Carol Yinghua, a chinese artcritic writes about Ai Weiwei in next Tate Magazine. See another article of hers where she highlights the relationship between China and Conceptual Art.
"In China, pragmatism has ruled society for a long time and as a consequence anything conceptual or spiritual is deemed insignificant. It fits the principle of a totalitarian state to minimize the power of individual intellectual and rational thought, while at the same time promoting a value system that measures everything according to principles of functional application (...)"
Ai has come to appreciate the enormous potential of such internet tools to reach a large number of young readers. He has been distributing more than 10,000 copies of documentary films he’s made about the private investigations he’s involved in to expose the problems of the political and legal system in the country, his petition for a Chinese activist lawyer, his confrontations with the police and so on. The receivers of these films will show them to their families and friends, and the size of the audience immediately doubles, if not triples. It’s no wonder that he considers his communications on Twitter as a form of education for a younger generation of Chinese people, who had otherwise received a simplified and unified view of the world from schools. “I almost see it as a school,” he has said.
"The complex and multifaceted nature of Ai’s thinking and practice challenges anyone’s understanding of art and the role of an artist. It’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate his public activities from his art-making, and any attempt to make such a distinction seems rather pointless and unimaginative. Ai Weiwei fluidly translates some of his discoveries and perceptions of life through his social engagements into his artistic practice and fuses them with emotion and force. In his solo exhibition at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, ‘Ai Weiwei: According to What?’, he created Snake Ceiling, a serpentine installation comprising hundreds of black-and-white backpacks for elementary and junior high school students in memory of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake. At Munich’s Haus der Kunst, he used 9,000 children’s backpacks to spell out on the façade the sentence “She lived happily for seven years in this world” in Chinese characters, a quote by one of the earthquake victim’s mothers. It was the centrepiece for his solo exhibition, ‘So Sorry’."
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