Ai Weiwei: ‘The Venice Biennale should not make value judgments about political positions. Otherwise, it’s censorship’

If there is an artist with the credentials to speak about freedom of expression and censorship, it is Ai Weiwei. And his response to any kind of restriction — regardless of who is being targeted by attempts to silence a voice — is a firm no....

If there is an artist with the credentials to speak about freedom of expression and censorship, it is Ai Weiwei. And his response to any kind of restriction — regardless of who is being targeted by attempts to silence a voice — is a firm no.

This 68-year-old multidisciplinary Chinese creator, who faced persecution and censorship from his government and now lives in exile in Portugal, has also spent time in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In 2023, he saw his exhibition at Lisson Gallery canceled after making statements on social media criticizing Israel over its attacks on Gaza. That’s why he argues that censorship knows no borders and is part of all political systems, including Western democracies.

Ai — who is also known for using his art to advocate for human rights — not only analyzes the phenomenon of censorship in his recently published book On Censorship, but also addressed the issue last Tuesday during the opening of a retrospective exhibition titled Aftershock, which runs until September 6 at the MAXXI Museum in L’Aquila, Italy.

Speaking to EL PAÍS, he commented on the controversy surrounding the Venice Biennale and the jury’s decision to exclude Russia and Israel from the competition for the exhibition’s awards. The jury that made the decision had not yet resigned when he spoke to EL PAÍS.

According to the artist, “the Biennale shouldn’t make value judgments about who to show or not show. That’s not their job. They should grant equal rights to everyone, regardless of their political or social positions. That’s what we call freedom of speech. Otherwise, it’s censorship. I believe we must protect the value of freedom of speech. Without it, I think we allow society to become dumb and stupid.”

For Ai — for whom art and activism are inseparable — the exhibition in L’Aquila offers a concise but sharp overview of his work, from the photographs he took in New York while studying there on one of the first scholarships available to Chinese citizens, to his ironic and incisive reflections on the war in Ukraine, today’s political polarization, the 21st‑century tension between truth and fiction, and his reinterpretations of art‑historical classics such as Munch’s The Scream and Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood.

In 2011, he spent 81 days detained in China for criticizing the government following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which 90,000 people died. Ai Weiwei worked with hundreds of anonymous volunteers to identify and publish the names of more than 5,000 children who died under the rubble of poorly constructed schools, information that the government sought to censor.

He also collected 150 tons of reinforced steel bars salvaged from those buildings and straightened them to create a memorial installation — a series of steel lakes in various shapes, each bearing the name of one of the children. Titled Straight, the installation evokes the memory of those losses and occupies the first three rooms of the L’Aquila exhibition.

Chosen this year as Italy’s European Capital of Culture, L’Aquila was also devastated by an earthquake in 2009, where structural flaws also played a significant role. Hence, during the exhibition’s opening on April 28, the artist insisted that the organizers open all the windows, from which one can still see the scars of that earthquake on the church of Santa Maria Paganica, a symbol of that seismic event, which is still under reconstruction and located opposite the MAXXI museum.

“Life is like a flowing river, passing through the past and looking toward the future,” says the artist. “We must necessarily speak of and look at our past to understand who we are. Almost two decades have passed since the earthquakes in Sichuan and L’Aquila, and time has passed very fast. But in both incidents, people lost their lives and their possessions. We are in a very fast-changing world. There are still wars in many places. People die every day. So the question should be: do we ever learn anything about humanity? Do we draw lessons from the past?”

Regarding his work, Ai says that when one begins a new piece of art, “a struggle begins because you have to consider the feelings that what you are doing evokes, but also certain historical and aesthetic aspects. The form you give your works must respond to all these demands. In the case of Straight, for me, there was no other possible form; I couldn’t express what I wanted to convey in any other way. When you produce a work, you have to be honest because otherwise, you risk failure.”

The exhibition features numerous creations made with “children’s building blocks, like Lego, but from other brands,” explains curator Tim Marlow, director of the Design Museum in London, reiterating something Ai always makes clear to avoid advertising any particular brand. These include works such as After the Death of Marat (2019), in which the artist is pixelated using building bricks and lies face down by the seashore. The image echoes the death of Aylan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian boy who was found drowned on a beach in Lesbos in 2015 during the refugee crisis that followed the outbreak of the war in Syria. The photo of Kurdi became a symbol of Europe’s failure to cope with the refugee exodus.

Ai’s work was controversial, with the artist accused of exploiting a tragedy. This greatly angered him, as he had spent years documenting the refugee crisis in other works such as the documentary Human Flow and Lotus, made from life jackets recovered in Lesbos and also included in the L’Aquila exhibition.

How does Ai view Europe’s current reactionary wave against immigrants, especially considering that he himself was received in Germany in 2015? “The refugee situation is more or less like the ocean, where you have tides,” he says. “Sometimes there is high tide, sometimes there is low tide. It depends on the movement of the Earth and the Moon, right? It’s a natural effect. But we have to ask ourselves where the refugees come from. Who creates these refugees? Instead of saying ‘we won’t let you in,’ we have to assume that we are all refugees because we all come from some generation of refugees. It’s not fair to hold them back and not address the reason why they become refugees.”

The son of Chinese poet Ai Qing, a favorite of the communist regime, though he fell from grace in 1958, Ai grew up alongside his father in concentration camps in Manchuria and Xinjiang and was only able to return to Beijing in 1976, after Mao’s death. “That’s why I’m a refugee too. My father was exiled the year I was born, so I can’t consider any place my home. I’m in Portugal now, but for me, every place is like a hotel. Some are more comfortable than others, some have more sunshine, others only rain,” he says hurriedly, glancing at his assistant who is timing the conversation.

He is referring to the United Kingdom and Germany, where he has also lived for the past decade and where he, too, felt the sting of censorship, always regarding his criticisms on social media of Israel and the genocide in Gaza. “Censorship is censorship; it has the same underlying reasons everywhere. Powerful societies, capitalism, or communism. There is no difference. They are only trying to protect their own interests and survive. China, the United States, or Europe. It’s all the same; there’s no difference,” he insists.

That idea is very well developed in his book, where he also highlights a new danger to freedom: artificial intelligence. “Look, it’s a tool, and as such, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But all efficient tools are manipulated by those in power. They are used for surveillance, to control us. I don’t know what we can do to prevent it. I can only say that each individual has the responsibility to protect their dignity. AI can crush our individuality and destroy our privacy, and that’s very dangerous.”

Ai is very protective of his own privacy and doesn’t want to talk anymore, abruptly ending the interview. His works and his powerful reflections in On Censorship speak for themselves.

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