BEIJING—According to China’s most famous (and troublesome) living artist, the painter, sculptor and architect Ai Weiwei, the government has targeted his assistant in a probe into allegations he spread pornography online as a way of getting back at Ai for his continuing activism.
The assistant, videographer, Zhao Zhao, told Ai he was summoned by the police Thursday and asked about a photo he took last year of Ai and four women, all of them nude, titled “One Tiger, Eight Breasts.”
The photo, though featuring topless women, is all but devoid of sexual innuendo, which puts it at the extreme margin of anyone’s definition of porn, and especially Wei’s.
"If they see nudity as pornography, then China is still in the Qing dynasty," he said.
According to Zhao, the police told him the photo was illegal and that they may pursue criminal charges against him.
"They said, 'This photograph is an obscene photograph,’” he said. “I said, 'I didn't know that, what's obscene about it?' They said, 'It's just obscene.' They've already decided that.”
No charges have been pressed, and the investigation appears limited to Zhao at this point, but neither he nor Ai believe either the photo or the assistant are the intended target. Rather, the government appears determined to inflict a certain level of punishment upon Wei for past dissident activities, and more recently, for, as one news report put it, turning the tables on the regime’s attempts to silence him.
Ai, the son of a famous Chinese poet who was himself persecuted and then reformed by the Chinese Communist Party, has used his fluency in English, as well as his ability and willingness to use the internet to communicate to a domestic and international audience, drew the ire of the government when he tallied the or tallying the number of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It was hugely embarrassing to the government because, according to AFP, “… many died in schools that were shoddily built and collapsed onto them, which many blamed on corruption.”
In April of this year, Ai was detained for a hefty 81 days, during which time, according to the Telegraph, he was accused of “tax evasion, bigamy and for spreading pornography online.”
Released in June, Ai was then informed by the government in November that his design company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., owed 15 million Yuan in back taxes (approx. $2,359,000). That’s when the artist’s immense popularity truly reared its head.
“Days later,” reported AFP, “a spontaneous online movement to help Ai began. Supporters sent him money orders, checks, internet transfers, and even rolled bank notes into balls and threw them over the walls of his Beijing studio.
“Visitors flocked there—some from as far away as Hainan island in the south, some 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) from the capital. Within 10 days, 8.7 million Yuan had been raised from artists, dissidents and ordinary Chinese, who accounted for the bulk of the donations.”
Earlier this week, Ai paid $1.3 million guarantee into a government bank account as a guarantee that allows him to continue contesting the tax assessment, which had to only further embarrass the government, which in turn allegedly targeted Zhao, the assistant, who admitted after his meeting with the police on the trumped up porn charges that the harassment is probably far from over.
"To them so far their efforts have had no effect, such as the tax case, so they are trying this from other angles," said Zhao. “They are again raising this [porn] issue, and will keep repeating this over again. They won't easily let him off."
Photo: Ai Weiwei in Tiananmen Square in 2009 on the 20th anniversary of the massacre, courtesy of Random Culture.
