Artist Ai Weiwei’s new film “Coronation” was recently released online, documenting Wuhan’s resistance to the Xinguan blockade and showing the lives of ordinary Wuhanians during the blockade, showing how the Chinese government’s harsh blockade of the city has worked but at a great cost to others.
Remotely Filmed Documentary
In January of this year, Wuhan, China, became the first city in the world to be sealed off to fight a neo-crown virus pandemic.
During the outbreak of the neo-crowning epidemic in Wuhan, Ai Weiwei was shooting Puccini’s opera Turandot in Rome, and Ai Weiwei wanted to document the experiences of ordinary Wuhanians, so he shot the film at night through colleagues he had worked with in China before, and introduced many ordinary people to join the filming during the city’s sealing, and then sent it to the artist.
Coronation, a documentary about the 76-day history of Wuhan from different perspectives, took four months to shoot and edit.
Ai Weiwei said he originally wanted to show the film at film festivals in Europe and the United States, so he proposed it to several festivals, but although the reviewers were excited, they all rejected it in the end. The artist sees this as self-censorship on the part of Western companies who don’t want to lose the Chinese market, so he decided to put the documentary online.
The Story of Ordinary Wuhan People
The film tells a larger story through chronological vignettes that revolve around more than 10 people. The first character tells how he came home to Wuhan after the city was sealed. There is also the mother and son who are grounded at home during the city’s closure. The mother is a retired institutionalized person who has given a lot to the country, but without any other information, she has never changed her mind, while the son, an artist, keeps challenging his mother’s beliefs. In the film, the artist son challenges his mother’s beliefs. Finally, the father and son, unaware of the epidemic, are trapped in a hospital because they accompanied his father to Wuhan for medical treatment.
On YouTube, Ai Weiwei said that the New Crown and SARS is a problem for the whole world, how do we look at it? How does it affect us? How do individuals, countries and different world organizations respond? In the age of the Internet, every day details are in front of us.
The artist argues that the attempts of some countries to cover up the truth about the epidemic will only create fertile ground for the next disaster, with the result that the epidemic will become uncontrollable on a global scale, as the last SARS epidemic was a warning, and that the neo-crowning epidemic will devastate social life, causing loss of life and property and dividing societies, making people question authorities such as scientists.
The artist told the French newspaper Le Monde that he believes that state capitalism is more efficient than liberal capitalism, that is, that a centralized society is more efficient, with one idea, one pace, one doctrine, dripping from top to bottom, and whoever makes a mistake will be disposed of. Such a society is one in which everyone is humiliated and even lives with the humiliation, and everyone is productive, to make the country glorious.
According to Ai Weiwei, Beijing, Shanghai, and other large Chinese cities appear to be as prosperous as Europe and the United States, but culturally and ideologically they are very different. China has laws on human rights, judicial independence, and voting, but it is not a one-party leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The question is, what kind of future do we need as China grows and develops rapidly? The Europeans are thinking, and the Americans are already responding.
Ai Weiwei, a well-known artist and dissident who has been living in Europe since 2015, is known for his large-scale installations and for his work on sensitive subjects.
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