Signature image on Ai Weiwei’s revived Twitter page
Ai Weiwei, released from detention on June 22, was already asking for trouble by posting provocative documents recently on Google+.
But with his apparent return to Twitter, he’s flirting with disaster.
Like his Twitter page, the English translation site for his tweets (managed by volunteers) is up and running again. His first rounds, on Saturday, were innocuous. But then he detonated these explosives. (All times are from Beijing.)
—Monday, 11:29 p.m.: I saw Liu Zhenggang today. It’s the first time that he talks about the detention. He held up his right hand and said, “Reporting to supervisor, I need to drink water.” Then, tears rolled off this tough man’s face…He had a heart attack when he was at the detention facilities and almost died.
—Monday, 11:29 p.m.: For a certain period of time, we were held at the same location. I heard that another artist with a beard came in, but I never thought it was him.
—Tuesday, 12:09 a.m.: They were illegally detained because of me. Liu Zhenggang, Hu Mingfen, Wentao, Zhang Jinsong, innocently they suffered huge mental devastation and physical torture [emphasis added].
It appears that Ai will not—cannot—remain silent. We can only hope he will not be silenced.
I guess that when the outspoken artist recently told Jonathan Watts of the Guardian (in apparent violation of government instructions forbidding contact with the media) that “freedom of expression…is most important for my art,” we should have known what would come next.
Ai seems determined to speak truth to power, at his own extreme peril. This defiance is at once heroic and horrifying.
“A new day,” he just tweeted three hours ago (morning in Beijing), in a post that hasn’t yet made it onto the translation site.
May he live to see many…and may they be full of sunlight.