Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei successfully hosted a party in absentia at his soon-to-be-demolished studio in the Malu Town section of Shanghai. The “crab fest,” attended by more than 400 supporters (according to the BBC), went off without a hitch, without incident and with the crustaceans.
Tania Branigan of the Guardian reports:
Partygoers held up posters of Ai, sang songs and dined off river crabs—their name in Chinese being a homonym for the government’s buzzword,
harmony. “In a harmonious society, we eat river crabs,” they chanted.
As CultureGrrl readers already know, the word “harmony” buzzed repeatedly in the propagandistic catalogue preface written by Shan Jixiang, the director of the People Republic of China’s Cultural Property Promotion Association, for the Metropolitan Museum’s current Yuan Dynasty show:
Unification under the Yuan dyanasty contributed to the formation of a
culture that was at once heterogeneous and integrated; it led to a new
phase of exchange and harmony among various ethnic groups….An
environment characterized by ethnic harmony and cultural eclecticism
gave rise to artistic invention and diversity [emphasis added].
Ai Weiwei’s way with words and double entendres may owe something to his family heritage: He is the son of the well known Chinese poet, Ai Qing (a pen name), who was jailed for political activities and was “best known for criticizing the Chinese government through his poetry,” according to this account, drawn from the book Censorship: A World Encyclopedia.
You can view some photos of the interior of the artist’s condemned Shanghai studio here.