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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIn late July, I flew to China not knowing what to expect, with one exception: I was sure, regrettably sure, that I wouldn't be able to speak with the person I needed to speak with, a man named Ai Weiwei. Who he is\u2014and there's no shame in your not knowing; I was among the unenlightened until recently, too\u2014it was my ambition to comprehend. And if I failed to meet the man himself, I hoped, at least, to see enough of the world he called his own to make sense of a matter of no small interest: why it is that not a few people of discernment now consider him to be one of the most significant artists working today; and why it is that the People's Republic of China considers Ai Weiwei to be, without question, a very dangerous man.\n\nDay by day, though, in the astonishing heat and unthinkable smog of Beijing's punitive summer, my investigations took on a hopeless tinge. The more I learned about Ai Weiwei and his world, the more desperate to meet the man himself I became. By the sixth of my ten days in China, in a state close to heatstroke or dehydrated near-collapse, I did something unseemly. I had heard from a friend of Ai's\u2014family names come first in Chinese\u2014that he liked to go to a particular restaurant for brunch, a place he'd take his little son, who's 2 1/2, and the boy's mother, who's not his wife. If I went there at such and such a time, I stood a good chance of seeing the man.\n\nAnd so, yes, like some unprincipled paparazzo, I did stake out a bistro in a pleasant residential neighborhood, sitting with Zhao, the young woman I'd hired to be my translator, the two of us looking for all the world like a couple dining innocently alfresco\u2014as we shot sidelong glances at every patron who approached and passed on by.\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\n  To read The Danger Artist in its entirety buy the Kindle Single at Amazon.com  \n\nSurveying the restaurant, I could see why someone who'd lived in New York in the '80s, as Ai had, would form a sentimental attachment to the place, why he'd want to bring his kid there. The menu options weren't exactly standard-issue Chinese breakfast: eggs any style; buttermilk pancakes; \"cowboy\" omelet. Coffee came in a mug. Mimosas and Bloody Marys. There were lots of young families. Mothers with kids in Toy Story Crocs awaiting fathers parking new BMWs. High-rent suburban Americana. And I felt ghastly sitting there, ogling a young woman and a little boy of 2 or 3 seated in the booth next to ours. The boy was attempting to fit the whole of his small fist into his apparently smaller mouth as his mother admired his industry. From self-portraits he'd made, I knew what Ai looked like\u2014broad, stout frame; large head of short dark hair; wise-man's graying chin beard. His son's mother I wouldn't know on sight. This could be her. She was looking around, waiting for someone.\n\nHe arrived soon after. It wasn't Ai. I felt somewhat less Geraldo. Dutifully, though, I clocked two hours, waiting in vain, growing all the more convinced, as I marinated in the day's rising heat, that I wouldn't manage to catch even a passing glimpse of him in what time remained.\n\n\n\nThat there was little chance I could meet Ai Weiwei was already a matter of history.\n\nOn the morning of April 3, Ai was going through customs at Beijing Capital International Airport with one of his many assistants. They were on their way to Hong Kong and then to Taiwan, routine business to discuss a possible exhibition. Before they could board, however, two or three officers took Ai into custody. Meanwhile, a police contingent was descending on his studio complex in Beijing's Chaoyang District, where, whether in preparation for the raid or coincidentally, electrical power to the neighborhood had been severed. Once inside Ai's studio, the police seized documents and electronic equipment: laptops, hard drives, DVDs, cameras.\n\nAi's detainment came as little surprise to anyone who knew him. In fact, few of his friends, not to say his detractors, understood how he had managed to evade detention for so long. An internationally known artist whose work can command half a million dollars at auction; a painter, sculptor, architect, curator, photographer, installationist, and filmmaker\u2014Ai was all these things. But it was also true, at least as it's perceived within China, that when set against his other activities as a blogger, tweeter, and citizen organizer, his artistic practice had been outpaced by his activism. It would be no exaggeration to say that no living Chinese citizen had spoken out against the People's Republic of China (PRC) and its restrictions on free speech with such regularity, variety, creativity, and force as Ai Weiwei and gone unpunished.