai is a project commemorating the children who died during the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008. It comprises rows and rows of A4 paper that make up a large rectangle, with each sheet bearing the names of 5,250 students who perished.

Ai dislikes talking about his art, preferring to focus on his activism: his views have seen him placed under surveillance, detained and even badly beaten.

“I am an artist and I use social research, galleries, museums, and I’m selling work for quite high prices right now. I’m in this industry. At the same time I’m an individual who wants my experience, my beliefs and my social-political values to be brought into my main activities as an artist,” he says.

A stocky, bearded man with an appraising eye, Ai is a playful, slightly mocking figure and, even though his art is political and sombre, it can also be very funny. He recently showed a number of photographs of himself jumping naked in the air, which are witty and touching. Every time you see him, he comes out with something unexpected, something new.

We are seated at a long table in his studio in Beijing’s Chuangyi art district, which is also his home. He has lots of people working for him here, Chinese and Western, acolytes who help him with his major works and with his voluminous internet research. Dozens of cats and dogs roam the compound; it’s a busy place.

Ai is a Twitter star in a country that bans that particular social network. People buy internet software to get around the Great Firewall of China just to read his stuff.

He is a cultural blue-blood, with a very high profile in China. It seems that his status has protected him so far from suffering the fate of, say, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate imprisoned for 11 years for subversion.

Liu is not as well known in China as Ai, who is the son of the poet Ai Qing, denounced during the Cultural Revolution and packed off to a labour camp in Xinjiang with his wife, Gao Ying. Ai Weiwei himself spent five years there.

Ai’s wife, Lu Qing is also an important artist, and he attended the Beijing Film Academy with top filmmakers Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.

But, as with his parents, his cultural standing has not kept him out of trouble. He has repeatedly placed himself at odds with the government, a dangerous position in a single-party state. And his disdain for the powers-that-be shows no sign of abating.

He was involved in the construction of the Olympic stadium, although he was subsequently critical of the structure, saying the 2008 Games were being used to mask China’s social and political problems and as a showcase for political power. He has never been back to the stadium.

Earlier this month, his Shanghai studio was demolished, without him being told until the day it happened.

Police burst in to his hotel room in Chengdu in 2009 and beat him so badly that surgeons in Munich later had to drill two holes in his head to remove 30 millilitres of fluid from his skull.

His phone is tapped and he and his associates are under surveillance. He invites the police watching his studio to come in and sit in the office.

“I can find them a table. In that sense they can know my total activities rather than speculating,” he says. “I think openness, transparency, works well in those cases, and people are most scared by this kind of attitude.

“The Public Security Bureau asks me: Why are you doing these things? They cannot believe that someone in my position, from my family background, would do such things. I tell them sincerely what’s on my mind because I want them to understand. But even if they understand, they don’t believe it. They think I must have some other intention,” he says.

His political work has made him a target. Critics say he is only being controversial to sell more work. He has been accused of having a foreign passport, which he denies, and of being a puppet of foreign agencies.

“People are suspicious. They see hidden motives because the risks are so great. They just won’t agree that there are some problems here,” he says.

Chinese contemporary art is hugely successful, and artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun are revered figures on the art markets in New York and London. Ai’s work sells for big money, but he is dismissive of contemporary artists who have thrived using the iconography of the Cultural Revolution and the era of Mao Zedong while remaining apolitical.

“Their work is not political; they use these icons as a recognition point. It’s very conservative and very safe. It’s not critical. It doesn’t have a message and it doesn’t have much content. All because of their education – most Chinese artists come through the academic system here and it’s devastating. It’s not a position to raise questions and to challenge the establishment.”

I ask him what he thinks about the Irish situation. Some have suggested that an authoritarian government, for all its failings, would never have brought a country to its knees like the democratically elected government in Ireland did. Is single-party rule a better style for developing countries, as the Communist Party in China says?

“I cannot speak for other nations. I grew up here, I’m Chinese, and I’ve been outside. Democracy is not a condition we can really choose or not choose: it’s absolutely necessary,” he says, “because only by doing that, you understand equal opportunity and the equal value of life. I don’t think a nation needs to be powerful, but it needs every individual to have equal rights and a law for society. I can’t think of another way.”

Suddenly animated, he looks me directly in the eye. “You cannot say we need to sacrifice somebody’s rights because we need a better society, or a more efficient society. I would never take that. I don’t understand this kind of argument, because if you don’t let people have the opportunity to be educated, to get the right information, to express themselves, to freely associate with others, what kind of society do you have? Why do we need development? This is not arguable. This is the basic necessity, the bottom line.”

He spends eight hours a day on the internet trying to develop a social consciousness among young people. He tweets, edits posts and uploads his work to try and “equip young people with the knowledge of when to anticipate and when to act”.

“If people can be brainwashed by money, they can be brainwashed by opinions and rights. Chinese people are not so money-conscious actually – it’s only because there is no other way,” he says.

“It is a project I’ve been always working on. It’s about current conditions in China, including social, political change and also the everyday, daily events, stories,” says Ai.

“I think exposure brings some kind of consciousness. We see many young people who get on Twitter, who are starting to act, rather than just watch. They start to paste information and give the other side. Once you become conscious, it’s easier to make judgments.”

Internet restrictions mean that his name is blocked on most search engines, although he is well known among those who routinely use virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around the Great Firewall.

“Even that’s quite powerful, because it educates people who are not interested in politics, who are not interested in social matters. They ask questions: why does this happen? Why can’t we use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube here in China?”

The rest of his time is spent organising exhibitions – he has four or five coming up in 2011, including a major exhibition in the Ullens Centre in Beijing in March. He is also working on three documentary films.

He is not surprised by the level of censorship in China. “There is a very strong reason for censorship, because once they open it, that’s the end of them,” he says.

He is angered and depressed by the decision to shut down The Party, a hip and archly outspoken magazine published by Han Han, a dashing racing car driver, sex symbol, novelist and possiblythe most popular blogger in the world.

“We see a young boy like Han Han,” says Ai. “His intention is that the world he lives in should be more reasonable, but every time he makes a move he is stopped. This is not even slightly negotiable. The magazine takes him years to bring out. It’s really a very conservative literary magazine for a small circle and its message is absolutely no threat. That’s all he wants to do: he respects literature and he wants to print a magazine, but it’s just not allowed. Nobody in power supports this.

“How can a nation such as China try to compete, try to face challenges, and try to say we need a culture and a creativity industry? It’s not possible.

“I want my activity and my effort to benefit my art, or my art to benefit from my other values. These are important tasks for me. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not a genius. I can be a failure here and there. But my intention is always to reach people who don’t need to know anything about art to care about their feelings, or to protect those basic values of self-expression and the right to life, dignity and opportunities. Which is okay – you have a million good artists who don’t care about this,” he says.

The generations of the 1980s, the 1990s, have had their lives ruined, he says. “All they can do is to emigrate, to study outside, to find a normal, reasonable life. Because it’s so painful when you grow up, kids here, they need to go through everything, and it’s all wasted. I see so many people coming out of university, and they can do nothing. It’s just wasted. They don’t even have a way to communicate, to adjust themselves,” he says.

This year there is no major event in China: no Olympics, no World Expo. What will be the next big event in China?

“The revolution. They always say there is silence before the storm. There are many, many crises. If they try to make it look like nothing has happened, it’s not a good tactic; they will accumulate . . .

“The Russian revolution, the whole Eastern bloc thing, happened when everyone said: “That’s enough!”

See tate.org.uk for online interview.

Sunflower Seedsis at Tate Modern until May 2nd