SEPTEMBER 2012
The new political art
by James Panero
On Ai Weiwei, Pussy Riot, and the right way to do political art.
"It wasn’t long after his release that Ai Qing suffered the fate of countless intellectuals in Mao’s China. A fellow poet accused him of falling “into a quagmire of reactionary formalism.” In 1958, he was sent off to Xinjiang, China’s “Little Siberia,” where he cleaned the toilets of a labor camp. As part of his punishment, youth gangs poured ink on his face and pelted him with stones. For a time, the family inhabited a cave dug in t
he earth. Ai Weiwei, born in 1957, lived here in the provincial city of Shihezi with his father and mother, Gao Ying, for the next fifteen years.
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The promise that his jailers made has become CCP strategy: “You criticized the government, so we are going to let all society know that you’re an obscene person, you evaded taxes, you have two wives, we want to shame you.” Yet the art of Ai Weiwei has demonstrated how a single individual can also shame the state. His example is now closely followed by another punk-inspired act, the Russian band Pussy Riot. The three young women of this group have been sentenced to two years in prison for challenging the corruption of the Orthodox Church and the thugocracy of Vladimir Putin. As John O’Sullivan recently wrote at National Review: “The Pussy Riot girls are seeking to protest not oppression by religion but the oppression ofreligion by the Russian state.”"
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