Ai has fused a lot of perennially popular art-world tropes into a single conceptual life-as-art juggernaut. He’s a figurehead of the once-burgeoning Chinese art market, an artist who keeps the line between life and work fluid; an auteur who creates his work in collaboration with other people, like the traditional craftsmen who used post-and-beam construction to assemble “Fragments” without a nail or screw, just a thwack of hammer sending wooden peg through perfectly aligned cut holes. He’s also destroyed artifacts, like the Han Dynasty urn he broke in a triptych of 1995 photos. He’s worked as an architect; sent 1,001 people from China to roam the streets of Kassel, Germany, in one of the works he displayed in the German megashow documenta XII in 2007; made films documenting the physical transformation of Beijing; protested corruption and human-rights violations in China on his blog, which was a part of his art, as well. Yet he’s said he wants his works to be judged on their merits as objects rather than ideas.

So: the objects. “Fragments” — here in its first American showing — is defined by its material: Ai collected the wood and thought about how best to use it. It’s an embracing physical presence, dominated by the warm darkness of the old wood. But the wood, hacked and muted, embodies a complex narrative about culture and value: Once-holy temples become meaningless and are discarded to make room for progress, then are reclaimed as ruins and reassembled into an object that ends up being even more venerated.

See a video of the installation of Fragments:

Meanwhile, in New York, a portion of the tiny sunflower seeds commissioned by Ai for an exhibit at London’s Tate Gallery sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $782,500.

Read more about Ai Weiwei and contemporary art in China via CDT.

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With China’s economy booming, art collectors there have become an increasingly powerful force in the market, demonstrating a growing interest in Western as well as Asian art.

At Sotheby’s spring sale, a Chinese buyer bought the evening’s priciest painting — Picasso’s “Femme Lisant (Deux Personnages)” — for $21.3 million. In March, at the auction house Lebarbe, in Toulouse, France, a Chinese buyer set a new French record for Chinese art with a $31 million bid on a scroll painting from the Imperial Palace in Beijing. Last year an anonymous telephone bidder who was believed to be Chinese paid $106.5 million for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” at Christie’s, a record for a work of art at auction.

Chinese auction houses are now selling works at a pace formerly associated with those in London and New York. One company that tracks the fine-art market, Artprice, reported that they were responsible for some $8.3 billion in sales, which would make them the world leader.

“We have seen exponential growth by mainland Chinese buyers who were brought up during the Cultural Revolution,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s vice chairman for Asian art. “These are successful business people with huge amounts of money at their disposal.”

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The terms of Ai’s release forbid him from discussing his legal case. But on Friday, Ai spoke by phone from Beijing about his artwork, specifically his touring installation “Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads,” which opens Saturday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and runs through February.

The artist, 54, was clearly in a chatty mood and the conversation touched on his health and even his recent return to Twitter.

Ai won’t be able to attend the opening of “Circle” at LACMA because he is confined to Beijing as part of his bail arrangement. “Circle” features large-scale statue heads of the Chinese zodiac and is inspired by those at China’s Yuanming Yuan palace, which was pillaged by British and French military forces in 1860.

“It’s about the future and the past, and how China is looked at today and how it looks at itself,” explained Ai. “It has many, many different layers — is it art or not art, and to what degree?”

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But the artist, Giuseppe Tampone , insisted that “Bye Bye” was not mistranslation, that he had been misunderstood. At the website www.byebyeaiweiwei.com, his explanation was presented in hard-to-understand English: “Bye Bye Ai Weiwei for all those that will not shout by any means ‘I don’t accept the bye bye.’”

The rest of his statement needs translation into comprehensible English: Stampione argued that “Hello Ai WeiWei” was “too easy,” because it seemed to offer hope, while hope in his view implied a passive stance. What was required, he argued, was “to realize the terrible situation in which Ai WeiWei is living today,” and then to take action to free him—political action, pressuring government leaders to take a stand and make demands of the Chinese authorities.

One more meaning he said he wanted to convey: “Bye Bye Ai Weiwei for all those who think that it could never happen to them.” Fair enough. Nevertheless, “Bye Bye Ai Weiwei” must be judged a failure.

