A wall to my back
Played its part
Forced me to start
This blog
My father? – an exile
Telegraph poles and aerials
Competed with
Naked crowns
Of trees
Books – damaged me
A shift in the shade
The corporation
Embodied – a plan
Following
Ten thousand plus horizons
Within the eucalyptus
At twilight – magic hour
A bearded man – jaw jaws
On silence
In the high place – interned
Angry dog barks
At lazy owners
A locked door – frost
No prompt
Unconscious – a poem
Sunset unseen – a life
Made of bricks
Is any effort worth
No memory;
No imagination? – the moment
acts
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn -- Ai Weiwei 
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist. He's largely built his career on controversy and he was imprisoned for tax evasion once. He's a tricky one to pin down: is he really a rebel or just about self-aggrandisement? I read a book of interviews Hans-Ulrich Obrist did with him and it was interesting how the same questions were posed after intervals of many years. The answers they would elicit from Ai Weiwei would change in minute details over those years. I liked this constant rephrasing by Ai Weiwei of his own history (mythology?), so I wrote a poem about it.
ReplyDelete--Simon Leake
When poet Jiang Zhenghan was tortured and imprisoned he wrote his 1st book and was writing his surname but balked at sharing the name of Jiang Jieshi ("Chiang Kai-shek"), so he crossed it out ("X" is "ai" in Chinese) and adopted Ai Qing as a pen name instead. In 1942 he became a Communist but in his 60s was accused of "rightism" and sent to a labor camp and then into internal exile with his family. Due to lack of nutrition he lost sight in one eye. His son Ai Weiwei was 1 at the begining of the ordeal, and they did not return to Beijing until 1976, after the death of Mao Zedong. Weiwei studied animation at the Beijing Film Academy and founded one of China's 1st avant garde art groups, then spent nearly a decade in the US. Returning to China due t his father's illness, he establish an experimental artists' village and began designing architectural projects (eventually he served as artistic consultant on the Bird's Nest stadium designed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Sina Weibo, China's largest internet platform, invited him to establish a blog in 2005, and he began writing scathing social commentary until the government closed the site in 2009 due to his investigative activism in the wake of a severe earthquake in Sichuan. He was severely beaten by the police and placed under house arrest. He was rearrested in 2011 for tax evasion and bigamy and labelled a "deviant and a plagiarist" in the press. After his release he was confined to Beijing for a year and was not allowed to leave the country until 2015, though he continued to produce provocative art.