Every society has constraints that offer opportunity for vision, freedom and courage. “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” by Alison Klayman is a documentary about a man who appreciates the possibilities and challenges of this opportunity in China. Ai Weiwei is an artist who turned his vision and success into an effective and audacious tool for challenging the Chinese government to promote freedom and individual rights.
In one of my interactions with the government, I was stopped by police in the U.S. for speeding and I was so scared that my back went numb. Ai Weiwei has been arrested, followed and harassed by the Chinese government for years. I am fascinated by people who by virtue of their values and beliefs overcome their fears and give up conveniences of their lives to forward causes they are committed to. Being a master communicator, Ai Weiwei is doing it with a particular grace that created a following for him in China and abroad – and it is that following that makes it so much harder for Chinese government to shut him up.
- Ai Weiwei was one of the designers of the Bird’s Nest, the Beijing Olympics stadium. He later publicly denounced the project and his participation in it because the government turned the Olympics games into a massive propaganda for the ruling party.
- During the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province poorly built schools collapsed killing a large number of students. As Chinese government refused to acknowledge issues with the school construction or release the number of children who died during the earthquake, Ai Weiwei and his volunteers identified 5,335 names and pictures of those kids who died. His supporters recorded their names and Ai Weiwei dedicated an exhibition in Munich “So sorry” to this event while Chinese government shut down his blog and threatened him and his family.
- In 2010 Ai Weiwei had 100,000,000 handmade porcelain sunflower seeds created for his exhibition in Tate Modern contrasting the mass-production reality of China, centuries of Chinese porcelain art tradition and a sunflower as an accepted symbol of Chinese propaganda art.
In “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” will tell you a story of one man’s life and leave you with the questions about yours.
Don’t be yourself. When Oscar Wilde said that everyone else was taken, he was kidding. And if you think that everyone else is taken, you just have poor imagination.
After all you’ve been “yourself”, whatever that means, all your life. And what is “yourself” anyway? – a mere collection of your incohesive ideas about you. Like what kind of a person you are or are not, and why you do or don’t do, and how you should or should not. (By the way, those might have nothing to do with reality and not even serve you.) In other words, your “yourself” is a limiting construct of a feverish mind. Or simply a box. Hello and welcome to “yourself.”
What’s on the other side is freedom to be. Though venturing off old familiar “yourself” could be dangerous. You might fail. Or get confused. In Hamingway’s story “Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, the main character for once stepped out of “himself and got shot. God gracious. There was also an incident of a man who insisted he was Albert Einstein and that didn’t end well either.
So does it make sense to hang on to “yourself”? Definitely not, especially when your “yourself” gets dull, moody, bored, scared and nasty. In spite of all obvious dangers, I invite you not to be “yourself.” After all Francis Macomber’s happy life, though short, was the only time he truly lived.
And I want to leave you with the theme song of one of my favorite movies “Harold and Maude”
And if you want to be me, be me
And if you want to be you, be you
’cause there’s a million things to be
You know that there are
"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist." - René
