Ai Weiwei can not collect as a dissident – Berliner Morgenpost

  04:09:15
 
 

 Gabriela Walde

 Poet Liao Yiwu interviewed the artist at the Philharmonie

Ai Weiwei has a problem. Since he arrived four weeks before in Berlin, no one talks about his work. Ai Weiwei also criticizes the fact that an interview with the “time” has been translated distorting. There would be a “new” Ai Weiwei, muttering the one who believe that the pressure on him was hardly given way. The other of strangers now with him.

And now he is sitting on Monday evening at the Philharmonic, the first time in front of large public in Berlin. 1400 mostly young people came, many young Chinese are doing. A nice coup of the literature festival Berlin. At Ai Weiwei side sits the poet, peace laureate and dissident Liao Yiwu, who was as well as Ai Weiwei detained, and has lived in Berlin since 2011th Liao, merciless China critic, says he would have once a drunk, because of its prominent interlocutor. The two have decided at short notice, the “gear turn down” to make the call without Moderator, from Chinese to Chinese. Somehow there is an interrogation. Liao Yiwu, the questions which all want to hear. Is there a resistance through art, as it is with the fear, the heroism and the sense of guilt towards those who are still sitting in prison in China?

Ai Weiwei answers never directly, but in poetic ellipses, humorous, ironic. In many respects he remains vague. Obviously he does not want to be monopolized as a dissident. While Liao Yiwu art and literature evokes as forms of resistance, Ai Weiwei prefers to speak of freedom as a “subjective experience”.

Of course, Liao Yiwu asks how it was meant in the interview, arrests in China are now “no great things” more. He had, says Ai Weiwei and qualifies his statement, this development in the context of the long, very long history of China saw – Confucius is a keyword. Only in the ’70s, a judicial system had developed that was not but the rule of law.

Also on freedom he does not speak so well. Is he ever free? Since he is in Berlin, he was inside him “quiet”. He try to see things rationally. And because he did behave rationally, he could even come to Germany. Whether Ai Weiwei see as a political refugee, Liao Yiwu want to know. “That question,” said Ai Weiwei, “you have to ask is not. Whether I, when I am in China, again get out, which can not be estimated.” And we really do not know this evening whether the case Ai Weiwei is now a translation, a mentality or even understanding a problem.

 (Gabriela Walde)