On the night of closing ceremony, we went to Hackney Picture House, which is near by from the Stadium to watch a fim, Ai Wei Wei – Never Sorry. He is probably the leading (in terms of fame in the west) contemporary artist from China now. At the last Olympics, he created the Bird Next stadiam with Herzog de Muron.

After the Olympic Ai became more and more vocal about political climates especially human rights issues in China, and since then he has been on battles with the communist government. He has been arrested and detained for 81 days, and recently been charged with tax bills amounting to 2.4 million US dollars.

The film mainly deals with his legacy following from his departure to USA in 80’s and his recent struggle with the regime, and his will to bring freedom to China. He use social media such as Twitter and his blog as a tool to maintain following in and outside China.

In this film, I was particularly intersted in the history surrounding his early years. His farther was also an artist, who moved to Paris in 1930’s. I imagine he came from an intellectual family to study in Paris this time. And when he returned to China after 3 years, he was jailed by the National Party. In jail as he could not paint, he started to write poems and he bacema one of the most influential poet of his time.

Ai’s farther became a collaborator for the Communist Party like many of the intellectual youths of that time, and they fought against Japanese and then National Party to build People’s Republic of China in 1949.

However in 1960’s, Mao’s cultural revolution labelled him as a counter-revolutionary because he was an intellectual. Under the revolution, much of the culture was destroyed in China, from books, temples, artifacts to art. It really was a crazy time, when school kids were regarded as more important than their teachers because of their lack of knowledge and closer to being the position of pure worker.

Ai’s farther was sent to northen part of China near the desert as a labourer. He cleaned the public toilet everyday. There are millions of stories like this. Jung Chang’s book Wild Swan illustrates such tragedy very vividly, as well as Zhang Yimou’s 1994 film – To Live (He also orchestrated the foot print fireworks for 2008 Olympics in Beijing)

So Ai Wei Wei would watch his farther clean the toilet everyday growing up. There were no art, although Ai’s farther would talk about his time in Paris on odd occasion. Ai entered eventually entered Beijing Film Academy then moved to study in US in 80’s with support from the government.

I saw a Ai’s exhibition at Martin-Gropius Bau museum last year. It showed many photographs from Ai’s stay in New York in the 80’s. He spoke no English when he landed in US, but he leaned the language quickly then entered Parsons School of Arts and spend over 10 years there. Many of the photographs echoes his fresh experience and his curiousity.

Han, my friend who visted today also moved to New York after his study in New Zealand for 6 months. When I visted him in New Yrok, remember him living with 2 other Chinese (illegal) immigrant in hosing project. Other chinese people living in the apartment were smuggled from China in a container ship.

Han’s parents were also intellectuals in China who participated in movement of Tiananmen in other city. They moved to New Zealand after this era, as they saw no bright future in China.

One thing which speaks to me in Ai’s story as well as Han’s, is that they have very high ambition in their 20’s and how their family legacy shines through despite their hardship and immigrating to completely different context.

These parallel stories makes me think of essence of what such families can pass on,  such as attitude towards knowledge despite the shift in social, political or economic surroundings.

Andy Sachs: No. No, no. Nothing’s… You know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. You know, I’m still learning about all this stuff and, uh…

Miranda Priestly: ‘This… stuff’? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent… wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.