ai wei wei {never sorry}

Never Sorry, the documentary about Ai Wei Wei, was incredibly inspiring for me. In fact, the entire concept of my project changed after I watched the movie. His simple interventions with a material consistently create a clear and powerful message. Ai Wei Wei seems to do this so effortlessly - that is, using a "signifier" and "signified" to convey a strong message, usually political.  As he stated at the beginning of the documentary, "Life is much more interesting when you make a little bit of effort." Ai Wei Wei is different from other Chinese artists in that his political statements are more aggressive – less subtle than typical Chinese artists. He seems convinced of the power of the internet to spread ideas and bring about collective acion. He says, "Blogs and the internet are great inventions for our time because they give ordinary people an opportunity to change public opinion." His artwork is often minimal in terms of material used; for example, in the Munich installation called "Remembering", in reference to the student deaths of the Sichuan earthquake, Ai Wei Wei simply covered the façade of the building with 9,000 backpacks. (However, this did make me curious about what happened to 9,000 backpacks once the installation was removed...) Rather than deriving his artwork from an aesthetic source, his influences are conceptual, resulting in a socio-political statement. As I was watching the documentary, I wondered how this approach could be applied to fashion design. Why should so much time and effort be put into making clothing that is just a manifestation of some aesthetic style? There are certainly designers whose work often has political or social influences - including Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen's collections - but much of fashion is not. I loved the multiplicity in the meaning of Ai Wei Wei's dynastic vase destruction. While it represents a destruction of tradition and old customs, it also reminds the world that destruction like this happens every day... without anyone really thinking about it. Ai Wei Wei's mother, Gao Ying, said something that struck me: "One person cannot solve an entire country's problems... but if everyone ignores the country's problems what will happen?" As an artist or a designer, how do you decide how much or how little you are politically involved? How much difference can one person make? These are valid questions for our society that is trying to deal with structural flaws and other limitations of modern life. Ai Wei Wei strongly believes that each person must fully utilize their freedoms, or to "earnestly cherish their rights" - which in his opinion is the "essence of society." In his artwork, photos are used primarily as documentation. As an artist, Ai Wei Wei has become almost a brand for what he considers "liberal thinking and individualism." His definition of optimism: "[is] whether you are still exhilarated by life, whether you are still curious, whether you still believe there are possibilities." The sunflower seed installation at the Tate Modern was one of the most impressionable moments for me. It was a beautiful and shocking realization that all 108 MILLION seeds were hand crafted and painted, representing that "every entity out there is its own thing."