'BEING A REFUGEE IS A HUMAN CONDITION': Katie Kilkenny interviews Ai Weiwei

By Dilip -
Non-stop self-documentation has long been both a statement and a safeguard for Ai, who is an outspoken critic of his native China. It was his opposition to the regime- recording his monitored, heated confrontations, and even physical abuse at the hands of Chinese authorities - that helped Ai achieve international fame. It was also his opposition that inspired his Chinese supporters to meet with him in person, despite close monitoring by the Xi administration. Ai will later Instagram my picture (#nofilter), just as he will Instagram the photos of other journalists visiting him that day. It's all part of his daily routine for documenting his life on Instagram and Twitter for his cumulative 700,000 followers—in between major exhibitions, public performances, and documentary releases.

We're here to discuss Ai's latest major release, and one of his most ambitious, the documentary 
Human Flow. Many may be most familiar with Ai's works about China - his 1995 performance piece in which he dropped a Han Dynasty urn, or his 2009 installation of 9,000 children's backpacks, commemorating those who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake due to poor school construction. 
Human Flow, in theaters today in New York, represents something of a departure from his more famous pieces, focusing instead on the global refugee crisis. 

The crisis has been a frequent subject of Ai's work after he became a refugee himself in 2015: In 2016, he covered Berlin's Konzerthaus venue in a curtain of 14,000 life vests discarded on the Greek island of Lesbos, a popular entry point for refugees to Europe, and filled the New York Gallery Deitch Projects on Wooster Street with cast-off clothing from a refugee camp in Greece. Last March, 
he installed a 200-foot sculpture of an inflatable boat occupied by hundreds of refugees in the National Gallery of Prague, among other projects.

Human Flow documents the lives and travels of refugees in over 23 countries, including Afghanistan, France, Kenya, and Turkey. It combines drone photography documenting the immense scale of camps and ongoing human migrations with intimate on-the ground storytelling in which Ai meets with, asks questions of, and occasionally comforts and jokes with displaced peoples.The ultimate goal, Ai tells me, is to challenge stigmas surrounding refugees, helping to create a new, universally understood definition for their status. Ai believes that, only by viewing refugees not as migrants, but rather as displaced persons, will the world arrive at a more compassionate policy for welcoming them. On Sunday we talked about the advantages of documentary, the challenges of production, and Ai's message for President Donald Trump.

Over the last few years, the refugee crisis has been the subject of your installations, sculpture, and public performances. Why do you return to the crisis again and again?
Well, my work not only focuses on the refugee crisis. I've also done many works relating to freedom of speech, human rights—especially while I was in China—and also about justice and judicial practices. But certainly refugees have attracted my attention for the past three years. Before I got my passport in China we already started to do research.

Why it attracted my attention is because it's getting overwhelmingly large-scale, and I have a strong curiosity to know what the story is and what is behind it. I didn't have the opportunity when my passport was [denied to me by] the authorities. Once I [finally got the passport], I started to be involved.


Tell me a little bit about how this documentary began to takes shape... read more
https://psmag.com/social-justice/an-interview-with-ai-weiwei

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