Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei (born 28 August 1957) is a Chinese artist, activist, and philosopher, who is also active in architecture, curating, photography, film, and social and cultural criticism. Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. In addition to showing his art he has investigated government corruption and cover-ups. He was particularly focused at exposing an alleged corruption scandal in the construction of Sichuan schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He intensively uses the internet to communicate with people all over China, especially the young generation. On 3 April 2011 Chinese police detained him at Beijing airport and his studio in the capital was sealed off in an apparent crackdown by the regime on activists and dissidents.
Posts tagged with Ai Weiwei
“No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy; no melees can be more exciting than those in cyberspace.”
Ai hopes the London Olympics will be different than Beijing.
Watch Wu-Tang’s GZA perform all the songs from Liquid Swords, catch a screening of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, and peek inside the studios of more than a hundred area artists in the eight-day extravaganza known as Brooklyn’s Northside Festival.
Ai Weiwei and Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron unveil their design for the 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Hyde Park.
The London 2012 Olympics will dominate screens and clog British roads in a matter of months, and while the the attention will be on the medals, it would be misleading to pin the games as merely a sporting event. The competition is an opportunity for the host nation to flaunt its power and industry through the architecture of its Olympic park.
Marking the anniversary of his eighty-one-day detention by the Chinese government one year ago, dissident artist Ai Weiwei is letting us all in on the government’s twenty-four-hour surveillance of his every move. Ai has installed cameras throughout his home and studio—over his bed, at his desk, outside his door, in his courtyard—sending a twenty-four-hour livestream to weiweicam.com.
It may seem strange to compare two exhibitions and a new art bar in Paris, but here goes. The three artists are Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and David Lynch (b. 1946), an unlikely combination but the most inspiring of what’s on in Paris in the coming spring months.
Pace, Gagosian, and other powerhouses may be rushing into China, but Meg Maggio beat them to it by twenty years. Her Ai-Weiwei-designed Beijing gallery, Pekin Fine Arts, represents major artists like Wang Qingsong, who currently has a show at the International Center of Photography in New York. “Never underestimate the vast cultural and linguistic divide,” Maggio tells us.