\n\nTo understand the size of Ai's daring and the originality of its expression, you'll need to watch how one of these baroque, many-headed battles unfolds. On Monday the twelfth of May, 2008, a magnitude-8.0 earthquake hit Sichuan Province in central China. Current estimates put the death toll at nearly 90,000, but at the time, owing to the chaos, numbers were hard to come by. One thing quickly became clear: Throughout the province, schools seemed unusually prone to collapse, even as buildings around them often remained standing. Seven thousand schoolrooms were reduced to rubble and dust\u2014and classes had been in session.\n\nA wail rose up from the parents of the dead, an outcry that the PRC heard and answered by promising to investigate. And yet, by the end of the year, the government hadn't produced a death toll of the children, much less a report that explained why so many schools had collapsed. In December, using his blog\u2014a blog that had attracted millions of readers since he began it in 2005\u2014Ai called for volunteers to canvass the province and assemble a list of the names of the children. This, he felt, was the least that was owed them: the dignity of being named.\n\nIn March, another activist investigating the earthquake, Tan Zuoren, who claimed to have uncovered evidence that local municipal officials had allowed contractors to use substandard building materials in the schools, was detained. Unfazed, by April, Ai had collated a list of 5,212 names, which, in addition to scores of articles about the investigation, he published in full on his blog\u2014which government censors had begun monitoring, going so far as to delete the occasional post. To one large wall of his Chaoyang studio Ai affid eighty sheets of paper printed with the names of the children\u2014a backdrop for interviews with the international media and, as you'll see, a sort of rough draft of an installation that he was beginning to conceive.\n\nWhat follows over the next six months\u2014and, essentially, to this day\u2014amounts to an escalating series of tactical strikes between Ai and the PRC. The PRC finally released a list of the dead a few weeks after Ai released his and twenty days later shut down Ai's blog for good, deleting every post and millions of comments. To make sure that their message had been received, they stationed two security cameras, like those oriented on Tiananmen Square, on a pole opposite Ai's front door. Denied his blog, aware that he was under surveillance, Ai turned to tweeting, a practice that has, to date, gotten him 100,000 followers to his 60,000 tweets\u2014as many as a hundred tweets a day.\n\nThat summer, tweeting all the while, still focused on the earthquake, Ai traveled to Chengdu to testify in the case against Tan Zuoren, the earthquake activist. But at 3 a.m., the night before the trial, police broke into Ai's hotel room and assaulted him. Ai made an audio recording of the attack as it unfolded. You hear the breaking down of the door, what sounds like a blow being struck, and then there's the dialogue, an absurdist script that life in a totalitarian state can't help but write:\n\nAI: What are you doing?I'm not doing anything.... AI: You're allowed to hit people?... You brought all these cops to beat me? Did you see him hit me?Who hit you? Who saw it?AI: Is this how police officers behave?Prove it! AI: Is this how police officers behave?Who hit you? Where? Where's the wound? Prove it!AI: I won't argue with you like this.Think you can argue with me?...AI: What's your name?What does it matter to you?AI: You come to my room in the middle of the night\u2014of course I want to know what your name is. Show me your badge!Did I enter your room? Am I in your room?AI: Didn't you just break in?Who broke in? What do you mean by \"break in\"?\n\nThe police wouldn't leave. They held Ai at a hotel through the next day, keeping him from going to court to testify. The same fate befell other witnesses for the defense; police prevented anyone from testifying on Tan's behalf.\n\nTo read The Danger Artist in its entirety, buy the Kindle Single at Amazon.com\n\nDuring the month after the beating, Ai had a constant headache. Even so, he was busy on Twitter. Because each character in Chinese isn't a letter but a word, you can say a lot more in one tweet. For instance:\n\nChoices after waking up: 1. To live or to die? 2. To be true or to lie? 3. To be lively or to decay? 4. To love or to be forsaken? 5. To be wise or to be idiotic? 6. To smile or to be humiliated? 7. To denounce or to celebrate? 8. To be more courageous or to be more fearful? 9. To take action or to be brainwashed? 10. To be free or to be jailed? [September 5, 2009 08:50:36]\n\nHe was in Munich at the time, setting up an enormous retrospective of his work at the Haus der Kunst, when the headache got so bad it sent him to the hospital. After a series of scans, doctors found that blood was pooling around the right side of Ai's brain, the result of the blunt-force trauma inflicted the month before. Emergency brain surgery ensued, saving his life. Fresh out of surgery, Ai began tweeting pictures of a tube draining his bandaged head of blood. They appeared in newspapers around the world.