Text by Piotr Bockowski
It depends, it depends, it depends…, repeated a Taoist incantation of the post-Internet emperor of Fake China. Between 3 and 4 July, a grand performance art stage of Manchester’s Aviva Studios was transformed into a 24h surveillance booth, simulating a supervised confinement and interrogation cell of superstar Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.
Filmed from multiple angles simultaneously by a CCTV system of industrial cameras, his movie-studio-style prison was displayed on large monitors surrounding the stage. The exhibitionist supervision showcased Ai Weiwei permanently handcuffed, walking back and forth, sleeping, shouted at, eating, washing, defecating, his movements guided by prison guards.
Then his face oppressively illuminated by direct light, speaking – repeatedly interrogated by several media personalities about his worldviews, involving four British post-colonial rotating broadcasters and journalists: Nihal Arthanayake (Bombay Bronx), Emma Dabiri (BBC Afrofuturism), Lemn Sissay (PEN Pinter Prize), Zing Tsjeng (Vice UK), performing the roles of CCP secret police agents.
The durational performance piece Sewing a Button was a compressed simulation of Ai Weiwei’s 81-day secret detention following his arrest on 3 April 2011 at Beijing Capital International Airport, as he tried to board a flight to Hong Kong at the dawn of its independence movement.
CCP police acted under the official pretext of economic crimes, accusing Ai Weiwei of tax evasion and insinuating that his design company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., hid millions of yuan in taxes. At the same time, it remained apparent to audiences outside of China as well as inside it that the accusation was an excuse for the Chinese Communist Party to punish Ai Weiwei for his dissident media art.
Followed on the streets of Beijing by the agents of control, he used his blog and social media account to criticise the totalitarian state and build a mass following online. He openly mocked the secret agents spying on him by recording their persistent presence and posting the imagery as a form of artistic concept.
Effectively, his almost 3-month-long detention in an unofficial windowless cell, under continuous watch by guards who interrogated him over half a hundred times, was an explicit act of revenge against the monstrous techno regime for turning their surveillance intimidation methods against the state control itself. Later, closer to the end of the imprisonment, he lost a lot of weight, which made his trousers fall down – and so he performed an unauthorised act of sawing a button, aimed as the ultimate attack against the CCP.
Subjected to treatment calculated to break him, Ai Weiwei was repeatedly questioned about an alleged online conspiracy to subvert the greatest totalitarian empire there has ever been. Locked up indefinitely in the darkness, less than 4m by 4m, he passed most of his time walking across his cell in manic steps, over ten miles a day, stimulating movement of his traumatic thoughts, always followed by two communist agents.
They watched him sleep, eat, defecate, walk and talk – just like the audience of the Manchester performance. The agents of control, previously exposed by him online, decided to watch him all too closely for an unlimited duration, forcing him into a humiliating compliance routine each time he wanted to drink water or use the toilet. They never took his handcuffs off and claimed from the beginning that they could do anything they wanted to him to make him feel close to death.
Upon release, bailed under the condition not to talk to any foreigners or media, Ai Weiwei locked himself in his Beijing studio in an informal house arrest. After a brief attempt to turn that domestic confinement into a reality TV show by capturing his living environment with webcams, CCP agents disconnected Ai Weiwei from the Internet. His phone was tapped.
After four years of being locked up at home, he got his passport back and finally escaped China to Europe, where he has lived since July 2015.
Born in a Maoist labour camp as the son of a degraded communist propaganda artist of the highest profile (a personal associate of Mao, his father led a committee that designed the flag and the anthem of communist China), Ai Weiwei must have internalised the totalitarian surveillance as his most intimate psychic landscape since his early childhood.
After escaping direct control of the Chinese Communist Party (although still remaining punishable under the novel Ethnic Unity Law of the CCP worldwide) and retiring to isolation in a Portuguese countryside mansion or honorary project spaces in Berlin and the UK, Ai Weiwei has been questioning the European narrative of “free speech”, remaining suspicious about indirect censorship within the technoculture of open media over the last decade.
In 2024, the largest public-space screen in Europe at the time, the Piccadilly Lights in London, displayed a conversation between Ai Weiwei and an AI agent, GPT, over 81 consecutive days.
Reminiscent of 81 days of detention by CCP agents in Beijing, Europe’s most spectacular screen broadcast to the global public, the “Ai vs AI” elaborations on distinct 81 questions pertaining to possibilities of social freedom, prisoners of conscience, control within social hierarchies, surveillance culture, algorithmic discrimination, IT whistleblowers, disinformation in mass media, as well as indulgence in philosophical absurd: Am I in quantum superposition?
Considering human longing for self-annihilation in conjunction with the importance of imagination against knowledge, AI concluded: Who am I? Wait, Weiwei, what, was Ai already AI?!
This summer in Manchester, Ai Weiwei performed CCTV of the CCP inside out. The windowless cell of totalitarian interrogation unfolded into an augmented labyrinth of electronic windows to global spectacle and mass interrogation online.
Agents of control were enacted by paid media experts and theatre extras, curiously asking about Ai Weiwei’s childhood in a Maoist labour camp, located within the most isolated yet the most open wastelands of the Far East and Central Asia, where his Maoist poet father was tormented by Mao himself, ruthlessly silenced and forced to shovel excrement for 21 years. Is there freedom – it depends.
What about truth – it depends. What controls what – it depends. Falling back into his staged interrogation, the formula of a 24-hour durational performance art piece, showcased to a European intellectual and paying audience, Ai Weiwei embodied the strategy of the most ambiguous AI agent. An autonomous protocol, ever elusive in his self-subjugation to the trans-totalitarian hyper-surveillance apparatus of free speech, which says nothing and leaves no room within a fake Chinese box.
