BEIJING — When Ai Weiwei’s assistant, Beijing artist Zhao Zhao, was brought in for questioning recently, the supposed charges were simple: distribution of pornography. The image in question was “One Tiger, Eight Breasts,” a shot of Ai with four young women, all of them naked. I first saw the photo in August 2010, when he tweeted a link to it and said “Trusting each other fully,” though the link to the image no longer works.
The average art student can tell you these are simply artistic nudes, nothing more, but the charges seem serious. From The Guardian‘s Jonathan Watts:
He said police had questioned his cameraman Zhao Zhao on Thursday over pictures Zhao had taken of the artist. “They clearly told him this is an investigation, now, they are doing on me, on pornography,” Ai told the AFP news agency.
Netizens wouldn’t stand for this. Quickly, a meme emerged: post pictures of yourself naked in support of Ai Weiwei and Zhao Zhao. A few months back, I wrote about the Wenzhou train collision spurring off a series of satire photos I dubbed online street art. But this is online assembly. Unable to assemble in person, Chinese citizens in the mainland and abroad are using the power of the internet meme to assemble online.
On Sina Weibo and Twitter, they used the hashtags #艾裸裸 and #爱裸裸, both pronounced Ai Luo Luo. It’s a play on words with Ai Weiwei’s name and can mean something like “Love getting naked.” Predictably, the hashtag on Twitter was quickly flooded (or “polluted,” in Chinese parlance) by spam messages from the 50 Cent Party, a paid army of pro-Party internet commentators, to make it difficult to locate images.
I’ve chosen a few here, and the rest — well over a hundred — have been collected at awfannude.blogspot.com and on Wuala. Here’s the Chinese Internet showing the government that they and Ai won’t take these charges with their pants down:
User @lihlii contemplates Twitter while using the john.
/@lihlii
Most images I found were of men, but the occasional woman made an appearance. Here’s @suyutong, who added this message in Chinese: “I love my body and freedom.”
/@suyutong
Why is @ptoq covering his crotch with a stuffed llama? It’s difficult to explain this visual pun without jumping into Mandarin. But the phrase “The grass mud horse covers the center” sounds an awful lot like “Fuck your mother, Central Party
Committee.”
/@ptoq
Yep.
/@PKUTeaParty
Netizen @chenahwei had nothing to cover his center, so he drew this fire extinguisher with a Chinese flag design on it.
/@chenahwei
User @qgf_ tweeted this one out, saying he loves being naked and loves freedom.
/@qgf_
And, of course, the obligatory comic art floating around Sina Weibo. Here are my favorites:
A more conceptual piece, using Ai’s silhouette and the symbol for male.
/
From www.biantailajiao.com: Panel 1: Today the fat guy will teach you how to appreciate art about the human body. // Panel 2: Common naked photo. // Panel 3: Artsy naked photo. // Panel 4: This way is fucking called an obscene naked photo. [He’s having sex with a grass mud horse, a symbol of defiance against Internet censorship.]
/biantailajiao.com
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