China halts artist's satirical crab feast

Fri, 05 Nov 2010

Beijing - Chinese police on Friday held famous artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest to prevent him from staging a feast in Shanghai that was designed to poke fun at the ruling Communist Party.

The police placed Ai under house arrest after telling him they would not allow him to travel to Shanghai, where he had invited friends and supporters to eat 10,000 river crabs on Sunday, he told the German Press Agency dpa.

"The police came several times in the last few days. This afternoon their final position was that I could not go (to Shanghai)," he said.

"They are forceful measures and my personal freedom is restricted, so I cannot go," Ai said.

The Chinese word for "river crab" is a homophone for "harmony," the party's ideological buzzword for maintaining a stable and "harmonious society," which underpins its continued crackdown on dissent.

In response, activists have made "river crab" a popular metaphor for many forms of official suppression of rights in China, including media and internet censorship.

Ai organized the Shanghai event to consume "harmony" in response to the authorities' decision to demolish, or "harmonize," his new studio in the city.

His wasted order of 10,000 crabs and other dishes for the planned feast was a "small problem," he said.

"The (bigger) problem is that thousands of guests are on their way," Ai said. "They bought their tickets and some of them wanted to take their children and partners, but now they have to cancel their tickets."

Some Beijing-based activists who were held under long-term house arrest said they still planned to eat crabs individually and post photographs online.

Shanghai officials invited Ai to build a studio in a new art district two years ago but this year they reversed their decision and said the building had to be demolished.

Ai, 53, has become increasingly active in China's human rights movement in recent years.

In September last year, he underwent surgery in Germany for a cerebral haemorrhage that he said was caused when he and other rights activists were attacked in his hotel in the central city of Chengdu during the trial of rights activist Tan Zuoren.

Tan and Ai have tried to determine how many children died when poorly constructed schools collapsed in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed at least 80,000 people.

Beijing-based Ai has gained an international reputation for his wide range of artworks, installations and performances. He was an artistic consultant for the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing.

In July, he placed a giant rock on the peak of the Hoher Dachstein mountain in Austria as a monument to the Sichuan earthquake victims.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/352063,artists-satirical-crab-feast.html.