In 2010, the artist Ai Weiwei poured 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower-seed hulls into the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a massive space that invites grandeur and mostly swallows up attempts at it. It was a sensation, his highest-profile commission, and a major breakthrough into the public view. All of this did little to keep the Chinese government from arresting him the following year, throwing a black hood over his head and disappearing him for 81 days.
Ai has not shied from addressing his internment, reanimating it in exacting fiberglass dioramas, for the 2013 Venice Biennale, and, that same year, re-creating it for a music video (a collaboration with the Chinese rocker Zuoxiao Zuzhou). He hasn’t shied from much, really. The 64-year-old artist, who was born in Beijing and currently lives in Cambridge, England, has been one of China’s most voluble agitators of the last 20 years, openly critical of its government’s human-rights abuses, investigating corruption, and inveighing against censorship. His name has become a kind of shorthand for defiance.
