Buncombe County-based viewers of Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly may be reminded of the site-specific artwork of American Mel Chin, who last year worked with students at UNC Asheville to create an installation for New York City’s Times Square. Yours Truly chronicles a similar long-distance art project: Chinese artist and prominent dissident Ai’s 2014 overlay within Alcatraz prison. It was put together during the period immediately after his brief incarceration by the Chinese government, when he was essentially under house arrest.
The Alcatraz installation, titled Ai Weiwei: @Large, was an elaborate and beautiful creation honoring prisoners of conscience from across the globe. Thanks to the film, viewers are able to watch the enormous effort that went into its construction, to explore it virtually and to learn the details of the work for themselves — and it’s well worth the time.
Yours Truly is not an objective documentary, however, but an extension of the exhibition, credited to Ai’s chief collaborator on the Alcatraz project, a San Francisco art curator named Cheryl Haines. She’s the film’s director and its primary voice, and she doesn’t hesitate to put herself center stage and pat herself on the back. Considering the magnitude of the project she pulled off — traveling between China and the U.S., supervising every little thing — that’s mostly justified. And to her credit, Yours Truly is a slick, dynamic film that utilizes all the editing and animation techniques used by the best modern documentarians.
But it also has the feel of a DVD “behind the scenes” featurette, in which everyone congratulates everyone else and any messy production questions are simply ignored. Don’t expect to learn, for example, who’s paying for all this or where all those worker bees come from. Things happen because Ai Weiwei wills them to happen, and no sticky problems ever need to be confronted. Still, Yours Truly is a fine introduction to the attention-grabbing works of China’s most famous artist — though not nearly as informative as the 2012 documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.
Available to rent starting July 17 via grailmoviehouse.com
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