Interview Ai Weiwei: 'The mood in Germany is like the 1930s'
The artist has battled surveillance,
underground exile and even irate Berlin taxi drivers. He thinks the world has
forgotten what human rights mean, which is why he has designed a new flag
The wallpaper image on Ai Weiwei’s mobile phone
is a black and white photograph showing the entrance to an underground home in
Xinjiang. It was here where the Chinese activist artist and his family were
exiled for five years when he was a boy. “We were put underground here as a
punishment,” he says. “This is where I grew up. Now they put the Uighurs in
these kind of camps.”
He enlarges the picture showing a bunker-like structure
jutting out of the ground in an arid, inhospitable landscape. Ai’s father, Ai Qing,
was a poet and political radical who, although no activist, was seen as a
threat to society. “So I’ve always been involved with human rights issues, not
initially out of choice but out of personal experience,” he says.
Many of Ai’s works
over a career spanning more than 40 years have been investigations into human
rights transgressions, including his own imprisonment by Chinese authorities.
But now he has taken his interest a step further by accepting the invitation
from UK arts organisations and human rights charities to design a flag to mark
the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“I don’t recall any kind of symbol for human
rights,” he says, sitting at a long wooden table in his studio in Berlin, where
he has lived in exile since 2015. “So it was time we gave it one.”
He lays out a series
of photographs. They show the muddy footprints of Rohingya refugees who have
been forced to flee attacks by Myanmarese soldiers and take refuge in
neighbouring Bangladesh.
“These are the
footprints of some of the barefooted children, women and young people who we
met, who had no shoes,” he says. “Of course it’s very difficult to design
something to illustrate such a large, abstract concept. But I thought a
footprint relates to everybody who has been forced to flee, whether in Africa,
Afghanistan or Bangladesh. There is nothing more human than a footprint.”
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