Tomorrow Night the Hammer Museum Presents Ai Weiwei's Film "Human Flow"

In L.A.? Tomorrow night @hammer_museum presents  @aiww 's film "Human Flow" and Q&A with Ai Weiwei https://t.co/pFlTnIuLyD pic.twitter.com/zMsYYTTUAC

— Gregg Chadwick (@greggchadwick) January 3, 2018

Walk with Ai Weiwei through his newest outdoor art project in New York, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”

Walk with Ai Weiwei through his newest outdoor art project in New York, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” which tackles issues of immigration and inclusion.Publish DateOctober 13, 2017. Photo by Jean Yves Chainon/The New York Times. Technology by Samsung..

By HILARY SWIFT, JEAN YVES CHAINON and KAITLYN MULLIN 

Legos Doesn't Like Political Art Made From Legos

Legos refuses Ai Weiwei bulk order says “cannot approve use of #Legos for political works” http://ow.ly/TOWVD 

Provocative Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Creates His Own Gangnam Style Video

Provocative Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Creates His Own Gangnam Style Video

Here's Ai Weiwei's twitter announcement:

@aiww 
艾未未 Ai Weiwei

给债主的礼物。。疯转吧！！！RT @aiww: 草泥马stylehttp://t.co/OmLdJjP3 来自 @youtube

October 24, 2012 3:15 pm via weiweiweb Reply Retweet Favorite

Chinese Consulate in New York City Carries a Ghostly Image of Falsely Imprisoned Artist Ai Weiwei

Nemesis-Ai Weiwei: The Elusiveness of Being. By Geandy Pavon

"The concept of the project is to impose the face of the victim on buildings walls that house government offices … The light on the wall is a symbol of revelation."
-Geandy Pavon

Provocative work by Cuban-American artist Geandy Pavon as he projects a billboard sized portrait of Ai Weiwei onto the Chinese consulate in New York City.

More at:
Geandy Pavon Website
Video: Imprisoned Artist Ai Weiwei's Face Projected On Chinese Consulate

International Concern for the Plight of Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei

A Berlin Museum Calls for China to Free Ai Weiwei

Last week, Salman Rushdie in the New York Times, wrote an important piece on the plight of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Excerpts below:

"The great Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern, a former power station, is a notoriously difficult space for an artist to fill with authority. Its immensity can dwarf the imaginations of all but a select tribe of modern artists who understand the mysteries of scale, of how to say something interesting when you also have to say something really big. Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider once stood menacingly in this hall; Anish Kapoor’s “Marsyas,” a huge, hollow trumpet-like shape made of a stretched substance that hinted at flayed skin, triumphed over it majestically."


Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei at the Tate Modern in London - October 2010

"Last October the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei covered the floor with his “Sunflower Seeds”: 100 million tiny porcelain objects, each handmade by a master craftsman, no two identical. The installation was a carpet of life, multitudinous, inexplicable and, in the best Surrealist sense, strange. The seeds were intended to be walked on, but further strangeness followed. It was discovered that when trampled they gave off a fine dust that could damage the lungs. These symbolic representations of life could, it appeared, be dangerous to the living. The exhibition was cordoned off and visitors had to walk carefully around the perimeter."

"Art can be dangerous. Very often artistic fame has proved dangerous to artists themselves. Mr. Ai’s work is not polemical — it tends towards the mysterious. But his immense prominence as an artist (he was a design consultant on the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics and was recently ranked No. 13 in Art Review magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful figures in art) has allowed him to take up human rights cases and to draw attention to China’s often inadequate responses to disasters (like the plight of the child victims of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province or those afflicted by deadly apartment fires in Shanghai last November). The authorities have embarrassed and harassed him before, but now they have gone on a dangerous new offensive.On April 4, Mr. Ai was arrested by the Chinese authorities as he tried to board a plane to Hong Kong. His studio was raided and computers and other items were removed."
-Salman Rushdie in the New York Times.

Continue reading the entire piece at:
Dangerous Arts

A Call for China to Free Unjustly Imprisoned Artist Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei with musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou in the elevator when taken in custody by the police, Sichuan, China, August 2009
100 cm x 130 cm color photograph
Courtesy Ai Weiwei and Christine König Galerie, Vienna

“We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.”
- Salman Rushdie

On April 3, 2011, the internationally recognized Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by Chinese officials at the Beijing airport while en route to Hong Kong, and his papers and computers were seized from his studio compound.

The international arts community has rallied around Ai Weiwei's unjust incarceration and an online petition is being sponsored by museum directors and cultural figures across the globe: 'By using Ai Weiwei’s favored medium of “social sculpture,” we hope to hasten the release of our visionary friend."

Please take a moment and sign the petition here:
Call for the Release of Ai WeiWei

Your signature will join the growing list sampled below:

Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation
and Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art
Juan Ignacio Vidarte, Director General, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,
and Deputy Director and Chief Officer for Global Strategies, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Glenn Lowry, Director, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Sir Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate and Chris Dercon, Director, Tate Modern
Kaywin Feldman, President, Association of Art Museum Directors and Director
and President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Yongwoo Lee, President, The Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Michael Govan, Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Vishakha Desai, President and Melissa Chiu, Vice President of Global Arts, Asia Society
Jim Cuno, President and Director, Art Institute of Chicago
Julián Zugazagoitia, Director, Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City
Ann Philbin, Director, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles
Olga Viso, Director, Walker Art Center
Alfred Pacquement, Director, Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Paris
Arnold Lehman, Director, Brooklyn Museum
Jill Medvedow, Director, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Julia Peyton-Jones, Director and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes
and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London
Poul Erik Tøjner, Director, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark
Nathalie Bondil, Director and Chief Curator, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Neal Benezra, Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Tony Ellwood, Director, and Suhanya Raffel, Deputy Director, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia
Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard Art Museums
Ann Goldstein, Director, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Apinan Poshynanda, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre Foundation, Bangkok, Thailand
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director, dOCUMENTA (13) and Bernd Leifeld, CEO, documenta
Manray Hsu, Founding Director, Taipei Contemporary Art Center
Holly Hotchner, Nanette L. Laitman Director, Museum of Arts and Design, New York
Joel Wachs, President, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Pittsburgh

More at:

Op/Ed piece Dangerous Arts by Salman Rushdie in the New York Times.

Ai Weiwei's Blog

Free Ai Weiwei