Displaying items by tag: Ai Weiwei

According to officials at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, on Sunday, February 16, a visitor smashed a vase from Ai Weiwei’s “Colored Vases” installation. The work, which is estimated to be worth $1 million, was destroyed by a local artist who was charged with criminal mischief and later released in lieu of bail. Maximo Caminero allegedly told a police officer that his act was a protest against the museum’s decision to exhibit only international art and its exclusion of local artists in its shows.

The Pérez Art Museum, which opened in December, released a statement saying, “As an art museum dedicated to celebrating modern and contemporary artists from within our community and around the world, we have the highest respect for freedom of expression, but this destructive act is vandalism and disrespectful to another artist and his work, to Pérez Art Museum Miami, and to our community."

Caminero claimed that he was inspired by one of Weiwei’s most famous works, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” a series of three photographs showing the contemporary Chinese artist dropping an ancient Chinese vase. Weiwei is no stranger to controversy and has openly criticized the Chinese government’s position on democracy and human rights.

The 200,000-square-foot, Herzog & de Meuron-designed Pérez Art Museum at Miami Museum Park has officially opened to the public. Located on Miami’s Biscayne Bay, the museum features expansive galleries and an education center.

Fundraising efforts for the museum began in 2004 when Miami-Dade county voters approved a general obligation bond for $100 million in public money. Private donors contributed another $60 million for the building’s construction and institutional endowment. After developer Jorge Pérez pledged $35 million and a number of important artworks to the project in 2011, officials decided to name the institution The Pérez Art Museum.

A retrospective highlighting controversial Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei is currently on view at the Pérez Art Museum. The exhibition opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., last year and traveled to the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario earlier this year.

Now’s the Time: Recent Acquisitions brings together highlights from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s ever-growing collection of contemporary art. Ending on January 2, 2013, the exhibition features works that have been acquired by the institution over the past five years and illustrates how painting, sculpture, and photography have evolved since the 1970s. While spotlighting the museum’s newest holdings, Now’s the Time also shows how the institution’s acquisitions have grown more inclusive in recent years and features works from a wide variety of artists and explores a range of ideas and perspectives.

The exhibition features works from both established and emerging artists including Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), William Cordova (b. 1971), Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), Barbara Kruger (b. 1945), and Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965).

Ai Weiwei has become China's most prominent international artist in large part because he is also his country's most persistent and popular dissident.

Last year, his growing celebrity prompted the Chinese government to arrest him at Beijing's airport as he was about to depart on a foreign trip. He was detained in secrecy for three months, charged with "economic crimes."

Since being released in June 2011, Ai, whose work was exhibited at Arcadia University in 2010, has been prohibited from leaving China. His art continues to represent him around the world, however. In fact, we seem to be in the middle of an Ai Weiwei boom.

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and activist who was imprisoned for 81 days earlier this year, topped ArtReview’s annual ranking of the 100 most influential people in the art world, the Power 100, published today.

The Beijing-based artist -- who last year paved Tate Modern’s monumental Turbine Hall with 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds -- “was ranked number one as a result of his activism as much as his art practice,” London-based ArtReview said in an e-mailed release, noting that artists no longer worked in “a privileged zone” defined by galleries or museums.

Every year, timed to coincide with London’s Frieze Art Fair, Art Review gathers an international panel of art-world professionals to pick the 100 most influential people in their field. Last year’s Power 100 topper, international art dealer Larry Gagosian, ranked fourth this year.

Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is living a heavily restricted life in Beijing after being released from detention earlier this year, but his work is speaking volumes to people in the second-largest U.S. city.

Ai's touring installation, "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads," opened two weeks ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has been introducing people here to the work of a man about whom, until recently, they may have only read about in headlines telling of his recent detention in China.

The work is a series of 12 massive, 800 lb. bronze heads depicting the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Standing among them on the museum's sunny North Piazza, people have been posing for photos standing next to the figures, leaning against them, and taking in the surface with their fingertips.

"I think he's questioning everybody, the entire idea of possession and of cultural permission and of nationalism," Franklin Sirmans, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) told Reuters about the installation.

"You see little kids going up to it and interacting with it in a way that is not necessarily about the same thing you or I might be interested in," Sirmans said. "Of course there are many other layers that come to mind as you learn more about the history behind the objects."

The installation is based on a series of sculptures carved by Giuseppe Castiglione, an 18th century Milanese artist and court painter to Ching Dynasty Emperor Kangxi. The original figures encircled a fountain in the Yuanming Yuan garden outside Beijing.

During the Second Opium War in 1860, the sculptures were looted by French and British troops. Of the original twelve figures only seven are known to exist, including two belonging to Yves St. Laurent which turned up at a 2009 auction.

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At the time, the Chinese government protested the sale, claiming the sculptures for China as a point of national pride. But Ai was among the first to ask whether they were even Chinese art, as they were made by Italian hands.

"It's interesting that the Chinese government used that (the auction) to take attention off of what is really happening domestically and sort of instil a sense of patriotism," said Stephanie Kwai of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.

Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.

The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it’s like a sandstorm. You don’t see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. No corner, no area touched by a certain kind of light. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.

To properly design Beijing, you’d have to let the city have space for different interests, so that people can coexist, so that there is a full body to society. A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.

