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Contemporary society maintains the belief that we are beyond binary thinking. We can access endless information on armed conflicts, debates, and elections with a few clicks of a button, creating the illusion that we have an informed position. It might appear that each of us, within our individually algorithmically curated internet rabbit holes, has seen everything there is to see. Furthermore, because of this world of accessible “evidence,” when one is asked to state their stance on an issue, one is subsequently expected to stick to their position. And being ‘on the fence,’ is of course, a guise for complicity.
While complacency or an apolitical attitude is not necessarily productive, Ai Weiwei is drawn to engage with the lack of nuance involved in the modern tendency towards the extreme. Through the act of enforcing a solid aversion to binary thinking, a new binary is created. In the process of continually reinforcing how outside of one line of thinking one can be, one may inadvertently create an either-or way of thinking, being itself Neither Nor.