Ai Weiwei detained for his refusal to tone down his views

The artist who is best known for his contribution to the outstanding Beijing stadium ‘The Bird Nest’ was detained at Beijing airport yesterday.


The most famous and recognized outspoken political modern artist, had recently reproduce one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds. His masterpiece is exhibited at the Tate Modern and without a doubt bringing a huge audience that wants to delight themselves with what it seems at first gaze as pebble carpet.

The political art exhibition that took two and a half years to manufactured the porcelain seeds with the help of 1,600 Chinese’s artisans in the city of Jingdezhen. It has been exhibited since the 12^th of October 2010 and that will last until the 2^nd of May 2011 at the Turbine Hall, a vast space renowned internationally for its previous astonishing exhibitions at the Tate Modern.

For the Chinese artist, the sunflowers seeds symbolized the Chinese people, the millions of faceless factory workers, the millions of Chinese oppressed by the regime of Chairman Mao, the millions of skilled Chinese handcrafters and the millions of Chinese without internet access. Ai Weiwei said that he chose to replicate sunflower seeds to his compatriots because the seeds were one of the few sources of food during the famine years under Mao. For him, they also symbolize hope.

His political statement its easier to understand when you get the chance to walk along this massive rectangle, when your feet submerge in the immensity of the replicas layer after layer under your feet. You then realize its immeasurable amount of work, especially because every minimalistic detail of the work represents the hugeness of China’s population. In that gray pebble sea there isn’t two identical seeds, all of them are unique, each of them representing the uniqueness that each Chinese person, each Chinese life that we may  underestimate in the mass industrialized China.


The Chinese government has detained scores of lawyers, human rights activists, writers and bloggers in the past two months. According to Human Rights Watch "is the most severe campaign  of repression in China in more than a decade".