[...] Perhaps the most striking thing about all this is the absence of any recognition of Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment on the part of the officials of the Biennale, especially curator Brice Curiger. Ai Weiwei was mentioned only once at an official event: at the first day opening of the preview, Paolo Baratta, president of the Biennale, told reporters, “We are great friends with the Chinese.” Then came a pause that implied “but,” followed by “I have written a letter to the ambassador of China in Italy saying how wonderful it would be if we could have happy news about Ai Weiwei.” And that was it for Ai WeiWei at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

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“THE Travelogue of Dr Brain Damages”, a show of Kenneth “Tin-Kin” Hung’s artwork, opened recently in Manhattan. Mr Hung’s garish and busy large paintings feature images of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders juxtaposed with icons of Western culture, such as Marilyn Monroe and the Mario Brothers (of Nintendo fame). These pieces are arresting, and I wish Mr Hung success, but most Western viewers will fail to understand some of the games the artist is playing. His work depends heavily on Chinese puns about internet censorship.

The Chinese have played with homophones and near homophones (usually differing only by a tone) for a long time. (They’re a staple at the Chinese New Year.) More recently, this feature of Chinese has been particularly useful for evading the censors. When the authorities banned the phrase cào nǐ mā, or “fuck your mother”, from the Chinese internet, in the name of combating vulgarity, the Chinese were quick to coin an internet hero, the Grass Mud Horse, whose name is a near homophone: Cǎo Ní Mǎ. Maorilyn Maoroe can be seen with him above. He is an opponent of the River Crab, a pun on “harmonious”, the official description of the society censorship is meant to promote.

The Grass Mud Horse is just one of ten mythical creatures all designed to talk about naughty stuff through puns. Mr Hung includes a painting of another of them, the great French-Croatian Squid, whose Chinese name requires a little English to get the pun. He is Fǎ Kè Yóu, and wears a Mao jacket while blowing an inflationary bubble with chewing gum.

For more background and a glossary of about 200 similar terms created by Chinese netizens, please browse CDT’s Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon.

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Zhang and Li wrote the following essay about imprisoned artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Translated by Vivian Wu (Read the original Chinese here):

Ai Weiwei Is a Creative Artist

By Li Xianting and Zhang Yihe

In the summer of 1957, Gao Ying was pregnant. But she was planning an abortion because her marriage (in all but name) with Ai Qing was the focus of criticism and was being severely punished. But Ai Qing insisted on keeping the baby. He said, “This is a work by both of us. Maybe it will be a masterpiece.” [1]

This baby was named Ai Weiwei, and indeed, it was a masterpiece. We have abundant reason to say: Ai Weiwei is a creative artist, as well as an art curator and social activist who is guided by love, conscience, and a sense of social responsibility.

I first got to know Ai Weiwei during the Star Exhibition in 1980, after seeing several of his water landscape oil paintings. The paintings showed picturesque scenes commonly seen in China’s water towns. Very fluid lines sketched the contours of residences and the river’s course. The coloring especially was not of a conventional sketching style; rather, it resembled the Chinese literati Southern School. The color was added after outlining. His lines were neither constrained by the rules of conventional color application nor the structure of the physical image. Rather, several lines of blue were painted in bold brushstrokes. We were so impressed by his boldness and casualness, and his pursuit of the transformation of Chinese painting elements.

Later, Ai Weiwei went to the US, and we heard no news of him. Until the early and mid-1990s, when we were in contact with the artists in Beijing’s East Village, we learned that he had provided a great deal of help to artists facing difficulties. He also paid for the publication of Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995) and Grey Cover Book (1997) with his own money, to introduce artists’ works, especially performance art in the East Village. Actually, in those days, the entire Chinese art world was still in a period of deep freeze. Artists Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming were both arrested because of their performance art. So the three books undoubtedly helped bond and encourage the artist community. More than that, the first information about Chinese performance art was passed on to many western art museums and critics through these albums free of charge. “Talent and intelligence, no gallants could compare to him. Draw back, he has thousands of wonderful plans.” [2] After this, Ai Weiwei devoted himself widely to various fields and has been active as an independent curator, arts promoter, social activist, architect and artist in Chinese and international arts communities.

