Photograph of Cube Light by Cathy Carver
Ai Weiwei has been feted, denounced, debated and attacked. We can decide whether the famed rabble-rouser’s work is worth the hype when According to What?, the 55-year-old conceptual artist’s touring retrospective, opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario last month. It’s the centerpiece of a very Ai Weiwei year in Canada. He Skyped with Laurie Anderson at her Luminato Festival concert in June, and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads—three-metre-high bronze Chinese zodiac sign busts—was installed beside Toronto’s city hall (until September 22). In October, his 1,200-bike installation Forever Bicycles will be built for all-night festival Nuit Blanche, and Barnaby Martin’s U.K. book Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei will be released in Canada.
A child of the poet Ai Qing, who raised him, in part, in a labour camp, Ai Weiwei is a born dissident. After he established himself as a leader among a new generation of Chinese artists in the 1990s, Ai’s
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