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Solemn yet provocative, artist Ai Weiwei treads a fine line between commemoration and protest in his piece Namelist. Designed to underscore the deaths of 5,096 children in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, Ai’s work—as its title suggests—lists the names, genders, ages, and birthdays of each young victim. But even more, Namelist attempts to make order of the unfathomable chaos of disaster, reinforcing as much the guilt of government officials as the innocence of voiceless victims. Following the earthquake in May 2008, a volunteer investigation spearheaded by Ai uncovered the corruption and oversight of Chinese governmental officials, who failed to address poor school construction before the earthquake and struggled to cover it up in the aftermath. As many like Ai have protested, it was not merely the earthquake itself, but these governmental failures that claimed the lives of thousands of students, who passed away in—to them—unthinkable ways: swiftly, brutally, far from home. Ai’s work thus assumes the task of social activism, challenging quite directly—with simple, black script on white paper—the inhumane response to human catastrophe. But how does such artwork preserve the memory of disaster?
As an American observer, Namelist calls one word to mind: distance. While the Sichuan Earthquake lies distant in my memory— nearly 8,000 miles away and six years into the past—Ai extends this physical separation with his emotionally detached memorial. Countless boxes stretch from one wall to the other, most filled with names and birthdays, some with numbers, others empty. Scanning the list, each box overlaps with the others until the victims themselves seem to lose their individuality. But this feature, I think, encapsulates much of Ai’s message. In his attempt to organize neatly the deadly toll of the earthquake, to personalize each individual’s suffering, Ai fails. The only distinct, individualizing feature of each victim is his or her assigned number, which—in many cases—is the only information listed. Much of this interpretation, I admit, is influenced by the fact that I cannot read each victim’s name or birthday. Regardless of the language barrier, however, I sense a critical distance from the Sichuan Earthquake. I don’t feel any empathy towards its faceless victims. Witnessing loss on this scale seems incomprehensible to me. And for this reason, I believe that Ai’s work successfully assumes the task of social activism. Rather than burying his audience in emotion, he places the viewer in the position of the arbiter, to determine the culpability of those allegedly at fault.
That is not to say that Ai completely depersonalizes the very real suffering of each victim. On the contrary, in his piece Remembrance—a companion piece to Namelist—Ai treats each victim individually. A nearly 4 hour-long audio recording, Remembrance plays the names of all 5,096 victims read by over 3,000 strangers. As each unique voice reads a name in its native language, each child assumes his or her own individual identity. Like scanning the list of names, I realize just how difficult it is to make sense of, to place an order on the immense suffering and chaos of disaster. But unlike viewing Namelist, I do not sense the same effect of melding each victim together. Instead, by personalizing each individual’s pain in his depiction, Ai preserves the memory of each child, while the echo of each name reverberating off of the list creates a powerful juxtaposition. As I stated previously, Ai tempers his protest with commemoration. And in combining the experience of Namelist with that of Remembrance, Ai performs this tremendous balancing act, reconciling the impersonal distance of disaster with the personal pain of each victim.
Assuming this position as both a distant arbiter and a personal witness is much like the task of the historian who studies disasters. While analyzing each event empirically is the ultimate aim, one cannot ignore the importance of preserving its memory and those of its victims. As we continue to study disasters this semester, reading the work of both scholars and popular historians, let us remember the critical distance and humane depiction of Ai Weiwei’s works and ask ourselves: how should historians perform this balancing act? Or can only artists, like Ai, tread this fine line between commemoration and analysis?