Where is Ai Weiwei?
It is, as I write, 37 days since Ai Weiwei disappeared, arrested by the Chinese police on 3 April in Beijing as he was about to board a scheduled flight for Hong Kong. He has not been seen or heard from since. He has not had access to a lawyer (Ai’s own lawyer disappeared for five days following the artist’s arrest), and despite persistent enquiries his family do not know where he is.
“What can they do to me? Nothing more than to banish, kidnap or 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,” he wrote on his blog in November 2009, when he was already being harassed and having his bank accounts investigated. CCTV cameras mounted by the authorities outside his Beijing studio had monitored his comings and goings for years. He even made a sculpture of one such camera, a replica carved from a single piece of marble. “I believe,” the artist continued on his blog, “that no matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy.”
via the Guardian.