With Swiss collector Uli Sigg, Ai Weiwei co-founded the Annual Young Artist Award and invited critics from China and abroad to join the judges’ panel. Though we don’t think the Award had a significant impact on the development of Chinese contemporary art, it provided a reference for the future development in the international arena and expanded Chinese artists’ aesthetic judgments of contemporary art. He co-founded China Art Archives & Warehouse with the late Dutch curator Hans Van Dijk and promoted exhibitions of many contemporary avant-garde Chinese artists. Spanning a decade, the CAAW has played a remarkable role promoting the development of Chinese contemporary art. Almost at the same time, he established his own studio, together with the studios he designed for other artists, became the earliest groundbreaking work of the Caochangdi Art District. Nowadays Caochangdi Art District is one of the most active art districts in Beijing; without a doubt, his was a banner project. Furthermore, he did remarkable work to promote China’s contemporary art overseas. In 2007, he was curator of an exhibition “Mahjong” at Musée Schweizerisches Landesmuseum (Swiss National Museum), which was an overview of Contemporary Chinese art during the past decade. He is no doubt a bridge helping the European art circle to understand milestones of China’s contemporary art development.

Ai Weiwei designed a large number of architectural works, and of course the world knows that he was the artistic consultant for the Olympic “Bird’s Nest” Stadium. What is worth stressing is that in the design, he created a combination of red and gray bricks- common materials in Chinese traditional architecture, with the modern concrete in a miscellaneous tangle. The combination has a striking visual effect that reveals both the traditional intricate texture and modern simplicity. This style later became Ai Weiwei’s symbolic design and won him a reputation both in China and global architecture fields. Especially in “the Dining Hall project in the Jinhua Architectural Art Park”, his design solved lighting and other functional problems. Fiber cement board and glass were cut into the wall and were assembled into irregularly-shaped exterior curtain walls. The interior walls and furniture were all assembled of various materials in diverse formats. Ai Weiwei’s attempt at simple construction with cheap materials is so unique and inspiring amid the insane and extravagant urbanization.

As an artist, Ai Weiwei was deeply influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. But if we take a broader view of the developing path of contemporary art since the early 1900s, no artist has not benefited from these two mentors. They radically changed the identity of contemporary artists from craftsperson to public intellectual, thereby differentiating them from traditional artists. Specifically, wisdom and ideology, interpretation of cultural and social incidents, mockery, incitement, parody and irony in the modes of expression, and the figurative interpretation of existing articles in daily life — all these originated from the inspiration of daily life. It’s the feeling, love and unchained will of an artist based on his living status and position in the public sphere. It’s neither indulgence in self-recognition as a traditional literati nor the meticulous but minute technical details as a craftsman. Regardless of art’s social position and love, or the vision and approach, nearly a hundred years of contemporary art’s accumulated experience has challenged traditional art. So without such basic principles established over the past century in the contemporary art field, any attempt to evaluate and understand Ai Weiwei and the revolutionary development of contemporary art will be in vain.

Among his most controversial works, there are “parodies” of the masterpieces in Western art history. For example, his work “Foundation of Light,” exhibited at Tate Liverpool, is apparently a parody of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Tatlin had made three models of the Monument to the Third International in 1920, 1924 and 1925. All three models were five or six meters high. In the center of the structure was a core consisting of a cube and cylinder, both made of glass; the interior of the building included many functional design elements. If constructed, The Monument was to be twice the height of the 318-meter-high Empire State in New York, the highest building in the 1920s. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International existed only in model form, but the idea and the model were both impressive. The proposal was regarded as a work of architecture commemorating the Communist revolution, so the design became a symbol of constructivism and utilitarianism. Ai Weiwei’s design “The Fountain of Light”, is a large-scale chandelier of steel and crystal. It is seven meters high and its pedestal’s diameter is six meters. To understand and interpret this work, one must first borrow the interpretation of Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International”. Or we should say Weiwei’s “The Fountain of Light” and Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International” have a corresponding relationship in the context of the history of international communism, so the audience sees the two works have corresponding social implications. The chandelier and foundation in Weiwei’s “Fountain of Light” directly connect us to the clumsy “lighting project” and “square fountains” erected all over China in its urbanization process. Or if we look at the two works in an historical perspective, they become an exaggerated satire of international communism.

