‘Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.
Ai’s own work was bolshie and anathema to custodians of good taste. His Study of Perspective series showed him raising a middle finger at global sites – among them Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower, the White House – that are expected to produce awe, delight, reverence. In the self-explanatory photographic sequence Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), itself the follow-up to Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo (1994), he asked viewers to decide who was the bigger cultural vandal: himself, a mere artist – or a Chinese state for whom iconoclasm was a defining feature of its modernising project. A 2000 exhibition in Shanghai that he helped to stage bore the name Fuck Off. (Its Chinese subtitle was “Ways to Not Cooperate’”.)
If anything, Ai’s talent to bemuse and enrage has only intensified in recent decades. A blog he wrote between 2005 and 2009 (posts had titles such as How Could We Have Degenerated To This? and If You Aren’t Anti-China, Are You Still Human?) scandalised the authorities and was yanked off the internet. His email and bank accounts have been repeatedly hacked. A studio complex he designed was demolished. Violent police treatment led to internal bleeding and emergency brain surgery. Later he was detained and placed under house arrest for 81 days.
Given that there can be few contemporary artists who have thought more about censorship – its goals, techniques, efficacy – than Ai, it’s inevitable this new book, which runs to fewer than 90 pages, will be read as his distilled wisdom on the topic. Censorship, he asserts, is no new phenomenon: during the Shang dynasty (1600-1046BC) a saying emerged – “the great affairs of the state are worship and military bases”.
But Ai’s main argument is that censorship is neither a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, nor something confined to “countries defined as autocratic and authoritarian”. In the west – “the so-called free world”, with its “ostensibly democratic societies” – free speech is a chimera, regulated through “more covert, more deceptive and more corrosive” means. Flexing his rhetoric, he describes censorship “as both an indispensable tool of mental enslavement and a fundamental source of political corruption”.
Overblown? Ai is fond of generalisations. “When a work of thought or expression gains widespread public acceptance or adoration, it often signals a lack of depth or a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose” – by that sweeping logic, his own art, which has been exhibited across the world, must also be depthless. No translator is listed, so we must assume he himself is responsible for the book’s many Victor Meldrew-isms (“Values such as effort, responsibility and the preservation of life’s dignity are replaced by materialism, fleeting pleasure and shallow entertainment”) or LinkedIn bromides (he has, he says, “consistently raised questions about human values and rights, engaging in debates that inevitably touch on issues of social justice, fairness, the legitimacy of power and the execution of judicial justice”).
Ai refers to his poet father Qing’s misfortunes – “his life was marked by suffering and our family endured punishment alongside him” – but the fuller story appears in Ai’s 2021 memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. Jailed for being a leftist by the nationalists in 1932, Qing was imprisoned again in 1957 for being a rightist: ink was poured on his face, kids pelted him with stones, he was forced to clean public toilets and lived with his son in a self-dug hole in the ground for a decade.
On Censorship is at its liveliest when Ai ponders artificial intelligence. Friends who mention his name to ChatGPT are reportedly told, “Let’s talk about something else.” The chatbot also claims – with stochastic self-assurance – that a selfie Ai took with Alice Weidel, leader of the German AfD party, is a fake. His belief in the fundamental importance of individuals runs counter to the theology of big data: “Individuals are reduced to a transparent, jelly-like state within society – formless, uniform and stripped of distinction.” Artificial intelligence, he believes, represents a “profound existential crisis for humanity – the virus infiltrates the central nervous system of human cognition”.
Much more barbed and more suggestive than Ai’s prose are the images he marshals: a listening device found in his studio; bored undercover policemen meant to be keeping tabs on him; a still of him being interrogated from the video for a heavy-metal song called Dumbass; him raising his middle finger to the surveillance goons outside his Beijing studio. For Ai, as for many artists, their deepest thinking is their work itself.
• On Censorship by Ai Weiwei is published by Thames & Hudson (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
