![]() Regardless, each gesture was related to my personal experiences. Most often, I made these gestures out of contempt, but sometimes they were borne of boredom or other motivations that are difficult to articulate. I made the gesture for a diverse range of reasons. This feeling extended to many cultural institutions, such as the Guggenheim and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. During my trip to Washington, DC, I felt the need to give the White House the middle finger, as I was acutely aware of the pressure that political capitals can exert on individuals and the way they can distort humanity. How have you chosen which institutions or landmarks to feature in the series over the years?Īi Weiwei: I did not intentionally choose to make these gestures they all occurred spontaneously. This is something that I never could have foreseen. What I never expected was that after more than three decades, people would come to realise the importance of individual expression, including acts of resistance, protest, and contempt for power. Being somewhat shy, I gave it a humorous title, Study of Perspective, as it was a rather understated gesture. Why do you think that your middle finger has resonated with so many people around the globe?Īi Weiwei: At the time I took the photo, it did not resonate with anyone. Business, government, and culture collide, as does the personal and the political.īelow, we talk to Ai Weiwei about what it means to share his middle finger with the world, what’s worth raising a middle finger to, and how we can continue to protest against the “intangible” institutions of the 2020s. Middle fingers raised to the work of Walt Disney, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. Some highlights? A middle finger raised to a Ryanair jet, to Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square, to racist monuments, to what appears to be someone’s own apartment. Since the project’s launch on March 16, more than 15,000 submissions have flooded in. Ahead of an upcoming Ai Weiwei show at London’s Design Museum, the arts platform has launched an interactive online artwork in collaboration with the artist, which allows users to raise a virtual middle finger at any location in the world. Until now, though, attempts to make it a reality have fallen through. Imagine: a sea of middle fingers rising up across the globe. “Regardless of the regime, it is necessary,” he adds, “and cannot be eliminated.”įor some time, Ai has envisioned open-sourcing the gesture online, as a tool that individuals can use to express their emotional response to the world around them, on an international scale. This would become the first in the Study in Perspective series, and many more would follow, taken all around the world to convey “the stance and attitude of individual existence” in the face of economic, sociopolitical, or cultural conflicts. In 1995, Ai took a photo with his middle finger raised, he says, “as an expression of my inner frustration”. “Despite this, every year on June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, I and my friends would go there without any specific reasons. ![]() “The government maintained strict censorship and control over people’s thoughts,” he says. Having spent the 1980s and early 90s in New York, he returned to his family in Beijing in 1993, and was “disheartened” to find that there had been no real changes in the country’s political landscape in the interim. It all started in Tiananmen Square in 1995, Ai tells Dazed. Captured on whatever camera he had to hand at the time, the pictures themselves have a simple, DIY aesthetic – despite this, or because of it, they’re some of the boldest symbols of dissent produced across the artist’s career (and, if you know Ai Weiwei, you’ll know there have been many). Each image is like a postcard from his travels, but overlaid with a stout middle finger. These are some of the icons condemned by Ai in A Study in Perspective. You could say it’s appropriate, then, that Ai Weiwei turns it toward some of the oldest institutions in the world in his provocative and long-running photo series A Study in Perspective. ![]() In fact, the middle finger has been called one of the oldest insulting gestures known to humankind, stemming from its resemblance to a phallus. Not the actual appendage, of course, but the insulting gesture, which the philosopher Diogenes was said to have aimed at Demosthenes, an orator and statesman. The middle finger can supposedly be traced back to ancient Greece. ![]()
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