Looking across his fireworks mortars, Wang Xiliau could see the festival atmosphere of the crowd turn ugly: what had been a group of happy spectators was being permeated by the same motley protesters who tried to disrupt the running of the Olympic torch because it had an open flame. They raised banners: Sell Out! and Art NOT Carbon.
When he first took up fireworks as his medium, Westerners like them loved him. Dozens had snuck into China to help him lay a fuse from the Great Wall through 1,000 miles of Mongolia, to help an artist shine light on human rights abuses by the Chinese government, they said. When he was arrested, when he told the Chinese government that what he was really doing, creating art—Chinese art—that could be seen from space, journalists in the West wrote that he was just trying to save his own skin, like Veronese called before the Inquisition for making a painting of The Last Supper full of German soldiers, monkeys, and prostitutes. Instead of changing the painting, Veronese simply changed the title: Christ in the House of Levi. Wang couldn’t speak for Veronese, but the thing was, he never changed his rap. All he’d ever wanted was to make a splash. He’d stacked new cars on a pike and set them on fire—Shish Kabob; his performance Celebration consisted of him driving a new car full of blazing fireworks through Times Square. It was the critics who read all this anti-capitalist, anti-communist meaning into his tea leaves….
When they first learned of his latest plan, one that the Chinese government loved but that the rest of the world hated, it all became clear. He was going to set off nuclear fireworks on the moon to scar its surface in a pattern that would resemble the Great Wall of China. Whenever anyone looked up, they would be
reminded of the power of China, of Chinese art. Of him. These demonstrations he put on around the world were supposed to attract investors. Not protesters.
The protesters were making the crowd angry, and the wind had begun to shift. A man wearing an N95 mask and a necklace that rendered facial recognition software useless had climbed up onto the barricade separating the crowd from the mortars and stared at Wang as police pulled at his legs, trying to get him down. Instead of looking away, Wang met the protester’s gaze and held it as he pressed IGNITE.
Whump, whump, whump…. The mortars began going off. Hundreds of them in syncopated rhythm, each mortar emitting a ring of white smoke like a cigar smoker might burp out before its shell exploded high above, leaving a thick black smudge in the sky. The banks of mortars continued to fire, their dull whump, whump like the chug of a heavy locomotive till the sky was completely black. Then bottle rockets streaked up before this black curtain, releasing ribbons of white smoke that drifted across it, forming a picture of mountains and trees like a watercolor of a misty Chinese landscape only rendered in smoke.
Whump-whump-whump-whump-whump-whump…. Other mortars formed Chinese characters— 我担心什么 —that a videoboard roughly translated as:
