Beaten, Imprisoned, His Studio on the Verge of Being Demolished

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei Weiwei is adored throughout the art world: he exhibited a poetic/political installation consisting of a100 million porcelain sunflower seeds at the London Tate Gallery. Each was hand painted by the artist himself, who toiled away on the project for two years. The seeds represent the life of Man as an individual, and speak out on the West’s misperception of Chinese uniformness.

Weiwei is, together with Herzog and de Meuron, the author of the acclaimed Bambus Installation exhibited at the last Venice Biennale of Architecture. They also jointly created the ‘Bird’s Nest’ for the Beijing Olympic Games, which should have been the symbol of a new China. As it didn’t pan out quite that way, Ai dubbed the project “a false smile”. After the Olympic Games closed he experienced all kinds of things.

Ai is a political activist who doesn’t shy away from saying what he thinks about the Chinese authorities, which landed him a stint in prison last summer. However, he’s not giving up even after being imprisoned. When Liu Xiaobo, an opposer of the Chinese regime, recently received the Nobel Peace Prize, Weiwei didn’t hesitate to express praise directed at the Academy.

His tongue has so far cost him his freedom, and will soon cost him his house. Namely, a couple of years ago he built a studio in Shanghai, for which the local authorities put out a demolition order. Ai interprets that as a personal reckoning. Namely, the Mayor of Shanghai went personally to Beijing to invite the artist to his city, where he planned on establishing a new Arts District. Two years later that same Mayor sent him a demolition order to be put in motion right after the EXPO closing. The order, in the Mayor’s words, came from “above” and can’t be retracted, thus Ai, to mark the demolition of his studio, sent everyone an open invitation via Twitter to attend his big pre-demolition farewell party where 10.000 crabs will be served, as the local delicacy.

The Chinese artist, the son of poets who were victims of Mao Zedong’s regime, holds that the demolition order for his studio was issued as a consequence of two newest instances: the first being Yang Ji, who was arrested and beaten due to riding an unlicensed bike, after which he inflicted heavy bodily injuries to six police officers. The second being a documentary he filmed about the activist and lawyer Feng Zhengh, who spent a 100 days captive at the Tokyo Narita Airport after being denied entrance to China 8 times.

Ai himself was also on the receiving end of police beatings and brutality, after which he had to undergo surgery: namely, the police beat him black and blue because of his support to the activist Tan Zuren.

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