For someone so irreverent and with such a remarkable disdain for authority, the Beijing-based artist Ai Weiwei speaks and thinks with surprising care, delicacy, and playfulness. He can sound and often look like a street-side sage, talking in sagacious elipses and in penetrating axioms, delighting while he confounds.He built his reputation in visual art first — subtly subversive stuff, breaking antique vases, giving the middle finger to Mao, strange furniture — and dipped into performance, into architecture. He's not an architect, he swears, even if he helped design the Olympic Stadium with Herzog and de Meuron, even if his simple buildings are some of the most inspired in China.But in the past two years – mostly since the disastrous earthquake in Sichuan province – he's really made a name as a kind of activist poet. That is, poet in the largest sense. A fearless someone who creates, an inspired and tireless citizen of the world.And these days, his medium, mostly, is Twitter.For years, his blog, a compendium mainly of photos chronicling every hour of his day, interspersed with a cutting, literate commentary, was a major hub of political discourse on the Chinese internet. When the authorities finally shut down the blog last year, just as Weiwei was raising his critical voice louder than ever, Twitter provided a perfect outlet for his epigrammatic ideas and his busy, peripatetic schedule, divided between his international art openings and his trips to Sichuan. (Chris Gill, a journalist, introduced Weiwei to Twitter last year: listen here.)To Chinese Twitter users, the micro-blogging service's 140 character space is far from stifling: it not only provides ample room to write a novel in Chinese, but it opens a new line of communication for those whose writing doesn't concern pop stars or government praise.Of course, Twitter is blocked in China, accessible only through back channels that can pass under the Great Firewall, and to those who can navigate its English-language login screens. It's estimated China's Twitter users number around only 50,000.Which in a way is what makes it so valuable in China: the community that goes to great lengths to use it does not take it for granted. They don't use it to talk about what they had for lunch or to "socialize their content," so much as to communicate somewhat openly about important political and cultural issues.Paradoxically, by blocking it – placing it in a parallel universe and off limits to most of China – the authorities have breathed a certain life into it that doesn't exist in most other countries. Even if they're always watching, which they may very well be, they do not police it (and given the sheer number of tweets out there, and the careful coded language with which some are written, they probably couldn't).But Ai wants more Chinese to find their way onto the service. After telling Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recently that he was a "God" in China, Ai asked Dorsey directly to add Chinese language functionality. Dorsey said to be patient.On many levels, Ai seems like the paragon of patience, a rock of deep composure and contemplation who has stayed in his homeland for years despite the abuse he and his family have received at the hands of power (a knock to the head by police last year almost killed him), despite the pull of an adoring West; a man who has made it his mission and his art to track down the name of every single and often young victim of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, because he knows the official statistics can't be trusted.But as meticulous and composed as he may seem, Ai's also too impatient to wait for anything to happen. He always seems to be improving, he's always asking how things can get better, and he's way too concerned about the world to be worrying about things like his legacy or how to turn his ideas into art.He just acts – for now, 140 characters at a time."I feel like Twitter is just like a diary," says Ai. "I don't think we have time for writing our autobiography. Life itself is the autobiography. Every minute is the writing process. Writing it all again would be a waste of time."via New Yorker / @osnos
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