Using different materials and textures from those in the original artistic masterpieces can be a way to parody or mock, and hence create a new meaning in a new context. For example, the caricature that adds a moustache on the face of Mona Lisa is based on the original version of The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous masterpiece, and this is the primary condition for the works’ connotation. There are numerous works such as this in the wave of American pop art in the 1960s. Another example is Roy Lichtenstein’s “Masterpiece” whose images were borrowed from popular cartoons from the 1950s in the US. Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” and silk screened portraits of Marilyn Monroe are world famous. In the 1980s and 1990s, more masterpieces were subject to parody. Chinese artists, like artists in other countries, have created many works following this momentum. Those who criticized Weiwei for plagiarizing in some of his works, were actually ignorant of art history. Weiwei’s “A Ton Of Tea” (exhibited at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo) is a parody of “Not Art/Goods!”, a cube made by Johannes Stüttgen and others using 100 kilograms of honey to commemorate Joseph Beuys, and it is known by everybody that this idea is based on the “Honey Pump in the Workplace” and “Chair with Grease.” Especially “Chair with Grease” is a three-dimensional object with an angular surface and this inspired Stüttgen and his colleagues to build a cube of 100 kilograms of honey to commemorate Beuys. Thus there is the possibility of forming a correspondence between two sculptures, on both the model and the texture. So Ai Weiwei replaces material and volume, but the message conveyed to the audience will show the contrast between the material of tea and the huge volume weighing one ton. The 100-kilograms of honey symbolizes Beuys spirit, but what does a ton of tea represent in Chinese culture? Such a relationship between the two will certainly create a new contrast and association of ideas.

In fact, Ai Weiwei has been longing to find new meaning in the adaptation of traditional Chinese textures and structures, and he is especially obsessed with rosewood and the mortise and tenon joints that are commonly found in traditional Chinese furniture. His Huanghuali wood sculptures Divina Proportion (the bigger one, with a 2.5 meter diameter, exhibited in Mori Tokyo, and the smaller one, with a 1.7 meter diameter, exhibited in Haus De Kunst in Munich) presents a giant wood soccer ball ten times the size of the real soccer ball. Huanghuali wood, a luxurious Chinese red wood, was exquisitely carved into an extravagant structure, thereby creating a sensory combination of absurdness and reality. Chinese soccer fans are obsessed with the sport with a nationalist expectation that it could win China honor as a super power. But in reality, they are repeatedly disappointed by the mediocre performance of Chinese soccer teams. Psychologically, such disappointment reflects a psychological tendency to link the victory of Chinese soccer to a symbol of China’s prosperity as a superpower. Weiwei’s soccer sculpture, its powerful structure and meticulously tender red wood technique, represents the contrast between the power of soccer and the delicacy of red wood antiques. His similar famous works include the Huanghuali wood sculpture “Map of China” and “Cubic Meter Tables,” 2009 which is a parody of a cubic design by Sol LeWitt, 1991. Under the principles of minimalism, Ai Weiwei cares only about texture and structure; he simply wants to stress full attention on the aesthetic sensibility of the beautiful wood and the nail-free furniture joinery techniques.

The Zodiac Heads went on display last week in New York. Weiwei’s design is a parody based on a famous water clock designed by European Jesuits for the Western-style gardens of the Summer Palace during the reign of Manchu emperor Qianlong in the 18th century. The originals, with the western-style gardens, were looted in 1860 at the end of the Opium War by French and English troops, which has never been forgotten in China. Some of the Zodiac heads were retrieved from the west by Chinese companies with an enormous amount of capital, although almost all antique experts thought the deal wasn’t worth the money. But the patriotic news actually became the best advertisement for the companies involved. Based on this background, Ai Weiwei designed this circle of Zodiac Heads. All the twelve heads are made in cast copper and gilt bronze, 3-meters high, almost ten times larger than the originals. When twelve giant shiny gold zodiac heads confront the audience, they imply a message that Ai might just want to tell the world: that the luxurious fabrication of the dozen heads, just like that expensive “patriotic buy-back”, is totally a joke. What is more interesting is that this isn’t yet the end of the story. If the world-renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art plans to collect this circle of heads in the US, that means Weiwei is selling a set of duplicates that were in no case created using Chinese aesthetics and sold to foreigners who would like to collect at a price. Then, which way is more patriotic? Who is more intelligent? The buy-back of the looted original Zodiac Heads by Chinese companies or Ai Weiwei?

