这个人是世界上最好的艺术家吗？
加拿大国家邮报 (National Post) 2011年05月21日
原文链接：http://goo.gl/Kqf8n
艾未未，一个天才的和令人烦恼的中国艺术家，他的事业，作为这个时代最令人信服的个人传奇，一天天在我们眼前展现出来。艺术从未见证过象他这样的人。中国也同样。就潜在的影响来说，他可能是这个世界最重要的艺术家。
自今年4月3号以来，他就一直在警方的监控之下。直到现在他也未被正式起诉。但本周警方宣称他偷漏税。然而他的真正罪名是批评现政府。
监禁无疑是痛苦的经历，但对艾未未来说这只是许多耸人听闻的事态发展的最近的例子。
没有什么事对他是普通的。他的生活象他的艺术一样，从头开始就是一系列怪诞的夸张。他见识过极端的贫穷和耻辱，但也有巨大的国际性的成功。过去的3年里，警方没收了他的电脑，关闭了他的博客，拆毁了他在上海的工作室，打他以致于他要进行脑部手术——现在把他和他的朋友，隔离崇拜者让他沉默。
他出生于54年前，是一个诗人的儿子。当他还只是个婴儿时，政府宣布他的父亲为右派并把他的家流放到一个劳改营，在中国最西部的新疆省。诗人被分配去打扫厕所。“在成长过程中”，艾说：“我总是设法隐藏我的名字，因为我属于一个不光彩的家庭".
24岁时，他放弃了在中国的电影和艺术学习来到美国，就读于帕森斯设计学校，靠干各种零活为生，包括佣金为15美元的肖像速写。他在东村的地下室住所成为流亡的中国艺术家交换思想的场所。1993年，他父亲病了，他回到中国。
艾从那时起就以创造出大量的令人倾倒的思想建立起一个独一无二的事业。他对艺术理念的娴熟运用和推广显示他是一个天生的执行者和卓越的形象制造者。
很少有艺术家象他那样展示出多方面的才能。他是雕塑家，画家，摄影家，电影摄制者，博客博主和建筑师。他参与了鸟巢(2008年北京奥运会轰动一时的建筑）的设计。
奥运会后，他以一个敏锐的，富于想象力的和不可预测的社会批评家的面目出现。他称奥运会为一个肤浅的，愚蠢的景象，一个与真实中国无关的“虚假的微笑”。从那时起，他就一直强调中国每一方面事物中的缺点，从暴虐的政治到习惯性的劣质的建筑——“豆腐渣工程”——以他的话来说。
数千四川孩童在2008年死去，当一次大地震摧毁了他们被以低质量建造的校舍。艾和他的100名志愿者在他的博客上建立了一个在那时还是匿名的死亡孩童的清单。2009年，在慕尼黑，。他设计了一个展览——非常抱歉——展示了9000个象征孩子的书包。展览的口号，“她在这个世界上开心地生活了七年”是一位女儿死于倒塌校舍的母亲说出的。
在过去的几年里，艾经常重新定义艺术的意义。2007年，“童话”，一个装置和行为艺术，是他对德国卡塞尔文献展的贡献。它包括空运1001名各个阶层的中国人（穿着搭配好的衣服和行李）到卡塞尔，和让他们在卡塞尔四处闲逛。
童话包含1001张代表参加者的凳子。自上个月艾被捕以来，世界各地的艺术家以回顾这次事件的方式抗议和要求释放艾. 他们搬来成排的凳子到中国大使馆外以静坐表示抗议。(多伦多的艺术家带着他们的凳子聚集在圣乔治街的中国领事馆外。）
艾未未向我传达出一个清晰的信息。他坦言中国共产党已变为资本家专制党：“与这个党有联系的人正变得非常富有。他们剥夺了所有国家财产并变成能源，交通和一切事物的专制者。他们是亿万富翁，比西方世界想的要强大得多。
在这个曲折的历史关头，在中国的资本家现在已不仅仅是公司，他们还是法院，警察和军队。在警察监视下说出这一点显示了艾的巨大勇气。没人知道他会发生什么事，但可以肯定的是，伴随着他在监狱里度过的每一天，他和他的观点变得越来越广为人知。谁能想到这个关键的政治角色要由一个前卫艺术家来扮演？
（感谢推友：@robertrt0001 翻译）
附：原文
Is this man the most important artist in the world?
