Weiwei and eight other employees of his workshop last Sunday, April 3, were removed from a flight at the Beijing airport, from where they intended to fly to Hong Kong, the Kommersant newspaper writes with reference to The Guardian. According to the artist's wife Liu Qing, until now nothing is known about his fate. The country's authorities do not comment on the situation either. Meanwhile, according to Gazeta.ru, a search was carried out in Weiwei's Beijing workshop, computers were confiscated, and employees were interrogated. Censorship also shut down blogs related to the artist.
Ai Weiwei, 53, studied and worked in the United States in the 1980s and returned to China in 1993. He has his own bureau, FAKE Design, with which he builds small architectural projects, but a number of high-profile international projects have brought him fame. In 2008, together with Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Weiwei created the famous "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Beijing. With Herzog, he also oversees the program to create a new cultural center for China, the Ordos 100, in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. In his hometown of Jinhua, Weiwei created a park with pavilions-sculptures, which, among other artists and architects, were designed by the same duo of Herzog and de Meuron, as well as another Swiss bureau HHF, with which Weiwei collaborates.
Ai Weiwei has always expressed his active citizenship and critical attitude towards the Chinese authorities - and not only through creativity. So, in 2009, he began his own investigation into the circumstances of the earthquake in Sichuan and accused the provincial administration of corruption in the construction sector, as a result of which schools collapsed in the very first minutes of the disaster, killing many students under their walls. And in 2010, Weiwei supported the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned for political reasons. Artistic provocations and dissident blog posts were not in vain for him. The authorities put the artist under house arrest, demolished his workshop in Beijing, canceled the first retrospective at home and even threatened him with physical violence.
Shortly before the current disappearance, Weiwei announced that he was going to move to Berlin, where he planned to open an exhibition in April, reports RBC Daily. And the BBC notes the link between his detention and a series of recent arrests of more than twenty Chinese dissidents, which analysts believe happened on the eve of the expected transfer of power in 2012.
Meanwhile, a number of prominent political and cultural figures of the West spoke in support of Weiwei, Gazeta.ru writes. Thus, British Foreign Minister William Hague appealed to the Chinese government with a request to clarify the detention of Weiwei and recalled the observance of human rights. A representative of the US State Department said that "the detention of the artist is contrary to the fundamental rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens" and called for his early release. Voanews.com adds that the US intends to raise this issue during the visit of the US Undersecretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, which will visit Beijing on April 7.
Ai Weiwei was supported by his colleagues - celebrities of the world art scene: director of the Tate Gallery Nicholas Serota, sculptors Anthony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. And the American architect and co-founder of the Research Institute of Experimental Architecture Lebbeus Woods, who is now engaged in a project in Chengdu, China, announced that he would refuse any new projects in the PRC until Ai Weiwei was released, reports the World Architecture News portal.
N. K.
