Ai Weiwei has been dropped from the Yinchuan Biennale, two weeks ahead of its opening, due to his "political’ status”, the Chinese artist posted Wednesday (24 August) on Twitter. The inaugural biennial at the Yinchuan MoCA, a private institution opened last year in the capital of western China’s heavily Muslim Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, is curated by Bose Krishnamachari and includes 73 artists including Anish Kapoor, Song Dong, and Yoko Ono.
Ai tweeted that he received a “vague letter” from Yinchuan MoCA's artistic director Hsieh Suchen that “the decision is made by higher officials” due to the show’s status as part of China’s One Belt, One Road initiative to build a new Silk Road of overland economic and cultural exchange with countries to China’s west. Hsieh tells the The Art Newspaper that the show is not directly affiliated with One Belt, One Road, but holds a central role as the “discriminator of cultural capital in Yinchuan, which is the main spot on the ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy…The government doesn’t have any involvement at all [with the exhibition].”
Rather, displeasure expressed in Chinese domestic media about Ai’s involvement raised Hsieh’s concerns, and “on 21 August, the board decided to exclude Ai Weiwei’s work.” She says it is the second time she has had to apologise to Ai. “The first time was when I invited Ai Weiwei for a solo show when I was director of the Today Art Museum.” She encountered “immense pressures and unanticipated difficulties that put me in great stress and distress and I left,” she says. “For this biennale, I gave a thought to the difficulties initially and I was aware that his presence physically or virtually will come with some controversy. So there were lot of discussions that went back and forth and inherent setbacks thereof came with them. Ultimately, the board decided to withdraw his work. Yinchuan MoCA is a fledgling institution, a ‘sapling’ for the contemporary art in Northwest of China, I would like to see this sapling being nurtured well and growing into an ageless tree.”
Following the end of Ai's exhibition ban in China in June 2015 and the subsequent return of his passport, he has been included without incident in several major shows in China, including last autumn’s West Bund Art and Design Fair and this March’s Art Wuzhen, both organised by local or district level governments. Despite Yinchuan MoCA’s private operation, the exhibition’s affiliation with the national level One Belt, One Road apparently subjects it to the more cautious sensibilities of the central government.
Ai meanwhile elaborated yesterday on Instagram that while censorship is a given under Communism, “it still comes as a surprise to me for an ‘international art biennale’…to remove a single artist for the reason of defending human rights and freedom of speech. This shows [that] what we face is a world which is divided and segregated by ideology, and art is used merely as a decoration for political agendas in certain societies.”
Ai wrote: “China is trying to develop into a modern society without freedom of speech, but without political arguments involving higher aesthetic morals and philosophies, art is only served as a puppet of fake cultural efforts. Therefore I am happy not to be a part of that effort as a political decoration.”
UPDATE: This article was updated on 26 August to include the response from Hsieh Suchen, the artistic director of Yinchuan MoCA.