Saturday, June 11, 2011

Free to Speak







We went to see the Chinese Zodiac heads by Ai Weiwei. The heads are elegant and powerful. Their visual potency is simultaneously clouded and illuminated in the acknowledgment that the marvelous mind and spirit which brought them into being is suffering persecution. He is being held somewhere as punishment for speaking his mind, and expressing in his art his concerns over the lack of liberty in China. Not everyone will appreciate his art, but we should all feel concern over suppression of his voice. In the U.S. we TRY to protect the liberty of free speech no matter how repugnant the message. To see Weiwei's art is to remind us to not take this liberty for granted.

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