Beijing, 2003

I think what happens around us is often more massive than what we can interpret. I am Chinese. I live in Beijing. […] This is my sense of the massive change that has happened in this city, which we are all part of. I wanted to find an almost mathematical and unemotional way to show this: to show the powerlessness of the people, and the blind nature of the redevelopment.   Ai Weiwei

Beijing 2003 is a video work by Ai Weiwei about the city he lives in and its people. Participants include assistants Liang Ye and Yang Zhichao, and driver Wu. Beginning below the Dabeiyao highway interchange, the vehicle from which the video was shot traveled along each and every road within the Fourth Ring Road of Beijing. Sixteen days, approximately 2400 kilometers and 150 hours of footage later, it ended where it began.

Through the windshield, the camera objectively recorded all the visual information that appeared before the vehicle. It recorded the mega city of Beijing through a single lens, meticulously investigating the spatial state of the city’s streets, the constant change, the scenery, movements and behaviors. The sum of the entire process became the meaning of the work. The book Beijing 10/2003 is a documentation of this video work. One still frame was captured every five minutes resulting in the 1719 images that appear in the book.

Tessa Praun, Curator, January 2012