Where is Ai Weiwei?

Ai Weiwei in Beijing earlier this year. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

It is, as I write, 37 days since Ai Weiwei disappeared, arrested by the Chinese police on 3 April in Beijing as he was about to board a scheduled flight for Hong Kong. He has not been seen or heard from since. He has not had access to a lawyer (Ai's own lawyer disappeared for five days following the artist's arrest), and despite persistent enquiries his family do not know where he is.
Another question. Who is Ai Weiwei? As well as an artist, Ai is an architect, designer, activist, iconoclast, blogger, sometime antiques dealer and expert blackjack player. If the Chinese authorities who have arrested him and engineered his disappearance are right, this creative, complicated man is also a bigamist, involved in tax fraud, the distribution of pornography, and – laughably – a plagiarist.
There is no currently no news on Ai's condition, only rumour, including an unconfirmed and appalling graphic report, by a disaffected Xinhua journalist writing under a pseudonym, that Ai has been tortured, and has begun to confess to his supposed crimes. Meanwhile, his art has been shipped abroad, to London and New York and Switzerland. Two exhibitions of his work open in London this week. Twelve zodiac animal heads will be unveiled in the Somerset House courtyard tomorrow; these are oversized bronze replicas of figures originally sculpted by the Italian Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) as a water clock for the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan, Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong's summer retreat. In 1860, the palace was ransacked by French and British troops, and the heads were pillaged. Two ended up in the collection of Yves Saint Laurent; the current Chinese government has been trying to retrieve them. What goes around comes around. A second show of Ai's sculptures and videos opens on Thursday at the Lisson Gallery.
Meanwhile, there have been protests by the German, American, British and other governments. There are petitions and protests and a Free Ai Weiwei website, where information is gathered. A young woman in Hong Kong has been spraying "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" on the city's buildings, risking a punitive jail sentence. Tate Modern has "Release Ai Weiwei" written in huge letters along its exterior. Anish Kapoor has dedicated his Monumenta exhibition, which opens tomorrow at Paris's Grande Palais, to Ai. There have been moments of silence and noisy demonstrations, letters to the press from Salman Rushdie and a long interview in Germany with the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, who said that on his most recent visit to Beijing he had urged Ai to keep his head down or to leave the country.
Ai did neither. "What can they do to me? Nothing more than to banish, kidnap or imprison me. Perhaps they could fabricate my disappearance into thin air, but they don't have any creativity or imagination, and they lack both joy and the ability to fly," he wrote on his blog in November 2009, when he was already being harassed and having his bank accounts investigated. CCTV cameras mounted by the authorities outside his Beijing studio had monitored his comings and goings for years. He even made a sculpture of one such camera, a replica carved from a single piece of marble. "I believe," the artist continued on his blog, "that no matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy."
In Ai's Remembering (2009), 9,000 children's backpacks mounted on the exterior wall of the Haus der Kunst in Munich spell out the sentence: "She lived happily for seven years in this world." The idea came from the artist's visit to Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake. Seeing the collapsed school buildings, Ai said: "You could see bags and study materials everywhere . . . The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything." In 1995, he had himself photographed dropping an ancient Han Dynasty urn, smashing it on the floor. He had a similarly ancient vessel decorated with the Coca Cola logo. Both works speak of the disregard paid to history during China's recent past, and of the selling of the past as though it were a brand. Questions of value – of unique and irreplacable artefacts, and of individual human lives – are recurrent themes. What at first appeared as acts of cultural, bad-boy vandalism have turned out to be bitter statements about the state of things.
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Starving cats and haircuts
There are those, even within the art world, who have viewed Ai with suspicion and regarded him as an opportunist. If anyone doubts his seriousness and sincerity, I suggest they read the English translations of the blogs he posted between 2006 and 2009, when his site was closed down by the Chinese authorities and its contents deleted from cyberspace. Many of these 2,700 posts have now been retrieved and translated into English, in a fascinating and frequently very moving book just published by MIT.
I can think of no equivalent recent writing by an artist in the west, none that confronts political and social realities so eloquently or with such passion and controlled rage. Thoughtful, acerbic, angry, increasingly outspoken, the blogs cover innumerable subjects, from attempts to rescue the cats rounded up and left to starve in warehouses in the clean-up campaign before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to architecture and design. He writes about Andy Warhol, about the destruction of China's heritage and the unthinking cynicism and idiocies of city planners and cultural officialdom. He documents the Chinese government's handling of the 2003 Sars epidemic, the contaminated milk scandal, the "tofu-dregs" construction of the schools that collapsed during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. He damns the mendacity of the Chinese media ("To call them whores would be to degrade sex workers. To call them beasts of burden would humiliate the animal kingdom"), and the hypocrisy of some Chinese public intellectuals. But there are also lighter essays on haircuts, humour, creativity and much more besides. After the closure of his blog, Ai turned to Twitter, saying that in Chinese the 140-character brevity of the form almost amounted to a novella.
Individuals lead complicated and messy lives, artists no more or less than anyone else. Ai's personal history – growing up with his exiled family in a labour camp from the age of one, his years in New York, his return to China and his pivotal role in the Chinese art world, his growing national and international fame – is all of a piece with the art he has made. His apparently iconoclastic appropriations of ancient artefacts and reworkings of antique furniture have a relationship to China's history and its social realities, as much as they do to Marcel Duchamp or Warhol. His blackjack playing on the tables of New Jersey in the 1980s has been used against him by the Chinese media (though blackjack websites in the US are calling for Ai's release, such is his renown); such activities would be almost unremarkable if the gambler in question were Francis Bacon. In his blog, Ai never presents himself as better than anyone else, even if he has campaigned at great personal risk for justice in China.
Diplomacy by stealth
As Ai was being led away at Beijing airport, German politicians and museum directors were flying home after the official opening of The Art of the Enlightenment, a €10m (£8.8m) exhibition at the new National Museum of China, the largest museum in the world. Housed in a building in Tiananmen Square designed by German architects GMP, and the summation of a Chinese and German cultural accord, the exhibition is scheduled to run for a year. In the light of Ai's arrest there have been calls, even within the German government, to close it now. The show's programme of talks and salons is being poorly attended by the Beijing audience. People are afraid. The Enlightenment does not seem to have enlightened the Chinese authorities.
Other big international projects that may go on hold include a festival organised by the British Council, the highpoint of which is meant to be an exhibition of ceramics from the V&A and the British Museum at the China National Museum next year. The former chairman of the Museums Association's ethics committee, Tristram Besterman, has called for a rethink. The Chinese government sees shows such as these – as well as a massive building program, up to 100 new museums a year – as a useful exercise in soft power. The detention of Ai Weiwei does such canny cultural diplomacy no good at all. "If a famous figure like Ai Weiwei can be so blatantly abused in the glare of publicity, what protections do ordinary Chinese citizens receive from their police?" wrote Jerome A Cohen in the South China Post last month. A world expert in Chinese law at New York University, Cohen has pointed out that Ai's detention is illegal even under Chinese law. Where is Ai Weiwei?
Adrian Searle @'The Guardian'