Ai Weiwei: 'The mood is like Germany in the 1930s' !!!
The artist has battled surveillance, underground exile and even irate Berlin taxi drivers. He thinks the world has forgotten what human rights mean, which is why he has designed a new flag
The wallpaper image on Ai Weiwei’s mobile phone is a black and white photograph showing the entrance to an underground home in Xinjiang. It was here where the Chinese activist artist and his family were exiled for five years when he was a boy. “We were put underground here as a punishment,” he says. “This is where I grew up. Now they put the Uighurs in these kind of camps.” He enlarges the picture showing a bunker-like structure jutting out of the ground in an arid, inhospitable landscape.
Ai’s father, Ai Qing, was a poet and political radical who, although no activist, was seen as a threat to society. “So I’ve always been involved with human rights issues, not initially out of choice but out of personal experience,” he says.
Many of Ai’s works over a career spanning more than 40 years have been investigations into human rights transgressions, including his own imprisonment by Chinese authorities. But now he has taken his interest a step further by accepting the invitation from UK arts organisations and human rights charities to design a flag to mark the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“I don’t recall any kind of symbol for human rights,” he says, sitting at a long wooden table in his studio in Berlin, where he has lived in exile since 2015. “So it was time we gave it one.”
He lays out a series of photographs. They show the muddy footprints of Rohingya refugees who have been forced to flee attacks by Myanmarese soldiers and take refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh.
“These are the footprints of some of the barefooted children, women and young people who we met, who had no shoes,” he says. “Of course it’s very difficult to design something to illustrate such a large, abstract concept. But I thought a footprint relates to everybody who has been forced to flee, whether in Africa, Afghanistan or Bangladesh. There is nothing more human than a footprint.”
The mud-prints have morphed into several versions of a white footprint on a blue background, which form the basis of Ai’s flag. The design is set to be released on 10 December, and UK schools, police forces, faith groups and hospitals will be invited to fly it from their buildings during a seven-day campaign in June.
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