Interview: Alison Klayman on getting to know Ai Weiwei
Alison Klayman is a freelance journalist and documentarian currently finishing a film about the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Ai is one of China’s most well-known and controversial artists, and in recent years has produced a body of work that is often highly critical of the Chinese government. In April 2010, Ai Weiwei was detained by Chinese authorities and held for nearly three months with virtually no contact with the outside world — an event that spurred much international criticism directed at the Chinese government. Klayman’s documentary, titled Never Sorry, tracks Ai’s life and work during the period Klayman was in China between 2006-2010. Klayman plans to debut Never Sorry in 2012 on the international film festival circuit.
PopTech: When you began shooting Ai Weiwei, did you have a sense of how you wanted to tell his story?
Alison Klayman: I really wanted to do a good job of letting people get to know him as a person. Through him you get to know so much about where China’s been and where it’s going. For me, it was about how he was finding his ways to express himself and how other people in China were responding to it. So it was a story about the diversity of opinion in China. To take one person, get to know him on a human level, and through that, start to appreciate that China was not a monolithic place at all.
Can you describe some of the challenges you’ve encountered not only in conveying the obstacles that Ai Weiwei faced, but also portraying them as the story continues to evolve?
I was thinking: How do I convey to people who might not be familiar with the subtleties of how things work in China, what is subversive, what is dangerous? How do you show somebody at a computer and make it feel like — this is big, you know? Like he’s doing something intense.
At first, the Tate show was going to be my artificial end to the film because I thought that his story could go on forever. Then his studio was destroyed [by the Chinese government] and I thought the studio event is going to have to be this post-script.
And then he was detained so that changed the story again.
Yes, it’s just changed the beginning and end.
It seems that how Ai Weiwei responded to his 81 days of detention became part of his work — just as how his studio was destroyed or how he tracked down the names of the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake became part of his work. In fact, it seems like people’s responses to his detainment have became as much a part of the work as the pieces that have wound up in museums.
Absolutely. I think it’s very much not about ownership; it’s about being in dialogue, or giving it away. With the Tate show and the sunflower seeds, if his Twitter fans wrote to him, he’d send them a little packet of two sunflower seeds with a little card. Or there was a video where you could leave a question for him during that show, except when he was detained, and they gave him a little Flip camera and he would respond to a great number of these questions.
Ai Weiwei is a prolific user of social media, and particularly Twitter, in a way that invites transparency and connects with his fans directly. What did you observe about social media inclinations over the years you were following him?
His ability to communicate does transcend. That’s also a part of going to the social media sphere. It’s recognizing the limitations of the art world. He wants to be recognized in good museums, and to have his art be valued too. But he recognizes that the art world can be a rarefied environment, or something that’s more for an international audience more than for mainland Chinese.
That openness is particularly interesting considering the Chinese government’s surveillance and censorship that has surrounded his work and life.
Yes, there’s a theme of transparency — the cameras around his house, people filming him, him filming them back. How funny to survey a man who spends his life constantly on Twitter!
Through all of that, or because of it, he seems awfully good at getting his message out there – both nationally and internationally.
In the film trailer, his studio assistant’s says: “Sure he’s a self-promoter, because it’s about getting people to believe in his ideas, that’s part of his art.” I thought that was a beautiful way to spin it. Sure he’s a showboat, but I did come to really believe that there was a deep concern, for example, in picking up the earthquake situation, a deep concern for individual life, and for wanting to make sure that people are acknowledged and valued, and that attention is paid. I think I started to see individuality as a strand in his work. I’m not coming at it like an art expert or art world insider either.
When Ai Weiwei was detained, you were thrust into the spotlight as someone who knows him. How did that feel?
During his detention when I was representing his story for a lot of press coverage, I really felt like I was acting in Weiwei’s shoes or something. I’ve sat there and filmed him being interviewed on the phone, and TV, speaking out for all kinds of other people for three years, since 2008. I felt like I had gone through the best spokesperson workshop ever in watching how he does it.
Did you get the sense that he was depending on you during that time?
People have asked me, “So is Weiwei relying on you?” I never imagined – I mean, Weiwei’s not the kind of person who needs somebody to tell his story, he’s not like the voiceless, he’s not a disempowered individual, he takes up a great deal of space, considering he’s just one individual in the world. But I did feel like I had something to contribute because I wanted to do the best take on him of anybody.
There’s a really interesting balance between his international presence and renown and his Chinese presence. It seems that he’s really speaking directly to the people of China.
Absolutely, and to me that was one of the early pieces of evidence in his sincerity and an insight into what he was trying to do – the fact that he tweets in Chinese exclusively.
Actually, that was something I thought was wild. After his release, his Twitter followers were spiking up 20,000 to 25,000. There were all these people around the world who were following him. And he only tweets in Chinese! I saw Mia Farrow following his Twitter feed, being like, “I love this guy! He just tweeted! What did he just say?”
But that’s maybe like a mirror, or projected down a line of where our society is headed. China is not necessarily that far away from the rest of the world anymore. Imagining a more integrated future would be awesome, and there are going to be more people who speak Chinese.
Would you say that there’s a sense of patriotism to Ai Weiwei’s work?
In the film, I don’t think the word patriotic appears once, but I think everyone will come out of the film and think he is deeply patriotic. We didn’t need to have that conversation because it just comes through in so many ways.
Image: Courtesy of Alison Klayman
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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