Here We Go Again: Naked People for Ai Weiwei

The Shanghaiist reports that a movement is afoot to garner more support for Ai by posting nude pictures ala the one above.  The list of such supporters is increasingly interesting, as described by Shanghaiist:

Activists who have posted their nude pictures to support Ai Weiwei include some usual suspects — Zuola, who posed as Michaelangelo’s David; Tufuwugan who posted an image of him looking to the mountains with his bare posterior facing the camera; and Hong Kong-based Wen Yunchao, who posed with an effigy of thecaonima (“grass mud horse”) covering his family jewels. In 2009, Wen infamously posted a picture of his pubesshaved down to the “t” of the Twitter logo when he embarked on a “de-Maoification” campaign, urging his followers to “get rid of mao”.

The line-up on the other side even more interesting, though.  Apart from the Chinese establishment, which, according to this Washington Post article,is now setting its sights on a photographer associated with Ai (Zhao Zhao) for his “pornography”, this gang of anti-nudity advocates includes Facebook itself, which may have just limited FB page of Alison Klayman for carrying the same images that I’ve posted previously on this blog (heavens! is WordPress next?!!??).  Alison, of course, is the documentary filmmaker whose work on Ai Weiwei (“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry“) appeared this year.  If it is true that Facebook has effectively censored some of Alison’s choices, we have an extraordinary extension of China’s firewall and an escalation of arguably the major global conflict of our time–the battle for information.  This one to my mind matters more than the Google case.  Google’s search function was bound to be and should be challenged by other services (百度–in the Chinese case at least), as a multiplicity of avenues, sources, not to mention languages, must be maintained.  Facebook as platform, however, hopefully will remain unfettered for the time being.
In earlier posts I was concerned that no one was much able to consider the phenomenon 0f the challenge of nudity in historical perspective.  I still am. However, we can also see that the strategy of stripping down to make a point continues to be effective on some level.