Why was ai weiwei detained

As I wrote last year in my Profile of Ai , this is not the first time that he has been detained, But early indications suggest that this detention may be something different. The search warrant, the carting off of his staff, the level of coordination—these are not the hallmarks of action by a local precinct.

It was local cops, after all, who arrested Ai in the western city of Chengdu, in August ; he was beaten and, four weeks later, underwent emergency surgery for a subdural hematoma—a pool of blood on the right side of his brain caused by blunt trauma.

Ai, typically, turned the encounter with the authorities into a meditation on government and the individual, composing a body of work that juxtaposed documentary footage of his negotiations with police against photographs of him in the hospital with a drain protruding from his scalp. Pressure on Ai has been building. In July he was briefly put under house arrest, and in January Shanghai authorities turned his studio into rubble. I spoke to him at midnight, a couple of days later, and he had already left the rubble behind and returned to Beijing.

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Back to all news. Most viewed Video: Who is Ai Weiwei? Read full story. He recently told Christina Larson, an American writer in Beijing who interviewed the artist for Smithsonian, that he remains astonished by his prominence.

But I think [their behavior] makes me more influential. They create me rather than solve the problems I raise. The authorities keep him in the news by, for example, hounding him for tax evasion. This past summer, during a hearing on his tax case—which he was not allowed to attend—his studio was surrounded by about 30 police cars. The story was widely covered. In , he established a studio in a proposed arts district in Shanghai.

The regime, fearing it would become a center of dissent—and claiming the structure violated a building code—destroyed it early in His house, like many in the district, is gray and utilitarian. His courtyard home consists of two buildings: a studio and a residence. The studio—a large space with a skylight—has a gray floor and white walls and seems much less cluttered than other artist studios.

Both the studio and the residence have a neutral air, as if they have not yet been filled, but are instead environments where an artist waits for ideas, or acts on impulse, or greets cats and visitors. Like Andy Warhol, Ai always has a camera at hand—in his case, an iPhone—as if he were waiting for something to happen. His more immediate before, however, is not ancient China but the totalitarian culture into which he was born.

He spent five years cleaning toilets. Ai Qing was exonerated in and lived in Beijing until his death in To Ai Weiwei, there was also another, less personal kind of emptiness about the China of before.

You could walk in the middle of the street. It was very slow, very quiet and very gray. There were not so many expressions on human faces. After the Cultural Revolution, muscles were still not built up to laugh or show emotion. When you saw a little bit of color—like a yellow umbrella in the rain—it was quite shocking. The society was all gray, and a little bit blue. In , when it became possible for Chinese citizens to travel abroad, Ai made his way to New York.

His first glimpse of the city came on a plane in the early evening. For a time Ai had an apartment near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where young Chinese artists and intellectuals often gathered.

But he had no particular success as an artist. He worked odd jobs and spent his time going to exhibitions. The poet Allen Ginsberg, whom he befriended, told Ai that galleries would not take much notice of his work. He has a wandering mind that can embrace very different, sometimes contrary, elements.

The same artist who loves the transcendental oneness of van Gogh, for example, also admires the abstruse and sometimes analytical sensibility of Johns.

In one well-known example, he placed a Chinese figurine inside a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch. The house is four equal-sized boxes covered on the outside in corrugated metal; the small spaces between the boxes permit light to suffuse the interior, where the geometry is also softened by wood and surprising angles. The award-winning design is both remarkably simple and—in its use of light and the grouping of interior spaces—richly complex.