TRANSLATING AI WEIWEI

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Lee Ambrozy, an American in Beijing, worked closely with Ai Weiwei to translate his blog into a new book. Here she talks to Andrew Stout about her impressions of the artist, who is still in police custody ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

After Lee Ambrozy moved to Beijing in 2004, she quickly grew accustomed to the spectacle that trailed Ai Weiwei wherever he went. The first time she saw the artist and activist in person, he was accompanied by five video cameras. Some passersby cried out for "Teacher Ai"; others stopped to bow. But Ms Ambrozy, an art-history student with a social science background, could only laugh. The scene was like something from a Eugéne Delacroix painting—and Mr Ai, detained by Chinese officials earlier this month, was still a couple years from earning his musket and flag.

Then in 2008 she received a call from Mr Ai's office. The artist was looking for a translator, someone who could turn his controversial blog into a book. "The caller immediately offered me the job," Ms Ambrozy said over the phone. "Anyone who knew what they were doing would have asked for a sample translation or tried to set up a meeting. But she didn't. She just sent me the text."

Mr Ai's office had good reason to seek her out. Since graduating from Oberlin college and coming to Beijing, Ms Ambrozy has immersed herself in contemporary Chinese culture. She has translated Chinese for MoMA in New York and the China pavilion at the Venice Biennial, and she now oversees Artforum’s Chinese language website and maintains her own blog, Sinopop.org, which reports on Beijing’s art world for English and Chinese readers. In conversation, her enthusiasm for the more subtle aspects of Chinese culture is infectious. She is a natural teacher.

But she was initially sceptical of Mr Ai's overtures. Finally, after several additional calls, she requested a meeting with the artist, who invited her to his famous self-designed studio on the outskirts of Beijing. In a 2010 profile in the New Yorker, Evan Osnos described the property as “a hive of eccentric creativity” with “airy buildings of brick and concrete” surrounding “a courtyard planted with grass and bamboo.” Others have compared it to Andy Warhol’s first New York studio, the silver Factory—a model that was surely not lost on Mr Ai, who has written reverently about the Pop artist. “It’s a very comfortable complex,” Ms Ambrozy said. “It’s like a little oasis in a village and very calm inside with lots of animals, lots of people working and recording things. He even had this little farmer family in the back raising chickens. It’s like its own little world.”

Before their first meeting, Ms Ambrozy braced herself for the arrogance of a global art superstar. But as they settled into an easy rapport, she discovered a good listener with a surprising lack of ego. As for what the artist saw in his would-be translator, she suspects it was her fidelity to his writing, which touched on a variety subjects within art and politics, but was increasingly critical of the Chinese government. After years of puckish exhibitions, Mr Ai’s blog, started in 2005, seemed to provide a platform for his activist tendencies. It allowed him to turn whims into agitprop for his admirers. As his commitment to human rights deepened, his audience grew. The zealous scenes he inspired on the street now had as much to do with his political voice as they did his artistic celebrity. Ms Ambrozy agreed to work with him, and they started searching for a publisher.

The two immediately established a work pattern. They would meet in Mr Ai’s living room and pour over his texts. The scope of the project seemed to grow each day. When the government shut down the blog in 2009, Ms Ambrozy said she felt a strange relief, as if their book had finally found closure.

When I called Ms Ambrozy, she was finishing a translation of a speech given in the 1950s by Mr Ai’s father, the celebrated poet Ai Qing, to a cultural worker’s union. She delighted in explaining the speech’s faded influence on Chinese intellectual circles. The speech is now hard to find in any language, its message of modernisation and reform evidently snuffed out by the Cultural Revolution that began in the 1960s. As Ms Ambrozy spoke of the elder Mr Ai, the parallel with his son's struggle seemed plain. “Ai doesn’t like to talk about his father, but it’s clear his father is a very big influence on his life,” she said.

Three years after the artist first reached out to his translator, MIT Press recently published “Ai Weiwei’s Blog” (which we write about here). Ms Ambrozy was at home in Beijing when she learned via Twitter that Mr Weiwei had been detained by Chinese officials. Four days passed before the government announced he was being held for an investigation into his "economic crimes", a catch-all charge often used by Chinese officials to publicly discredit dissidents. The detainment was the latest in a series of government reprisals against Mr Ai in recent years. In 2009 he was beaten by the police in a Chengdu hotel room, and suffered a cerebral haemorrhage thought to be related to the attack. In late 2010 Chinese officials put him under house arrest while city authorities demolished a studio he'd recently built in Shanghai. When Ms Ambrozy learned of this latest imbroglio, she was prepared for it to blow over like the others. Now, weeks later, she finds that the avenues once strolled by the artist and his many fans remain too quiet for comfort.

Andrew Stout is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. His last piece for More Intelligent Life was an interview with Miranda July. Picture credit: "Study of Perspective - Tiananmen Square" by Ai Weiwei