Chinese lanterns, raised middle fingers, a surveillance camera and Chinese passport — images of written Mandarin characters made of bamboo and silk cast shadows on the Marciano Art Foundation’s walls in the crammed lower level gallery dedicated to Ai Wei Wei’s installation Windows (2015).
What would my mother think?
Whereas I see coded messages and Ai’s subterfuge, I imagined my mother, who lived most of her adult life in Beijing — where I was born as well, living there until I was seven before moving to Vancouver, Canada — taking these shadowed objects for exactly what they depict: lantern, hand, and texts.
By contrast, many in my generation see shadows. We suspect that there is political meaning to most things. We are internet-savvy. We live in a world of double meanings. Two written characters in Windows allude to how Ai and many other activists in China bypass censorship in the country. “河蟹” (hé xié) is the word that stands out.
Check out this interactive by playing with the “center” line:
Additionally, Windows depicts alpaca-like hoofed animals that symbolize the more blunt “草泥马” — with a direct translation of “grass-mud horse” — a double entendre for a serious Chinese curse word and an outright defiance of being censored online.
When in 2011 Ai’s personal Weibo account was disabled because of his contentious posts, one of his followers widely-circulated a drawing of Ai’s head on the body of a “grass-mud horse,” signaling that the Chinese netizen community had had enough of being censored.
Rarely have I felt so independent from my mother as I do in this space, this submerged underground gallery.
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Ai WeiWei: Life Cycle at the Marciano Art Foundation, (September 28, 2018 – March 3, 2019)
