Interrogating the limits of humanitarian art: the uncomfortable invitations of Ai Weiwei

ABSTRACT

Ai Weiwei is one of the most prominent contemporary artists to engage the so-called ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee crisis’ since 2015. His work spans several mediums, from feature-length documentary films to gallery exhibits, public installations, and social media content. Ai has garnered both admiration and criticism for his representations of migrants and refugees, with some critics alleging Ai’s works are tone-deaf and self-serving publicity stunts that disregard the uneven power dynamics between the artist and his subjects. These critiques, however, often overlook Ai’s postcolonial positionality and the ways in which his own experiences with exile shape his approach to representing mass displacement. In this essay, I offer a reappraisal of Ai Weiwei’s work by considering how his documentary practices productively discomfit viewers and invite audiences to interrogate the limitations of humanitarian art. Through close readings of his documentary film Human Flow (2017), gallery installation Laundromat (2016), and the notorious India Today portrait of Ai Weiwei as Alan Kurdi, I show how Ai destabilizes humanitarian documentary tropes typically used to represent refugees. In doing so, Ai calls attention to the constructed nature of his own work and invites viewers to re-examine their practices of looking.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary
• art
• humanitarianism
• migration
• refugees
• Ai Weiwei
• postcolonialism
• global media
• ethics
• care

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Sandra Ponzanesi and Ana Cristina Mendes for their careful readership and feedback on an earlier draft of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though unauthorized migration to Europe has been occurring for decades, 2015 marked a turning point in global media attention to mass displacement. The UNHCR reported that over one million asylum seekers arrived in Europe and an estimated four thousand drowned in the Mediterranean while attempting to reach the continent that year (Clayton and Holland 2015).

2. I do not mean to undermine the tragedy of Kurdi’s death in any way, nor do I mean to suggest that his death is undeserving of the public outcry it received. Rather, I aim to understand why the original image and its reproduction by Ai Weiwei generated such notable and global reactions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eszter Zimanyi

Eszter Zimanyi is the 2021-2022 Postdoctoral Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, where she received her Ph.D. in August of 2021. She is a former co-programmer of USC’s Middle East Film Screening Series and recently curated Discarded Visions, a virtual exhibit exploring media and waste. Her research interests include migration, diaspora, and refugee studies, global media cultures, postcolonial and postsocialist studies, humanitarianism and militarism, discard studies, documentary and digital media.