SOZIOLOGIE IN ÖSTERREICH – INTERNATIONALE VERFLECHTUNGEN. Österreichischer Soziologie Kongress 1.-3. Oktober 2015 (Universität Innsbruck)

Art without boundaries. Even under censorship. The case of Ai Weiwei. I hereby wish to address Chinese artists and their paradoxical possibility to get renown thanks to forbidden and censured forms of art. Indeed, media communications let them communicate their messages even from jail, by means of the interest focused towards forbidden social and cultural topics. In such a way, art becomes the means against all forms of violence and crime (moral or material). The contemporary Chinese artist has already learned to play the game very well (Yung, Asia Art Archive, 2014). In a video interview Yung explains that many artists in China deliberately create artworks that will be censored. A lot of contemporary Chinese art over the last twenty years has been made for the market and, it seems, making art for the censors is simply a more sophisticated variation of the same phenomenon. So, censorship is one of the most misunderstood things happening in China (Anthony Yung). Artists recognise that censorship correlates with international attention and success. It is no coincidence that the most visible and powerful Chinese artist is dissident artist Ai Weiwei. While he enthralls the West, many Chinese artists have met with a different reaction. The maturation of Chinese art has been accelerated by two decades of challenges due to censorship. There are three types of censorship that have dogged the production of contemporary art in the twentieth century: stylistic, moral and political (Si Han, 2012). Summing up, these models produced a lot of shared artistic and political values.