Before Ai Weiwei came to Europe, he was considered our man in China: not only as a representative of Western values, but also as living proof of the assumption that so-called contemporary art, which is an art of the western or at least western dominated world, is now also include China.

In his memoir, which has just been published in fourteen languages ​​at the same time, Ai Weiwei reveals what this claim was like on his part, and mentions a symbolic date for it: May 23, 2006, coincidentally the day on which exactly 64 years earlier Mao had announced art must serve the masses of the people and thus the party that appears as their spokesman.

Mark Siemons

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

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But now two buses with more than seventy collectors, museum advisory councils and foundation councils, which the New York Museum of Modern Art had brought to Beijing, also stopped in front of Ai Weiwei's studio.

Ai describes the visit as a kind of seizure of possession, how the elegantly dressed gentlemen strolled "comfortably" across the lawn, being recorded by four surveillance cameras hidden in the corners of the courtyard, without their knowing it.

At that time it had become an attraction like the Terracotta Army for travelers to China from the western art world, and even if he received the guests most of the time, he was “deeply aware of the differentness of our respective experiences and the different perspectives that separated us " been.

Reshaping of thoughts

The fact that the artist's stubbornness has not been so well received since he has lived in Europe may have a lot to do with this unacknowledged experience gap, which prevents him from being understood on his own terms and not just as a representative of a collective self-affirmation. The great thing about Ai's autobiography is that it manages to clear up this blind spot, that it is able to make people aware of the kind of experience that protrudes into the supposedly global art cosmos without being able to be absorbed or neutralized by it - not through large-scale assertions and not just by describing the historical framework under which the life of his family took place, conditions that are not unknown in the West from the civil war to the cultural revolution.Rather, what makes the book so special is its ability to capture the smell and the color, the emotional substrate of a period of life or a historical moment, in a concise, laconic phrase.

When, in May 1967, after ten years of exile, his father was sent to an even more remote paramilitary production unit on the edge of the Xinjiang desert, the mother no longer had the strength to go with them;

she returned to Beijing with her little brother.

Ai Weiwei, who was ten years old at the time, remembers it like this: “I remained silent, I neither said goodbye nor asked if she would return.

I can't remember how long it was before they disappeared from view when we left.

For me, staying was no different than going;

however, it was not up to us to decide. "