The refugee crisis and Ai Wei Wei's Search for Humanity

I often wonder, “Who am I?” I always thought that to make an impact in this world one should define one’s identity firmly. “I am a pharmacist,” “I am an engineer,” “I am a doctor,” I am a… ?

When I think about Ai Weiwei’s life and work, my fingers stop frenetically rubbing against each other, my breath goes back to normal and a wave of calm sways over me. I float through my own thoughts, feeling better, feeling alive and ok for not having the right answers – or answers at all – about the role I play in this world.

Geniality aside, Ai Weiwei is hard to define. The Chinese artist made his whole career by blurring lines about “what“ he is, and yet  there are few people alive today that have had a greater positive impact in the world. He is the antithesis of the idea that one can only succeed by finding an area of interest and working at it until they master it.

If on one hand Ai Weiwei has based a lot of his work on minutiae and detailed techniques that took years to master, he does not make a single craft his artistic identity. His plurality is his identity, and I will argue that this is what we need today to talk about challenging issues such as migration.

Ai Weiwei is an artist and an activist, a designer, an architect, a filmmaker, a painter, an investigator, a protester. He revives ancient techniques of Chinese handicraft to make a point about the necessity of breaking traditions. Ai Weiwei has made his own place in the world, changing and experimenting as his surroundings demanded it.

The same can be said of the artist’s fluctuation between multiple themes, always unique but at the same time interchangeably linked to human dignity and freedom. Born in China from a father who was a poet persecuted by the cultural revolution, Ai Weiwei lived amidst repression, sensitive to the loss of freedom both at home and around the world.

When I visited his exhibit “Root” in my hometown of São Paulo, Brazil, on January 10th, 2019, it was no surprise that one of the many places that called Ai Weiwei into action was the refugee crisis.

Maybe you’ve heard of Ai Weiwei’s documentary “Human Flow.” It is an almost silent investigation into some of the trajectories taken by more than 65 million people around the world who have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change, and war. Despite being the most famous piece on the subject, it is far from being his only one.

At the exhibit “Root” we see another consequence of this process as the artist takes up a different focus: the marks left in history by the violent odyssey faced by refugees today. The wallpaper imitates the style of ancient Greek paintings, now portraying the modern conflict relating to migration.

Representation of modern armies merges with poses historically linked to ancient warriors, past and present combine as the artist explicitly points to mistakes made now and then: violence that will leave its mark on history.

On the last segment of the image, combined with a portrayal of state repression, a self-reference: Ai Weiwei placed symmetrical arms made by him in a different context – another one of his works, in this case, “Finger for sale” (Wallpaper, 2016) –  inside the painting’s background. The work is a message: a literal “f___ you” to authoritarian control. A self-reference in the form of resistance. The finger takes the seriousness away from the depiction of state warriors.

Maybe that is what Ai Weiwei is. An artist, but also resistance against the establishment in all its forms. Resistance made through both content and format – exactly the type of mediamaker we need producing migration-related content.

In an interview for the exhibit’s catalog, Ai Weiwei talks about his greatest fears: “If I could no longer be critical or if I lost my compassion for humanity. If I could no longer examine the human condition, life would lose its luster.”

I think we often stop having the ability to examine the human condition out of self imposing limitations. If we can learn something from Ai Weiwei it is that we should be flexible with our research tools, so we can pursue permanently deeper corners of ourselves and the  world around us.

Ever since I started learning about migration, I feel like I have fallen into a space that demands new skills, a greater sensibility and a greater capacity to endure the sight of human suffering and the depth of state administrational problems that defy basic democratic principles.

To talk about these issues, it is necessary to have cross-media skills. May we have the wisdom to be like Ai Weiwei: a man with the freedom of having no single answers on sight and the will to permanently look for them.