Brain Inflation, 2009. Ai WeiWei.
This X-Ray piece shows Ai Weiwei’s brain hemorrhage caused by Chengdu policemen. In August 2009, the second year after the Sichuan earthquake, his lawyer and friend, Tan Zuoren, was charged with “inciting subversion of state power” for investigating substandard school buildings that killed 5,000 children in the Sichuan earthquake. To prevent her from testifying, police attacked him on the head at a hotel, causing a brain hemorrhage and placed him under house arrest. The artist then returned to Germany for brain surgery and took this MRI scan.
This work tally with Ai’s proposition that everything is art and everything is politics. His right brain shows abnormal blood vessels and a dark mass in the work. The brain of an artist, activist is brought to the world by modern technology.His blood, nerve fibers and other organizations in the brain that govern human thinking and activity are presenting an irrefutable fact. I think the birth of this work also reflects Ai Weiwei’s art career. He has been constantly used art as a weapon to express his thoughts on politics, which is also suppressed by the Chinese government, but respected, lived and healed in other countries.
As an artist and activist, his works attempt to intervene in social activities, but the Chinese “brain” believed that his actions affected social stability. Since 2008, Ai Weiwei’s relationship with the authorities became ambiguous and he became an invisible ghost in society.His fate is predictable and necessary. This not only exposes the Chinese government’s fear of art, but also warns other totalitarian politics around the world.
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