Digital Video magazine — September 2012
Documenting Dissidence: Alison Klayman Directs ‘Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry’
Named by ArtReview in 2011 as the most powerful artist in the world, Ai Weiwei is China’s most celebrated contemporary artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. He rose to prominence in 2008, after helping design Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium and then publicly denouncing China’s embrace of the Games as political propaganda.
Since then, Ai’s critiques of China’s repressive regime have ranged from “perspective studies”—photographs of his raised middle finger in front of monuments such as Tiananmen Square—to memorials to the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died in shoddy government construction in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry documents the celebrated artist’s activities over the past several years, during which time government authorities shut down his blog, beat him, bulldozed his newly-built studio, and, in 2011, held him in secret detention for 81 days, making him China’s most famous missing person.
The feature documentary premiered at Sundance in January prior to its limited North American release in July. While working as a journalist in Beijing, director and cinematographer Alison Klayman gained an incredible level of access to Ai’s family and working life, including his mother and young son and the several dozen cats he shelters at his home and studio. What began, in 2008, as a short-term project to promote an upcoming show at a local art gallery, became an unprecedented view of the celebrated artist and his inner circle encompassing his Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate Modern in London and his Michael Moore-esque attempts to receive due process from Chinese police following his assault and subsequent surgery.
Klayman shadowed Ai in his Beijing studio as he worked and met with journalists, and as he traveled within China and abroad, initially capturing footage using the using the Sony Professional HVR-A1C HDV camcorder. “It was my first camera,” Klayman says, describing the many opportunities to buy lightly used digital cameras following the Beijing Olympics in 2008. “It was definitely more of a prosumer choice, but after he saw me using it, Weiwei ended up buying one for his team as well.” (Read full story…)