“He’s just an artist. What does he know?” a critic said of Ai Wei Wei. “He’s all politics,’ said the Tokyo critics. Both could be right but both are also wrong. Today he was in Rotterdam’s Kunsthal for the press day of Ai Wei Wei, in Search of Humanity. He praised the new show as one of the strongest ever mounted of his work – and he is absolutely right. The exhibition is spectacular, not only in its enormity, but also in the thoughtful way it has been curated. He admitted that once he has sent a work into the world his relationship with it is over. Or it sits in a crate in his studio, now in Portugal, so the only times he will see it again is in a show such as the Kunsthal’s.

Ai Wei Wei was his usual self on the podium – slightly self-deprecating, a little like one’s favourite Chinese uncle, but also forceful in his view of the world and humanity as a whole. At the beginning of the exhibition there are early works, unashamedly and heavily influenced by Dada and Marcel Duchamp to be precise. Everyday objects such as wooden stools leaning onto each other assume dynamic structures. A large sculpture made of the standard Chinese manufactured bicycle frames seemed at first to be a jolly rondo dance of bikes until one realises that the bikes themselves have neither saddle nor a handlebar – a bike will get you nowhere if you cannot steer it. The irony is obvious and refers to the state control in China. And Ai Wei Wei was the unfortunate recipient of state control more than once, at times brutally beaten and incarcerated.  There are videos of his altercations with Chinese police. A series of black boxes recreate the nightmarish conditions in which he was held for close to three months. Physically pressured in his cell by two guards at all times he had to eat with them standing threateningly close; not only that. They also stood within touching distance from him when he sat on the toilet. These scenarios are like something out of Orwell’s 1984, only worse.

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