Of course, the most offensive part about Ai Weiwei in some people’s eyes is his series of actions. In fact, in our point of view, Ai Weiwei has never been a politician, although some of his behavior indeed contains political elements. But that is art, performance art or event art. Besides, performance art by its nature is freedom in life’s activities, and acts of artistic creation often go beyond people’s general understanding and senses in ordinary life. This will naturally lead to aloofness from or clashes with the state ideological apparatus, and furthermore have the nature of defamation, rebellion and defiance. Therefore, we must hereby make a solemn statement that politics is an activity with an agenda, objects and organization, but Ai’s behavior or the events he designed are not political campaigns. Rather, they are aimed at expressing emotional and sensory feeling as an individual. His behavior and events are of a certain public nature, and his works in this category are somehow creative.

A review of the history of China’s performance art will be necessary here to help elaborate our statement. It has gone through four phases. The first phase is from 1985 to 1987 when cultural criticism was fermented in the whole society. Performance art was usually conducted in the sites of cultural symbolic meanings, such as the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. Artists bound themselves up, suggesting the suppression on individual expression. The second phase lasted until the early 1990s, and was featured with waves of events and popular art. This was related to the culture of consumption and commercialism. Rock and roll, pop music, popular painting all presented a political irony. For example, there were performances symbolizing social behavior during the Mao Era. Artists acted as Lei Feng [a well-known army solder who personified altruism in the 1960s] doing good deeds or passing towels to coalminers. The third phase was from early 1990s to the mid-1990s, when some artists started gathering in the East Village, a place near Maizidian, which is where Beijing’s Great Wall Hotel is now located in the east part of Beijing. It was named East Village and was known as an avant-garde artistic community in the early 1990s. Their works stressed body language and featured autosadism to express the hardship of living through troubled times. And the fourth phase was featured by Ai Weiwei’s performance art. Distinctively different from the previous phases, in this phase Ai Weiwei went beyond the general public. His works emphasize relevance to a certain social context, stressing love and social responsibility, social criticism and communication with the public. So it’s Ai Weiwei who truly pushed the spectrum of China’s contemporary art, from introvert to a broader spectrum that cast full attention on society, the public, and created a channel for the public to understand and take part in his contemporary art, which is closely related to the people’s current lives. Ai Weiwei thus created his own idiom for performance art. He knew too well that the public sphere in China was changed with the emergence of the cyber world. He was also skillful at using public media, especially the Internet. This led to his creative slogan: “The internet headline party”. Every performance or event art had a catchy and easy to circulate characteristic such as “Public investigation” on the list of the names of children killed in the Wenchuan Sichuan Earthquake; “The July 1st Web Boycott” — calling on Internet users not to use the web on July 1, 2010; “The Old Mother Kicking the Flowers” — using a cell phone to make on-the-spot recordings of violent people with ulterior motives.

Ai Weiwei’s works draw attention to events in society; by expressing his own feelings of love and anger, his own resistance, and fearlessness he has helped many Internet users reach a consensus, share their anger, and share the love.

No doubt, his remarks, works and especially behavior in recent years have not only presented his unique narrative and sense of power, but have also demonstrated to the society and public contemporary art’s basic concern for the existential status of humanity.

Why did he do this? In a letter written on January 4th 1978 , Ai Weiwei gave his best explanation. He said: “The endless memory (of the past) poisoned our young souls like snakes, but it didn’t kill us. On the contrary, I just require a better life for myself! For twenty years, there has been stupidity, incompetence, ignorance and weakness, and only now am I becoming a bit more clear-headed. Live, and be your own master. To lead a life of purpose, take your own road.”

When he wrote this, he was 21.

May 2011

[1] from Gao Ying’s memoir: Me and Ai Qing, Beijing October Literature Publishing House, page 29.

[2] a line from a poem written by Li Xianting

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An outspoken artist angers rulers with his savage, satirical wit. A crusader for political freedom and social justice, he lives in fear of arrest. Beaten and jailed, he becomes famous far beyond the borders of his land.

That was Voltaire, the hero of Europe’s 18th-century Enlightenment.

