The grinding heavy metal riffs of Ai Weiwei’s debut single echo an even more unsettling sound—that of brick being crushed to dust.
The infamous Chinese dissident may indeed be delving into a new medium, (his first album, The Divine Comedy, was released on June 22, led by the hard-hitting single “Dumbass”). But it’s far from the first twist in this artistic activist’s narrative. One of the most noticeable turns in that ever-thickening plot occurred in 2011, when authorities demolished his Shanghai studio art gallery. Many supporters saw the razzing as a rebuttal to Ai’s numerous government critiques and human rights pleas in the international press. But his greatest ally and dear friend, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, could relate on a more visceral level, having sung protest songs against those PRC bulldozers for years as they lumbered closer to his family’s village in Jiangsu province—a region deemed ripe for urban development.
“Tearing down dissidents’ buildings has been a very essential policy in China for the past 20 years, and probably for the next 20 years,” Ai says during a scorching hot late June afternoon at his studio in Beijing’s northeastern outskirts. He’s wearing a plain green shirt and brown slacks, and his hair is cropped to a bristly stubble. During our sit-down he never crosses his legs, instead planting his feet firmly shoulder-width apart while leaning forward in his chair. His voice is soft, but his phrases are lean and direct, lacking the flowery language that one might expect from a world-renowned artist. It all adds up to the look of a man drafted into an endless boot camp, as he further described the government’s punitive demolitions: “The state is selling the property to everybody, and many of us only get temporary ownership. So they can tear it down anytime they like, and there’s no legal action we can take. It makes me feel terrible.”
That threat of destroyed property is just one of many ties that Ai and Zuoxiao share. In fact, their lives seem to have overlapped in constant ways over the course of their 20 year friendship. But The Divine Comedy is the first project that both of these vastly different artists have collaborated on so extensively. Ai writes and sings all the lyrics, but Zuoxiao is the one providing a sonic canvass comprised of clanking drums, wailing industrial synths and ferociously gnashing guitars.
Zuoxiao is wearing a crisp, white t-shirt and a brown fedora. Throughout our interview he pets one of Ai’s napping cats and nibbles on the veggies that his friend has placed on the table. But the songwriter’s facial expressions aren’t nearly so gentle, his eyebrows arching as he keeps persistent eye contact in a hawkish stare.
“It’s a very barbaric and sad album. I told him ‘If anyone should be a punk singer, it’s you,’” Zuoxiao says of how he encouraged Ai to record an album. But he was shocked to hear that his friend sounded nothing like the thoughtful philosopher one might expect. Zuoxiao adds: “People will really see his angry side on this album.”
That anger gushed out of Ai long after his nastiest encounter with the authorities. It was worse than the razzing of his property, the scuffles he’s had with police, or the constant censorship he faces in the Chinese media. Above all that, Ai says his most harrowing hardship occurred in April 2011, when he was arrested before boarding a plane to Hong Kong. His release didn’t come until that June. In those months his family and friends had no way of knowing if they’d ever see him again.
But as he was sealed inside those walls, Ai truly unleashed his voice for the very first time. It started out simply enough, with one of the guards asking him to sing a song to break the monotony. Ai insists the officer wasn’t mocking him, adding: “The soldiers also face a difficult situation, and they can’t bear it. I’m not angry with them; they have to follow orders. They don’t know what they are doing. It was a sign of humanity, for him to ask to hear a song.”
From then on, he grew determined to make more use of his voice. After his release, and after a bit of prodding from Zuoxiao, Ai entered the studio and stepped up to the microphone.
“That’s the fist time I heard my voice so clearly. I could hear all the mistakes, it was like seeing a child start to walk,” he says, adding that some critics will likely nitpick these initial, infantile musical attempts. “To do it you need guts, you need the will, and you need sensitivity. Of course, you also need a good friend like Zuoxiao, who is willing to hold my hand and walk with me for a few steps.”
In fact, Zuoxiao has stood by Ai’s side for quite some time. The two visit each other so frequently that the musician witnessed the bulldozing of Ai’s Shanghai studio, and the artist’s scuffles with the police. But he can also relate to Ai’s trials on a more convoluted level. Zuoxiao had once worn a uniform, for instance, which was not unlike that of his friend’s would-be captors.