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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