Robert Fulford, National Post • May 21, 2011 | Last Updated: May 21, 2011 3:19 AM ET
The career of Ai Weiwei, a greatly talented and hugely troublesome Chinese artist, unfolds day by day as one of the most compelling individual sagas of this era. Art has never before seen anyone like him. Nor has China. In potential influence, he may now be the most important artist in the world.
Since April 3, he's been in police custody. He hasn't been formally charged but this week the police claimed he's guilty of tax evasion. His real crime, however, is criticizing the government.
Incarceration is no doubt a painful ordeal, but for Ai Weiwei (pronounced aye way-way) it's only the latest of many sensational developments.
Nothing ordinary happens to him. His life, like his art, has been from the beginning a series of bizarre exaggerations. He's known extreme poverty and shame, but also exuberant international success. Over three years, the police have seized his computers, closed his blog, torn down his studio building in Shanghai, beaten him so badly that he required brain surgery -and now silenced him by cutting him off from friends and admirers.
He was born 54 years ago, the son of a poet. When he was a baby, the government declared his father a "rightist" and banished the family to a re-education camp in Xinjiang, the far west of China. The poet was assigned to clean toilets. While growing up, Ai says, "I always tried to hide my name because I belonged to a disgraced family."
At 24, with film and art courses behind him, he left for New York to study at the Parsons School of Design while earning a living by odd jobs, including $15 portrait commissions on the street. His basement apartment in the East Village became a forum where exiled Chinese artists traded ideas. In 1993, when his father grew ill, he returned to China.
Ai has since built a unique career by generating an overwhelming blizzard of ideas. His skilful use of every opening in the art world, and every known method of publicity, demonstrate that he's a born entrepreneur as well as a distinguished maker of images.
Few artists of any kind have exhibited so much versatility. He's been a sculptor, painter, photographer, filmmaker, blogger and architect. He helped develop the Bird's Nest stadium, the architectural sensation of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
After the Olympics, he emerged as a subtle, imaginative and unpredictable social critic. He called the Olympics a superficial spectacle, a "fake smile," unrelated to the real China. Since then, he's emphasized the flaws in everything from China's oppressive politics to its chronically shoddy construction methods -"tofu-dregs engineering," in his phrase.
Thousands of Sichuan children died in 2008 when a major earthquake destroyed their badly built schools. Ai, with 100 volunteer helpers, constructed on his blog a list of the dead children, who were otherwise anonymous. In 2009, he designed a show in Munich, So Sorry, which exhibited 9,000 rucksacks to symbolize the children. The slogan of the exhibition, "She lived happily on this Earth for seven years," was spoken by a woman whose daughter died when her school collapsed.
Over the years, Ai has often redefined the meaning of art. In 2007, Fairytale, an installation-cum-performance piece, was his contribution to the Documenta exhibition in the German town of Kassel. It consisted of flying in a cross-section of 1,001 Chinese citizens, with matching clothes and luggage, and having them wander around Kassel.
Fairytale included rows of 1,001 chairs representing the participants. Since Ai's arrest last month, artists in cities around the world are recalling that event while demonstrating for Ai's release. They bring rows of chairs to Chinese embassies and sit outside in silent protest. (Toronto artists came together with their chairs at the Chinese consulate on St. George Street.)
One Ai Weiwei message comes through to me with special clarity. He makes it plain that the Communist Party of China has become the Capitalist Dictatorship Party: "People associated with the Party are getting very rich. They stripped all of the state-owned property and became tyrants of energy and transportation and everything. They are multi-billionaires, bigger than the Western world thinks."
By a devious turn of history, capitalists in China now own not only the corporations but also the courts, police and the army. It takes an exceptionally brave man to say that with the police looking over his shoulder. No one knows what will happen to him, but certainly he and his opinions get more famous with every day he remains in jail. Who could ever have guessed that this crucial political role would be played by an avant-garde artist?
robert.fulford@ utoronto.ca
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