ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 moves back East-to China specifically. It considers the life and work of the artist Ai Weiwei, focusing on the way that Ai represents and utilizes death and techniques of memorialization to craft a politics. It looks not only at Ai’s formal works that deal with death directly but also his online presence on Twitter as well as his documentaries that he has made available for free-streaming on his website. It concludes that Ai “publicizes” death, with much of his work aiming to bring to light the effects of state obfuscation. As I will try to suggest, Ai wages his battle against the Chinese party-state through a politics and aesthetics of memory.
