Hentyle Yapp, “Not To Be Governed Like This”: Ai Weiwei, Foucault, and Illiberal Representation, Public Culture, 11 February 2026.
https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12175774
Abstract
In expressing critique, the main model for understanding the merits of such expressions is through a liberal democratic tradition with its ideas of free speech. Regardless of whether discontent is expressed through aesthetic or political means, it is primarily framed through a logic of representation and the presumption that the means of expression directly mediate and thus properly represent one’s perspective. Under the governance structure of liberalism and its domination as a global logic, most expressions of discontent, from aesthetic to political, become equivalent and primarily legible through a democratic aesthetics. Within the provincial logics of Western democracies that saturate our understandings of the transnational, those nations without proper individualized voting rights or space to perform and enact frank speech are seen as illiberal and unmodern. This is because the tacit benchmark for our ideas of governance and law come to be inherited from a liberal formula that relies on democratic representation as the mode for political representation.
This essay examines other ways to understand governance and law beyond liberalism. The author uses the aesthetic to not only trace the dominance of democratic logics but also reconsider them through the illiberal. The author turns to the work of Ai Weiwei, engaging his 2019 sculpture Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen Cut in Nine Pieces. Ai’s work allows us to understand how our fields often approach the aesthetic as a proxy form of free speech and how we might expand what the aesthetic can do in relation to governance.
Foucault News 
The point about liberal democratic logic framing all dissent, even aesthetic, as a form of representational speech is so crucial. It makes me reconsider how easily we categorize artistic protest from non-democratic contexts through our own political lens. Ai Weiwei’s fragmented sculpture seems a perfect challenge to that.
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The point about liberal democratic frameworks flattening all expressions of discontent into a single legible “free speech” model really resonates. It makes me wonder if our criticism of illiberal states often misses how aesthetic acts can challenge governance on entirely different terms, not just as failed representation. Ai Weiwei’s cut-up declaration seems like a perfect example of refusing that very framing.
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