NEW YORK, June 9 — One was a wildly successful artist, the son of Slovakian immigrants, whose alabaster complexion and shock of white hair made him instantly recognisable on the streets of Manhattan.
The other was a shy film school student from Beijing who toiled in anonymity, sketching US$20 sidewalk portraits to make the rent on his basement apartment.
And though their paths crossed at more than one downtown art opening in the 1980s, it is safe to say that Ai Weiwei, the young Chinese striver, made little impression on Andy Warhol as he flitted through the adoring throngs.
“I remember going to a gallery opening and hearing people say ‘Andy is here, Andy is here,’ and suddenly I saw him through the crowd,” Ai recalled this week, walking through “Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei” at the Warhol Museum here. “It was incredible to be in the same room, but I was a nobody.”
In the 25 years since he abruptly left New York to tend to his ailing father in China, Ai has become a somebody. Wily provocateur, enemy of the state and media-savvy advocate for the disenfranchised, he is a darling of the global contemporary art world, a bona fide celebrity whose burly, bearded presence invariably draws admiring crowds.
Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei, it turns out, have plenty in common.
Like Warhol, Ai surrounds himself with stray cats, has a fondness for neon-tinted floral arrangements and takes pleasure in subverting hallowed cultural touchstones.
Both men have also made a mint turning everyday objects into sought-after commodities. And Ai, like Warhol, compulsively records his life and surroundings — Warhol had his tape recorder; Ai always has his iPhone, which he uses almost hourly to post a deluge of images to Instagram and Twitter.
But the two men are conjoined by something more significant: They are both unrepentant iconoclasts and gleeful disrupters of art world conventions. Warhol scandalised with his soup cans in 1962; three decades later, Ai defiled neolithic Chinese pottery with tutti frutti-colored paint, and he once famously smashed a Han dynasty urn just for the heck of it.
“The things said about Warhol are intriguingly similar to what was said about Ai Weiwei today — that he desecrated art,” said Eric Shiner, director of the museum, which is staging a dialogue show of the two men’s works that runs through August. “Yet in reality, both artists changed, and are changing, how the world understands art and how art penetrates the world.”
Such commonalities are on full display at the museum. One room juxtaposes Warhol’s garishly tinted Mao Zedong with Ai’s own vaguely sardonic portraits of the Great Helmsman; another places the Warhol Coca-Cola paintings alongside a centuries-old Chinese vase that Ai scrawled with the Coke trademark logo.
As he glimpsed the galleries today for the first time, Ai seemed genuinely taken aback by how Warhol had influenced his work, often unconsciously. (Ai was first exposed to the artist after arriving in New York, when he bought a dog-eared copy of Warhol’s ironic quotations at The Strand.)
“It’s as if we were brothers,” he said, noting the similarities of Warhol’s early bird’s-eye ink sketches of the Manhattan skyline to his own youthful renderings of Shanghai’s rooftops. “Who could imagine that a poor Chinese kid would one day be showing his work alongside Andy’s?”
The past few days have been especially emotional for Ai, who has not been here in eight years. He spent several years in internal exile after the Chinese authorities jailed him for 81 days on spurious charges of tax evasion and then refused to relinquish his passport.
In July, the police finally relented, and Ai promptly decamped to Berlin, joining his partner and their 7-year-old son, who live there. In addition to lecturing at Berlin’s University of the Arts — a position he was offered just before his arrest — he has spent the past year working at a feverish pace.
His work may occasionally tack to the incendiary, but in person Ai is a calm, self-effacing presence — seemingly little changed from his days as the hungry East Village artist who threw away his paintings each time he was forced to change apartments.
Dressed in a black T-shirt and cheap cloth shoes, he speaks just a notch above a whisper. As workers made last-minute tweaks to the gallery lighting, Ai was transfixed by the wall of photos he took during his New York years: images of the 1988 riots in Tompkins Square Park; a snapshot of Allen Ginsberg urinating; and numerous portraits of a reed-thin Ai, in one naked and posing like the Venus de Milo.
“No one was interested in showing the work of a Chinese artist back then,” he said, shaking his head, and turning to a wall of photographs documenting Warhol’s 1982 trip to China.
Even as Ai revels in his newfound freedom, he is mindful that the life of an exiled dissident has its drawbacks. Living in Europe, he said, has diminished his voice as a human rights advocate in China. Unlike most persecuted activists who have been given the chance to leave, Ai refuses to seek asylum.
Next week, he will return to Beijing for a visit, a journey that fills him with trepidation. Ai says he wants to see family and friends, but he also wants to demonstrate to the Chinese authorities that he has not abandoned his homeland. “Things there are dreadful right now,” he said, referring to the unremitting government crackdown that has jailed pro-democracy activists, human rights lawyers and journalists, some of them his friends.
But he seemed somewhat conflicted about his role — an exiled government critic or someone who willingly, and perhaps foolishly, steps back into the dragon’s maw. “It’s not honest for a real Chinese fighter to be outside,” he mused. “You’re just throwing stones.” — New York Times
