For the past couple years, Ai Weiwei has been a fixture in the art world. The Chinese artist, featured in recent documentary Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, is best known for politically-dissident pieces critiquing his home country. He’s dropped 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty vases, tweeted out photos of his arrest, and filmed a politically-influenced version of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” all in the name of art. But what about his life prior to international fame?
The BROOKLYN MUSEUM, current home of the Ai Weiwei: According to What? exhibit, recently commissioned spoken word poet KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI to direct a performative biography of the artist. Tsai's Ai Weiwei: The Seed, which premiered Thursday night, delves into the influencer's own history, including his life as a New York artist. Like Ai Weiwei, the Brooklyn-based, award-winning poet's work heavily expresses the need for change in the cultural and social landscape.
We chatted with Tsai about why Ai Weiwei should truly be considered an Asian-American artist and what surprising things she learned about the artist.
JESSICA CHOU: So you wrote Ai Weiwei: The Seed based off the artist’s own blog posts?
KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI: They’re pretty much verbatim. I took all these quote extracts, blew them up on 8.5x11-inch sheets of paper, and at our first rehearsal I spread all the papers out on the floor. So imagine this huge space covered with all these quotes about his life. And I told the collaborators to put the ones with emotional heat on one side of the room, and put the ones that don’t on the other.
Was there anything that you wanted viewers to take away from the performance?
Well, it’s always interesting when you think about any artist or activist—they get canonized in a certain way, but your life is as real to you at any other moment as it is when people remember you... Ai Weiwei is so written about, but the majority of that work was from 2009 or 2011. So you have 50 years of life before that, and when I saw the exhibit, I wanted to do a piece that showed that he lived in New York.
It’s almost like you want to bring him into the artist community in New York.
Community isn’t just about who you claim, but who claims you, which I always think about. I would like to claim him as a New Yorker. I would like to claim him as an Asian American; I’m really into understanding the fullness of someone’s life.
Was there anything that you wanted to put into the performance that got cut?
There were tons of stuff. For me personally, coming from the spoken word community, he lived on 3rd Street and he moved here in 1981, and the Nuyorican Poets Café was on 3rd Street. I knew he had interactions with Steve Cannon. Steve, who supported me when I first came to New York, was one of these East Village fixtures who was like, just do anything. Crash here, do a poetry reading, in that spirit, which a lot of people can argue is no longer in the village.
Did you run across anything that surprised you as you were reading Ai Weiwei’s works?
I was so surprised by his love for Andy Warhol. He can be so highly critical, and even though he was critical of Warhol, I really felt almost a dreamy quality to some of the blog entries about Warhol that really surprised me. He talks about Warhol’s work as
The BROOKLYN MUSEUM, current home of the Ai Weiwei: According to What? exhibit, recently commissioned spoken word poet KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI to direct a performative biography of the artist. Tsai's Ai Weiwei: The Seed, which premiered Thursday night, delves into the influencer's own history, including his life as a New York artist. Like Ai Weiwei, the Brooklyn-based, award-winning poet's work heavily expresses the need for change in the cultural and social landscape.
We chatted with Tsai about why Ai Weiwei should truly be considered an Asian-American artist and what surprising things she learned about the artist.
JESSICA CHOU: So you wrote Ai Weiwei: The Seed based off the artist’s own blog posts?
KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI: They’re pretty much verbatim. I took all these quote extracts, blew them up on 8.5x11-inch sheets of paper, and at our first rehearsal I spread all the papers out on the floor. So imagine this huge space covered with all these quotes about his life. And I told the collaborators to put the ones with emotional heat on one side of the room, and put the ones that don’t on the other.
Was there anything that you wanted viewers to take away from the performance?
Well, it’s always interesting when you think about any artist or activist—they get canonized in a certain way, but your life is as real to you at any other moment as it is when people remember you... Ai Weiwei is so written about, but the majority of that work was from 2009 or 2011. So you have 50 years of life before that, and when I saw the exhibit, I wanted to do a piece that showed that he lived in New York.
It’s almost like you want to bring him into the artist community in New York.
Community isn’t just about who you claim, but who claims you, which I always think about. I would like to claim him as a New Yorker. I would like to claim him as an Asian American; I’m really into understanding the fullness of someone’s life.
Was there anything that you wanted to put into the performance that got cut?
There were tons of stuff. For me personally, coming from the spoken word community, he lived on 3rd Street and he moved here in 1981, and the Nuyorican Poets Café was on 3rd Street. I knew he had interactions with Steve Cannon. Steve, who supported me when I first came to New York, was one of these East Village fixtures who was like, just do anything. Crash here, do a poetry reading, in that spirit, which a lot of people can argue is no longer in the village.
Did you run across anything that surprised you as you were reading Ai Weiwei’s works?
I was so surprised by his love for Andy Warhol. He can be so highly critical, and even though he was critical of Warhol, I really felt almost a dreamy quality to some of the blog entries about Warhol that really surprised me. He talks about Warhol’s work as