Ai Weiwei and “The Fake Case”

The title of this article is ambiguous – it refers to a film by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and to “The Fake Case” (the sham trial) behind this film.

The film “The Fake Case”

The film “The Fake Case” is a Canadian-Danish-British co-production directed by the award-winning Danish documentary filmmaker Andreas Johnsen . The book accompanying the film is also by Andreas Johnsen, whose company Rosforth Films has produced a number of acclaimed documentaries and who is one of the leading figures in Danish documentary filmmaking.

Here too, Johnsen and his team succeeded in capturing the core of the threat of the sham trial with frightening conciseness; after 86 minutes of film, the viewer feels the anxiety in their own body.

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing airport on April 3, 2011, and taken to an unknown location. For 81 days, the Chinese state held him there without due process and under false pretenses; the aim was to finally silence the critical artist.

This caused a great stir in the democratic world, and there is more than one film about Ai Weiwei during his imprisonment. American filmmaker Alison Klayman, who lived in China for many years, focuses on the artist during and after his imprisonment in her documentary "Never Sorry for Exposing China's Oppression." She follows his life for three years, and the documentary shows excerpts from Ai Weiwei's life during this time, including his arrest in 2011.

The result is a kind of documentary autobiography that touches on Ai Weiwei's entire life and work. The documentary, usually referred to simply as "Never Sorry ," was released in 2012 and had its German premiere at documenta 13.

Danish documentary filmmaker Andreas Johnsen only began following Ai Weiwei after his release – but whenever he was in China, he followed him closely. Ai Weiwei was released on probation after his detention in June 2011. The grounds for his detention were simply asserted at the time of his arrest and have never been substantiated with evidence. This constitutes an unlawful deprivation of liberty, as an arrest in a state governed by the rule of law requires such a legal basis.

After that, Ai Weiwei was placed under strict house arrest for a year, just as without cause. This meant he was not allowed to leave his house, he was forbidden from giving interviews or making any other statements, and he was required to maintain constant contact with the police.

The actual “fake case” is, as mentioned, an alleged tax evasion without any evidence, which for anyone operating within a framework of the rule of law is an obvious attempt by the state to intimidate and silence the artist known for his critical statements.

This would have been possible if the Chinese people had not provided support in a truly sensational way: thousands of citizens donated, and with their help Ai Weiwei was able to raise the absurd sum of millions that the state had imposed on him “as punishment”.

Andreas Johnsen traveled to China seven times to accompany Ai Weiwei, and in total, he worked on this film for years. Johnsen simply lets Ai Weiwei tell his story, about the 81 days of solitary confinement, and about the fact that there were always two guards in his tiny cell.

Even during the night's rest, which one can well imagine was not so restful, even without Ai Weiwei's reports of guards pacing back and forth or suffering from hiccups.

Johnsen also shows that Ai Weiwei is pushed to his limits, showing him as exhausted and overwhelmed – but above all, he shows how Ai Weiwei nevertheless manages to beat the powerless and shameless aggressors in his life with their own weapons:

He installs four cameras in his studio that monitor him from all sides, day and night, 24 hours a day, and streams the images to the world nonstop 24 hours a day, thereby not only impressively proving the complete harmlessness of his actions and life, but also impressively giving every imaginative person a glimpse of what it really means when one's own data and images of one's own life become the plaything of an unauthorized and unregulated data collection and use via the Internet.

When it is reported that the authorities are “anything but pleased” by the artist’s self-disclosing defense, even the least imaginative people are sure to feel a shiver run down their spine…

In “The Fake Case”, Andreas Johnsen has portrayed the atmosphere of lawlessness and its effects on China’s most famous artist in a very intimate way ; it is precisely through this that the film succeeds in highlighting Ai Weiwei’s unbroken courage in the fight against the Chinese pseudo-authorities all the more clearly.

This makes Ai Weiwei and Andreas Johnson's "Fake Case" an impressive piece of hope for the survival of humanity, which was awarded the "Bodil" for best documentary film of the year in Denmark after its release there in 2013.

What business is that of us?

