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AN ASSET, NOT A THREAT

The Chinese government is wrong. Ai Weiwei, says CIWEM executive director, Nick Reeves, is not a dissident artist but a champion of transformation and a sustainable world.

China's transformation from inward-looking third-world nation to fastest-growing economy (and now the world's banker and biggest polluter) has been nothing short of phenomenal. And its land and resource grab continues to astonish us. Chinese goods and services have reached every corner of the planet - the enrichment of ordinary Chinese people gathers apace. But success has brought challenges that the Chinese government is struggling to cope with. Sooner or later it will have to bow to pressure for social and environmental justice and work with - not against - its critical friends.

But for China's emerging middle classes - sleek, confident and opinionated -   change isn't coming fast enough. Now that they earn enough to pay tax, they want a say in how it's spent.  A growing sense of entitlement has led to an expectation of greater freedom of speech, movement and action. That these freedoms are mostly denied has led to an outbreak of demonstrations and a predictably violent reaction from the authorities.  Those in charge must be worried that the clamour for democracy that led to the Arab Spring could also spread to China.

It is hard to confirm the figures, but it is widely reported that the Chinese government has increased, by around 13.5 percent, its spending on internal security.  A worrying move, which suggests that China's premier, Wen Jiabao, is expecting trouble, and that public unrest will spread. It is a move that will also encourage China's trading partners in the West to pile on the pressure for improved human rights and environmental justice. 

But it is rarely governments, or governmental bodies, that take the initiative on human rights or environmental justice. They simply aren't nimble or far-sighted enough. It takes the actions of one determined individual, or a small number of noisy ones, to force the issue. Throughout history, groups of artists, writers, philosophers and activists have been at the forefront of campaigns for change for the better.    

No argument, art is the highest form of human expression and can change people's lives. Down the ages leaders, monarchs, popes and potentates have harnessed the power of art to promote change and define themselves and their governments. But how far can artists contribute to social transformation, environmental justice and sustainability?      

The arrest of artist Ai Weiwei at Bejing Airport on 3 April (and his release on 22 June under very strict bail conditions to a fanfare of international media attention) has had various outcomes, some predictable, others not. Among the predictable ones has been the huge enlargement of his reputation as an artist and social issues activist. If you had not heard of China's most famous dissident artist, architect, writer and film-maker before his detention, you must surely have heard of him now. Stupidly, those who run China have made their best-known naysayer better known and the issues he has campaigned against much more prominent.

The international art world, too, has behaved with predictable noisiness - petitions have been launched, signs put up, pronouncements made, exhibitions dedicated. Most of the time, the art world (unlike the environment one) is a politically toothless assembly of unusually selfish people. But when an outsider hurts an insider; it gangs together and unsheathes its claws.  Let's see if it will use them. Meantime, Britain's oldest art academy, the Royal Academy of Art, has shown that it is prepared to get a little bit political and has made Ai an 'Honorary Royal Academician'. 

For Ai himself, heaven knows what terrible fates have been visited upon him. He was already a sick man. And on release, under the most constraining of house-arrest conditions, he looked thinner and introspective. If he was in a typical Chinese prison, the poor man will have been brutalised and degraded while the thought police submit him to one of their nasty campaigns of character realignment. It will not work, of course. As far as I know, nobody has ever come out of a Chinese prison thinking differently from the way they went in. They merely weigh less and feel angrier. And Ai will know this. In 1958 his father, the poet Ai Qing, was sent to a labour camp for 'rightism'. Despite the fact that he spent each day of every year, for many years, cleaning toilets, he remained faithful to his core belief in freedom of expression and the need for a proper balance between people and the planet.

All this is predictable. Yet, since the Fates have decided to stick their oar in as well, by ensuring that two Ai Weiwei exhibitions were available simultaneously in London in the summer, we need also to look at the misunderstanding of his art encouraged by the current situation. Stupidly, again, the Chinese authorities have ensured that Ai is understood principally as a dissident who attacks his own government. But that is not what he is. What he is, is a conceptual romantic who expresses his dismay at the relentless trashing of the past by a crude, cruel and unrelenting modernity, where the idée fixe is greed-fuelled consumption, over-development and resource degradation. And which is now our problem as much as China's.

A good example was the surveillance camera carved out of marble that surveyed viewers from a pedestal at the Lisson Gallery's Ai Weiwei exhibition last July. Yes, surveillance cameras are sinister objects. Yes, marble is a noble and exquisite material. Yes, if you carve one out of the other, you highlight an immediate clash of values and timescales. But anyone who imagines that Ai's marble surveillance camera is intended only as a criticism of the Chinese authorities who have imprisoned him needs to look out of the window of the Lisson Gallery (or along any High Street in any town or city) at the surveillance cameras trained on the door. There's nothing Chinese about those. Or any robot eyes that make Britons the most watched people on the planet, contributing immeasurably to a feeling of disjointedness and discomfort, and disengagement from the natural world. 

China didn't invent shoddy urban development or urban creep, either. The sort that is graphically highlighted by Chang'an Boulevard, a ten hour video piece, which was also showing at the Lisson Gallery, in which the artist pauses at intervals to examine a 30-mile road that crosses the length of Bejing from east to west. If Chang'an Boulevard were called the North Circular, it would make exactly the same point and would offer, I suggest, an even more depressing environmental spectacle. And a more obvious example of wonky urban planning.

The real subject matter here, as it is in Ai's recent giant sunflower-seed installation at Tate Modern, is the victory of mass production over skill. The triumph of the worst form of capitalism. The replacement of the handmade over the cheap to sell. The rise of the shoddy and badly made. The triumph of development over nature. It's a particular problem in modern China, and was grotesquely speeded up during the ghastly preparation of the Bejing Olympics, but it is also a problem everywhere else. China did not invent flyovers, skyscrapers, concrete wastelands or any of the grim urban sights glimpsed through the ring road in his video. Unfortunately, since Ai's arrest, the fact that he is as much against McDonald's (and all the trappings of popular western culture), as he is against the ruling party in China, is harder to see.

In the sculpture court of the Lisson Gallery, there was a huge hoard of 56 exquisitely carved marble doors stacked haphazardly, as if dumped in a reclamation yard. Each one is a careful reproduction in marble of the countless wooden doors ripped out of the ancient cantons during the 'rebuilding' of Bejing. The funerary air here is appropriate and deliberate. Every white door is a monument to an unknown life discarded by 'progress', disposable, brutalised, commoditised.   

Ai is China's meddlesome priest. He has exposed the danger of development in a hurry at any cost. In 2008 the Great Sichuan earthquake led to the loss of 68,000 lives, 20,000 people unaccounted for and over 300,000 injured. Careless planning and construction practices meant that children lost their lives as school buildings collapsed on top of them. Alleged corruption fuelled building at speed without care for the young lives within and Ai pointed the finger.  When he tried to collect the names of the dead children so that he could build a wall in their memory the authorities reacted badly.

Ai's comments on everything from street furniture to climate change are a message to all of creation and what defines him as an artist. His practice is a total interrogation of the human condition and the environments we all inhabit. He consistently displays great courage (when others dare not) in putting himself at risk to affect social change through his art.  One day all of China will come to celebrate a true cultural icon and come to regard Ai as an asset and not a threat. China's new high-rollers will be paying vast sums at Christies and Sotheby's to get a bit of Ai.