Beijing tax authorities are seeking nearly $2 million in back taxes and fines from outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was released last week from nearly three months in detention, his close friend said Tuesday.

Ai was released on bail last Wednesday and Chinese authorities said he confessed to tax evasion and pledged to repay the money owed. His family has denied he evaded any taxes and activists have denounced the accusation as a false premise for detaining Ai, who spoke out against the authoritarian government and its repression of civil liberties.

The Beijing Local Taxation Bureau informed Ai that he owed around 5 million yuan ($770,000) in unpaid taxes and would be fined about 7 million yuan ($1.1 million) — totaling just over 12 million yuan ($1.85 million), said Beijing human rights lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan. Liu does not legally represent Ai, but has been a friend and supporter of the artist for many years.

Chinese authorities sometimes try to silence critics by accusing them of tax violations or other nonpolitical crimes.

Ai, who has shown his work in London, New York and Berlin, has earned huge sums selling his work at auctions and through galleries. Last year, Ai filled the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern art gallery with millions of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds. A 100-kilogram pile of the seeds sold for more than $550,000 at a Sotheby's auction in February.

Ai's mother, Gao Ying, said two tax bureau officials delivered the notice to Ai on Monday and asked him to sign it in acknowledgement but he refused. Gao said she was unclear about the specifics in the notice, but that the alleged violations took place over the past decade.

"We don't know anything about these taxes," Gao said. "These taxes date back 10 years. Why, at that time, if they really had not paid their taxes, why did they not say anything about it every year?"

Ai declined to comment, saying the terms of his bail barred him from doing media interviews. Ai was the most high-profile target of the government's nationwide crackdown on bloggers, lawyers and activists aimed at derailing potential democratic uprisings like those sweeping through the Arab world.

Before he disappeared, Ai had been keeping an informal tally of the recent detentions on Twitter.

When he was released, the Chinese Foreign Ministry repeated allegations reported earlier by state media that a company linked to Ai, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., had evaded a "huge amount" of taxes and intentionally destroyed accounting documents.

Previously, his wife said the company, which handles business aspects of Ai's art career, belongs to her.

On Wednesday, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, a painter detained on April 3, was released on bail after confessing to tax evasion. According to Ai’s lawyer, the charges were just an “excuse” to silence his client — in 2009, Ai had unflinchingly criticized China’s communist regime, asking, “If you aren’t anti-China, are you even human?” in an online forum. But three months in jail could lead Ai to be less visibly anti-China. After all, Ai is just one in a long line of artists who have dabbled in politics and suffered the consequences. How have other notable aesthetes responded to oppression?

Michelangelo (1475-1564): Even in the face of occasional disapproval from the Catholic Church, the Renaissance master championed a shockingly erotic style. When Florence fought and expelled the ruling Medici family in 1527, Michelangelo came to his city’s aid, helping fortify against invasion. This proved a bad bet: After Florence fell to the family in 1530, a Medici governor under Pope Clement VII ordered the artist’s assassination, forcing him into hiding. Later forgiven for his political sins, Michelangelo completed the sensuous “The Last Judgment” at the Sistine Chapel in 1541, a fresco commissioned by Pope Clement himself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881): Dostoevsky’s involvement with a radical, anti-czarist St. Petersburg literary group brought him the unwelcome attention of Czar Nicholas I, who sentenced him to death in 1849, then commuted the sentence just as the author was to be shot. Dostoevsky became an ardent nationalist, embracing deeply Orthodox Christian and Russophile beliefs that shaped his most prominent works, such as “Crime and Punishment” and “The Possessed.” His time as a political prisoner turned his focus from political ideology to the spiritual angst of “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): Five years after he published his bleak novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the great Irish dandy was sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895 for homosexual behavior. The experience forever changed Wilde. After serving time, he published “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” both lamentations darker than “Dorian Gray” and as depressing as “The Importance of Being Earnest” was buoyant.

Reporting from Beijing— After languishing for more than two months in prison without formal charges, China's most famous dissident artist was abruptly released on bail late Wednesday.

The official New China News Agency reported that Ai had been freed "because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from."

The 54-year-old artist is reported to suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure, although he was not known to be seriously ill. More likely the release was a belated response by Chinese authorities to the international reproach that followed Ai's arrest April 3 at the Beijing airport.

But it appeared that he would not be able to pursue the biting criticism of the Chinese Communist Party that had permeated his artwork and writing.

"I'm not allowed to talk. I'm on probation," he said apologetically to reporters and supporters who greeted him about midnight as he returned to his studio in northeastern Beijing.

Dressed casually in a gray T-shirt and appearing in good health, he said his future plans were to "enjoy life."

"Everybody should enjoy life. I can't say anything,'' he said before disappearing behind the gates to the studio.

Though dozens of others have been arrested over the last six months in a crackdown on activists, it was Ai — by dint of his stature in the art world — who inspired petitions and demonstrations across the world. In London, the Tate Modern gallery installed large black letters across its facade reading, "Free Ai Weiwei." In New York, a Cuban artist used a slide projector at night to cast the artist's face onto the Chinese Consulate.

Ai had not been formally charged, although the state media reported that his company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., had evaded "huge amounts" of taxes. The New China News Agency quoted police as saying that "the decision [to release Ai] comes also in consideration of the fact that Ai has repeatedly said he is willing to pay the taxes he evaded."