In conversations at a pub level – which still occur, even if there are fewer and fewer pubs – the opinion quickly arises that it is completely excessive to support an artist who lives in China; after all, there is enough to do here in Germany, and our money should be better spent on the needy here (what money they mean remains unclear, perhaps a salary that Ai Weiwei would receive for his work at the Berlin Academy of Arts, if he were able to carry it out – the author refuses to imagine what that would mean if taken further).

These are the people who say, “I don’t care if someone collects my data, I have nothing to hide!”, without realizing that they are being sold off internationally and that people end up on surveillance and exclusion lists if a family simultaneously searches the internet for a cooking pot and some camping equipment, because you can build terrible things with these two items (which of course nobody in this family knows).

Incidentally, these are usually also the people who typically do not get involved for their fellow citizens in their own country and, if in doubt, advise a victim of a blatant injustice not to get so upset, as there is nothing they can do against "them" anyway.

If you ask a self-employed tradesman who has been deprived of his livelihood by his client's failure to pay (and perhaps even having the payment legally declared not owed due to procedural fraud – such cases are being reported with increasing frequency); or a manual laborer who has to live on state support after a workplace accident because the workers' compensation board refuses to pay benefits; or the victim of a contract with a large corporation whose breach is, in fact, not legally actionable because the corporation is pursuing the case through the courts and the victim in our country does not receive sufficient support in enforcing their rights in court – they will even say that the Chinese people are ahead of us in standing up for Ai Weiwei.

In our system, the tradesman, the accident victim, and the injured party might briefly attract media attention (from which they gain little), then they are forgotten and ultimately treated as failures who must have done something wrong themselves – accepted the wrong client (although a client who intends to cheat cannot be identified beforehand), provided false information to the employers' liability insurance association (although the consultant said during contract negotiations that the flu did not need to be disclosed), or entered into the wrong contract (although any contract is invalid if the other party, due to their power, refuses to abide by it and the justice system does not intervene).

“Ai Weiwei The Fake Case” shows us an artist who, without reservation and even without regard for personal well-being, stands up against the violation of human rights and is committed to personal freedom and freedom of expression.

We all, including the Germans, can learn from Ai Weiwei that taking personal responsibility is essential. This is especially true in a globalized world – in fact, the individual is even more crucial if we don't want to leave the field to "global players" who, in their "global game," generally have no good intentions for others.

What we can learn from this case and the reaction of the Chinese people to it is an attitude – the attitude that listening to the victims and the weak, taking their arguments as seriously as those of their powerful opponents, and supporting them is an irreplaceable part of a civil society (as opposed to a society where only the strongest prevail) and a democracy, so that harmful and destructive power is limited.

We can learn to stand up for our neighbor who has fallen into financial hardship through no fault of their own, instead of looking down on them and being glad that we ourselves are not affected, and we can even learn not to buy goods from a company that treats its employees like cattle and/or simply doesn't pay taxes, anywhere in the world – in short, and to put it simply, we can learn that it depends on each individual and their commitment if the world is to remain a livable place.

Uproar as art brings additional profit

All the concerns mentioned in the section “What does this have to do with us?” can also be pursued by taking to the streets with banners or signing petitions (which is necessary and important and should probably be done more rather than less in Germany at present).

Andreas Johnsen, however, gives us a little more – he shows us how someone feels who is in distress caused by the aggression of others, he shows it to us in an artful and emphatic way.

Andreas Johnsen's documentary is essentially nothing more than a lesson in empathy, in feeling with and understanding others, a basic skill we need to exist successfully as a community – and which inevitably falls by the wayside more and more in a market economy that is increasingly less restricted by moral boundaries.

Ai Weiwei offers us something more – he doesn't simply call for rebellion against injustice; he denounces existing conditions by drawing attention to them through art – many incredibly beautiful works of art. You can read more about this in the article “Ai Weiwei – Never Sorry about Oppression.” Further insights into the content of Ai Weiwei's activism can be found in the article “Ai Weiwei – Art and Rebellion of an Unyielding Man .

In the spring of 2014, Ai Weiwei's film "The Fake Case" was released in our cinemas, and we can only recommend seeing quote from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

THE FAKE CASE turns truth into a weapon. A must-see

Lina cream

Passionate author with lively art interest

www. kunstplaza .de