Sign Petition to Release Ai Weiwei

Members of the international arts community are petitioning the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China to release artist, Ai Weiwei. You can sign the petition, started by the Guggenheim Foundation, here. 

Link to: Petition for the Release of Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei

Change.org, host of the petition, has been under cyber attack from China in an effort to shut down the site and stop the petition. Change.org engineers are working around the clock to keep the site up.

Protests for Ai Weiwei

 "What can they do to me? 

Nothing more than to banish, kidnap, to imprison me. 

Perhaps they could fabricate my disappearance into thin air, 

but they don't have any creativity or imagination. 

And they lack both joy and the ability to fly."

Ai Weiwei's last blog entry before his April 3 detention.

 Photo: Elisa Haberer

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has still not been seen by his friends and family. Officials claim that he is under investigation for "economic crimes" but the police have still not informed his family regarding his detention from the Beijing airport two weeks ago. Colleagues of Ai also remain missing.

 Artists and activists protest the detention of Ai Weiwei in Hong Kong.

Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters The Guardian

According to the British newspaper The Guardian a Canadian curator organized artists around the world to protest Ai Weiwei's detention by taking chairs into the streets and sitting in silent protest. This idea stemmed from the 2007 installation, Fairytale, of Ai Weiwei's where he took 1,001 Qing Dynasty wooden chairs and 1,001 Chinese citizens to Germany. The German curator of that show, Roger Brugel, sat in protest outside of the Chinese Embassy in Berlin. Said Brugel, "It's crucial to exert pressure now, before they come up with a verdict."

Fairytale, Installation, Ai Weiwei 2007

photo: Galerie Urs Meile

 

Censored in China, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, has just been made available through MIT Press.