\n\nUpon his recovery, Ai returned to the Haus der Kunst to complete preparations for his retrospective, which included an enormous new piece\u2014ten meters high, one hundred meters long, spanning the entire facade of the museum. Called Remembering, it consists of 9,000 children's backpacks, in bright colors, that spell out a sentence in Chinese characters. The sentence had been spoken by one of the mothers of the children killed in the earthquake: \"She lived happily on this earth for seven years.\"\n\nAi's activism and his art were feeding each other, history forcing him to figure out a way to make art into a kind of propaganda that wasn't trivial or disposable but beautiful. And its growing presence on the international stage offered him a kind of protection: He had become too large for the PRC to punish as they had other activists. For shortly after the show went up, the PRC sentenced another earthquake activist to three years in prison on the grounds of \"possession of state secrets.\" Soon thereafter, Tan Zuoren was sentenced to five years, for \"inciting subversion of state power.\" While the 9,000 backpacks spelled out a damning rebuke, a reporter asked Ai why he continued to court such risks, both as an activist inside the country and as an artist exhibiting internationally.\n\n\"I have asked myself many times, 'Should I do this?' The answer is clear,\" Ai said. \"I have to act on my feelings.\"\n\n\n\nAnd by April 2011, those actions, those feelings, had finally gotten him disappeared.\n\nDuring the first weeks of his detention, his family was told neither where he was nor how he was. Five days in, a Chinese official announced that Ai was being investigated for \"economic crimes,\" an allegation that you hear a lot if you start paying any attention to contemporary China. For when the PRC disappears someone, that investigatory pretext will often be raised, promulgated in China's state-run media (whether the state-run news agency, Xinhua, or the newspapers that run in lockstep with it), claims that are left to echo, unanswered, in a void. Essentially, to be accused of \"economic crimes\" means that the PRC is going to hold you until they decide either to charge you or let you go. So it was with Ai: Over the weeks that followed, anonymous sources and unnamed police officials were quoted in newspapers, offering reasons for Ai's confinement\u2014tax evasion, destruction of evidence, trafficking in pornography. With Ai made unreachable for comment and despite his family's public statements to the contrary, the allegations steeped in the cultural waters.\n\nOn the eighty-first day of his detention, with no charges having been brought by the government and no word about his condition, his wife, the artist Lu Qing, received a call from the police. She could collect her husband. He was free to go. But it became clear rather quickly that Ai was not free, not truly. A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hong Lei, gave the government's first official statement to international media. During the coming twelve months, \"Ai Weiwei is still under investigation,\" Hong said. \"Without permission...he is not allowed to leave his area of residence\"\u2014Beijing. And when asked why Ai had been released at this time, Hong confirmed that Ai had shown, as state news agency Xinhua put it, a \"good attitude in confessing his crimes.\"\n\nHis first full day home, wearing a Comme des Gar&amp;amp;#xE7;ons T-shirt the design of which is a series of enormous black letters that spell out his name, Ai appeared at his studio door, where he was met by a throng of cameras and microphones. \"I can't talk about the case,\" he said. \"I can't say anything.\"\n\nAnd then, before closing the door, he asked everyone, politely, to leave.\n\nJune 23.\n\n\n\nAs I said at the outset, I flew to Beijing in late July.\n\nBefore leaving for China, I had gotten in touch with Alison Klayman, a documentarian based in New York who, for the past three years, has been traveling around the world with Ai, shooting her documentary about him called Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. (It will debut at Sundance in January.) She had spoken briefly to Ai after his release. It was clear to her that things around Ai were not at all business as usual. If I were going to be able to talk to anyone who was in touch with him, Klayman felt I'd only be able to make sense of that once I was in Beijing. \"It's a whole other thing, being over there,\" she said.\n\nAllow me to confirm that being over there is indeed a whole other thing.\n\nTo read The Danger Artist in its entirety, buy the Kindle Single at Amazon.com"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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