Ai Weiwei designed and presents the Human Rights Flag
Renowned Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei is no stranger to making headlines. Today, however, carries a particular significance as he unveils a flag designed at the behest of official UK arts organizations and international human rights bodies.
The commission was intended to mark the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The new symbol is expected to fly at public institutions, schools, hospitals, and other establishments for a week in June next year.
“I don’t recall there ever being an official symbol for human rights,” Ai Wei Wei tells the Guardian from his Berlin studio, where he has been living in exile since 2015. “It was high time,” he adds, presenting a series of photographs that inspired the design of the flag commemorating this significant anniversary.
We talk less and less about human rights now. Instead we use terms like ‘shared values’ to avoid offending the Chinese authorities with whom we do business.
The images depict the muddy footprints of Rohingya refugees forced to flee Rakhine state in Myanmar to escape genocide by the local army and seek asylum in neighboring Bangladesh.
“Illustrating such a vast and abstract concept is admittedly challenging. But I felt that such a footprint connects everyone who was forced to flee their homes: in Africa, in Afghanistan, in Bangladesh, anywhere. There is no more human footprint than a footprint.”
Ai Wei Wei suggests that globalization has undermined a shared understanding of human rights: “Fewer and fewer people now talk about human rights since the end of the Cold War. Instead, we resort to terms like ‘shared values’ to avoid upsetting the Chinese authorities we do business with.”
“People in the ‘first world’ struggle to comprehend how their lifestyle impacts people globally. The workers who manufacture iPhones in China are devoid of basic rights and end up leaping out of factory windows.”
The Chinese artist recently took his nine-year-old son along on a trip to Bangladesh as part of a film he is working on, as he has done on other research trips.
“He has accompanied me to most of the refugee camps and impoverished ghettos I have visited, from Mytilene to the cartel regions in Mexico. It’s not about teaching him anything, but through exposure to these realities, he’s developed a sensitivity to what is right and what is wrong. He also gets to see me engage in arguments.”
“There’s no way I’m not going to fight wherever I am. Even here, I find myself in disputes with Germans who assert that I should express gratitude for their ‘sponsorship’ of my stay here as a refugee. The stark reality of present-day Germany is embodied in the posters I encounter on the streets, declaring, ‘We are capable of producing our own offspring, we have no need for foreigners’. This is a chilling snapshot of the broader European situation, evoking a disturbing reflection of the 1930s.”
As reported by The Guardian
