What Does a Terrorist Look Like? This Controversial Sculpture Challenges Your Inner Bias

In a year that felt explosive, due to in no small part to violent attacks in a public spaces and further increases to surveillance technologies, Beijing-based artist Li Wei created Secure for Now, a sculpture that questions current global perceptions of safety. Composed of fiberglass and oil paint, the statue emulates a blonde-haired, blue-eyed child with his arms hidden behind him and a little white dog by his side. Viewed from the front, the boy looks calm but vacant, tricking viewers who fail to peek behind the sculpture and find the grenade cradled in his hands.

“From certain points of view, crisis is caused by humans,” Wei tells The Creators Project. “Personal crisis is a crisis, too, and it is often from [personal crises] that a public crisis actually originates. When personal turns into public, I think that is when the real crisis happens. It is in the many details of our human lives that the sparks of crisis lie hidden, but unfortunately most people cannot or do not want to see them.”

Following the attacks of September 11, Wei became a documentarian of similar catastrophes, from a fire in a Shanghai high rise in 2010, to the massacre at Paris' Bataclan last year. The parallels between these disasters, for Wei, whom The Creators Project profiled back in 2012, is the chaotic flow of information and its use as a springboard for paranoia, often manifested as adversity towards the Other. Wei plays with this notion in Secure for Now, arguing that a small boy and his dog are the least likely sources of threat, according to mainstream narratives. Within the work, the artist strives to change perceptions of disasters and their perpetrators.

“A crisis doesn’t care about borders, and it doesn’t care whether they are regarded as big or small,” Wei says. “It is hard to imagine that the relevance of a crisis should be measured simply by the number of casualties caused.” Another mode of measuring calamity, Wei notes, is through Facebook Safety Check, which the social media giant controversially rolled out during the 2015 Paris attacks, despite the service's intention to serve as a check-in during natural disasters.

“Users could confirm the location of themselves and other nearby users on Facebook, informing relatives and friends of their safety, at that time,” Wei says. “My cellphone was fiercely hot, like a freshly cooked pancake, informing me that a great number of people were 'secure for now.'"

In line with Facebook's decision to expand Safety Check to include acts of terror in its definition of emergency situations, as disasters of all kinds have occurred, public opinion of safety decreases, while the need to place blame increases each time.

Check out The Creators Project's documentary on Li Wei below:

Li Wei's first European exhibition took place at the Paris Asian Art Fair, which ran October 20–23. Secure for Now was also shown at the Artissima Art Fair in Torino, Italy from November 4–6. To see more of Wei's work, click here.

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