Ai Weiwei taking a good look at himself..
CHINA’S best-known artist Ai Weiwei was detained yesterday as part of an apparent crackdown by the regime on activists and dissidents.
Ai, 53, was due to fly to Hong Kong for business yesterday morning, but was detained at immigration. An officer told an assistant travelling with him that the artist had ”other business” and could not board the plane.
Between 15 and 20 uniformed and plain-clothes police surrounded his studio in the capital, and more were believed to be searching it. Power to the neighbourhood was cut off.
One of his assistants said via the artist’s Twitter account that eight of his employees had been taken to a local police station. Ai, who helped create the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Games in Beijing, has been an outspoken critic of the government. His detention follows the dramatic disappearance for several days last week of Chinese-Australian writer Yang Hengjun, as revealed in The Age.
The trigger for the crackdown appears to be concern that the ”jasmine revolutions” sweeping through the Middle East will spread to China. At his studio in Caochangdi, in the north of the capital, men who appeared to be plainclothes police grabbed the phone of a Guardian journalist who took a photograph of the scene and deleted the image. A uniformed officer told the reporter: ”You are not allowed to be on this street. You must leave.” Although Ai has previously experienced harassment, he appeared to be relatively protected by the status of his late father, a renowned poet, and his high international profile.
Last year, for example, the conceptual artist created the Sunflower Seeds installation for the Tate Modern in London. Officials visited Ai’s studio three times last week, saying they wanted to check that staff there – particularly foreigners – were registered correctly. Yesterday, Ai’s mobile was not available and telephones at his studio rang unanswered. Posts about Ai on the popular Weibo microblog were deleted. Asked about Ai, an airport police spokesman said: ”I do not have the obligation to tell you the information. You may have got your information wrong; even if it is right, you have to go through certain procedures to make inquiries, not just make a phone call.” Last week it emerged that Ai was setting up a studio in Berlin, partly because of growing interference in his work by the Chinese government. ”You can see it’s getting worse,” he said in an interview published in Germany. ”My studio in Shanghai has been demolished … and another faces the possibility of being demolished.”
He said he wanted to spend ”as little time as possible” in Europe. ”However, there will be no choice if my life and work are somehow threatened.”
Last year Ai was placed under house arrest after saying he would hold a party to mark the forced demolition of his studio in Shanghai. He also complained he was twice assaulted by police in Sichuan, south-west China. In December he was prevented from leaving the country. Many dissidents had their movements restricted at the time because of fears they would attend the Nobel peace prize ceremony in Norway for jailed writer Liu Xiaobo. Ai visited Australia in May 2008 to launch several projects in Sydney, including an exhibition of his work at the Sherman Art Foundation. Foundation chairwoman Dr Gene Sherman described him as one of the top three artists working in the world today. ”He’s a credit to China,” she told The Age. ”The Chinese should be honouring him and applauding him. He’s an exceptional man, a giant among men – courageous, intelligent, articulate, charming.”
”He’s a larger than life person. He’s also very jolly.”
Doug Hall, Australian commissioner for the Venice Biennale and former director of the Queensland Art Gallery, who introduced Ai the at the foundation, said his work was shown ”all over the place”. ”It would be the equivalent of, say, the British police arresting Damien Hirst”. Ai is best known as a conceptual artist, Hall said, whose work amounts to a deep reflection and critique of contemporary and historical Chinese culture. Dissent is important to it, Hall said. ”There has been this precarious relationship for 25 or 30 years between Ai Weiwei and other artists and the authorities about what the boundaries are between authoritarianism and its tolerance of artistic dissent.”