It is also Ai Weiwei, one of China’s best-known artists, seized by the police at the Beijing international airport on April 3, two days after a major German exhibition about the Enlightenment, Europe’s flowering of reason, science and tolerance, opened in the heart of the capital in the National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square.

“There is certainly a parallel,” said Bao Pu, the Hong Kong-based political commentator and publisher of New Century Press. His father, Bao Tong, a former aide to the liberal Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, was jailed for seven years after the crushing of the 1989 democracy movement.

Like Voltaire’s, Mr. Ai’s work points toward change, Mr. Bao said. “Art is at the forefront of social change,” he said. “In the end, it is part of a larger social context.”

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Each of his photos requires long hours of preparation, the longest being ten plus hours. He transforms himself into a painting canvas, and with his assistant’s help, he blends in with the background.

He said he tries to convey message through his works, “Chinese artists are in a very difficult situation. The reason why I came up with this idea is many artists’ workshops were demolished forcibly. I wanted to create a series of photos titled ‘Hiding in the City’ to protest in silence the adverse circumstances artists live in, the terrible attitudes the society takes towards art.”

See more of Liu Bolin’s work via CDT.

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The baron opened the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in a former munitions factory in the 798 district of Beijing in November 2007. The not-for-profit gallery, which contains three exhibition halls, an auditorium, restaurant, library, and bookstore, was entirely funded by Ullens.

Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Ullens said he had originally hoped to use UCCA to show his extensive holdings of Chinese contemporary art. “That idea was very quickly shot down … so we [moved] very quickly to promoting Chinese art by doing special exhibitions and temporary shows.”

At first, UCCA struggled to find its feet. Six months after its launch, four out of the five senior staff members who had been introduced to the press at the launch had resigned or had been replaced.

The gallery was criticised for employing too many Europeans—its director is the French curator Jérôme Sans—amid suggestions that the Chinese resented a foreigner opening an ambitious and important institution like UCCA. Ullens admitted those suggestions were partly true. “The Chinese have been nice, we’ve had very nice relationships, we’ve never had censorship. The problem is they have structures and you need to have Chinese partners to navigate the structures. So it’s true, to some extent it’s true.”

Read about the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art when it first opened, via CDT.

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During the casual talk, the man pictured above (“the Man,” from here on out) slipped into the gallery, promptly planting himself in front of Wu Meng’s four “Gravity” photographs, which show items of women’s laundry hanging in disconcerting fashion before images of Shanghai’s Lujiazui, Lupu Bridge and a demolition site. Inscribed with Chinese texts that, Catching writes, “are purposely oblique—as part of her strategy in talking about…media reports of women being taken advantage of, raped and murdered in massage parlors.”

The Man patiently copied those texts into his notebook before moving on to scrutinize the rest of the show, only to return for more time with “Gravity.” Meanwhile, the gallery talk and tour continued. For me, stationed just outside on the sidewalk, it was a bizarrely theatrical moment, with the Man moving deliberately—and, given the paranoia-inducing circumstances, quite sinisterly—through the gallery space as a small group of actual gallery goers (almost entirely women, by the way) listened intently to Catching’s curatorial talk, apparently oblivious to the Man in their midst.

As it turned out, Wu Meng’s texts were apparently not oblique enough, nor was Cui Xiuwen’s controversial “Lady’s” video, which, to quote the artist, captures footage of “a group of ‘ladies of the night’ in the washroom of a luxury night club in Beijing.” Cui’s video showed without major incident at the Guangzhou Triennale, but it was, apparently, too much for Shanghai.

Monika’s lecture went on elsewhere, successfully—and not without a bit of dramatic frisson and plenty of far-reaching irony given the shadow the Cultural Bureau cast over the entire affair—but the next day we learned that a squad of ten (!) members of various government organs showed up at the gallery to remove the work of Wu Meng and Cui Xiuwen. What happens next? Well… part of the thing about being in China is dealing in one way or another with opaque authoritarian decision-making, often combined with lengthy periods of suspenseful (or boring, yet somehow interestingly boring) waiting. In the meantime, Shanghai galleries have been put on notice (apparently Art Labor 2.0 was also paid a visit by the Man and ordered to remove pieces from Lu Yang’s “Hell” show).

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