![]() Until now, though, attempts to make it a reality have fallen through. Imagine: a sea of middle fingers rising up across the globe. “Regardless of the regime, it is necessary,” he adds, “and cannot be eliminated.”įor some time, Ai has envisioned open-sourcing the gesture online, as a tool that individuals can use to express their emotional response to the world around them, on an international scale. This would become the first in the Study in Perspective series, and many more would follow, taken all around the world to convey “the stance and attitude of individual existence” in the face of economic, sociopolitical, or cultural conflicts. In 1995, Ai took a photo with his middle finger raised, he says, “as an expression of my inner frustration”. “Despite this, every year on June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, I and my friends would go there without any specific reasons. “The government maintained strict censorship and control over people’s thoughts,” he says. Having spent the 1980s and early 90s in New York, he returned to his family in Beijing in 1993, and was “disheartened” to find that there had been no real changes in the country’s political landscape in the interim. It all started in Tiananmen Square in 1995, Ai tells Dazed. Captured on whatever camera he had to hand at the time, the pictures themselves have a simple, DIY aesthetic – despite this, or because of it, they’re some of the boldest symbols of dissent produced across the artist’s career (and, if you know Ai Weiwei, you’ll know there have been many). Each image is like a postcard from his travels, but overlaid with a stout middle finger. These are some of the icons condemned by Ai in A Study in Perspective. You could say it’s appropriate, then, that Ai Weiwei turns it toward some of the oldest institutions in the world in his provocative and long-running photo series A Study in Perspective. ![]() ![]() In fact, the middle finger has been called one of the oldest insulting gestures known to humankind, stemming from its resemblance to a phallus. Not the actual appendage, of course, but the insulting gesture, which the philosopher Diogenes was said to have aimed at Demosthenes, an orator and statesman. The middle finger can supposedly be traced back to ancient Greece.
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