ABSTRACT

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been exhibited in countless museums and art exhibitions worldwide, and he enjoys a huge following of art-world insiders and ordinary Chinese citizens. His status in his own country is so great that he was asked to help design the stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Despite Ai Weiwei’s success and prestige inside and outside of China, he has been hounded, harassed, beaten, and jailed by the Chinese Government for his dissident activities. After working on the design for the Olympic Stadium in 2008, he denounced the Olympics as an elaborate public relations routine enacted by the Chinese Government to present a happy face to the world and whitewash persistent human rights violations and clampdowns on basic freedoms in China. After the earthquake in Sichuan province in China in 2008, he launched a citizen action campaign to uncover the names of schoolchildren who had been killed there. He sought to expose both the Government’s attempts to bury the extent of the tragedy and the Government’s culpability for the shoddy buildings that housed the schoolchildren. When the Chinese police began surveying and harassing Ai Weiwei, he videotaped their actions and distributed these videos via the Internet and his blog, twittering the details of his cat and mouse game with authorities (Barboza, 2009).