The artist Ai Weiwei has not been heard from since Sunday morning Beijing time, when he was detained at the Beijing airport before a routine flight to Hong Kong. Shortly thereafter, a team of police arrived with a search warrant at his studio, in the dusty suburban village of Caochangdi. Officers took away eight of his assistants, bringing them to a police station in Beijing, according to a Twitter message sent out from his office shortly before it went largely silent. “There are police at the front and back doors, no way to go in or out.” the tweet said. Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, was kept at the studio with the police.
His detention, by all visible measures, was not impromptu. Soon police turned up at the home of Ai’s two-year-old son, who lives with his mother, not far from Ai’s studio. And around 2:30 that afternoon, four or five police officers forcibly detained Ai’s friend Wen Tao, a former reporter, driving him away in a black sedan, according to someone with him at the time. (Wen’s phone has been turned off since.) As night fell in Beijing, there was no word from Ai, and the streets around his studio remained blocked by police. A person in the neighborhood tweeted, "All of Caochangdi is plainclothes cops."
Beijing is in the midst of what I call the Big Chill, an ongoing sweep of Chinese writers, activists, lawyers, and others, which constitutes the most intense crackdown on expression in years. If Ai Weiwei stays in custody, this will mark the most high-profile detention yet. As I wrote last year in my Profile of Ai, this is not the first time that he has been detained, But early indications suggest that this detention may be something different. The search warrant, the carting off of his staff, the level of coordination—these are not the hallmarks of action by a local precinct. It was local cops, after all, who arrested Ai in the western city of Chengdu, in August 2009; he was beaten and, four weeks later, underwent emergency surgery for a subdural hematoma—a pool of blood on the right side of his brain caused by blunt trauma. Ai, typically, turned the encounter with the authorities into a meditation on government and the individual, composing a body of work that juxtaposed documentary footage of his negotiations with police against photographs of him in the hospital with a drain protruding from his scalp.
Pressure on Ai has been building. (It feels like I’ve typed that phrase a dozen times in recent years, but this time, it's especially apt.) In July he was briefly put under house arrest, and in January Shanghai authorities turned his studio into rubble. I spoke to him at midnight, a couple of days later, and he had already left the rubble behind and returned to Beijing. “It all goes down so fast. There’s no reason to stay,” he said. “Everything is in the past. And we have to look forward.”
Ai is on the road much of the time, but last week he surprised people with the news that he was planning to spend time in Berlin, where he was building a new studio. He expected it would take several years to finish the studio. He told the German press agency that he hoped to spend “as little time as possible” in Europe. “However, there will be no choice if my work and life are somehow threatened.”
For a glimpse of life in Ai’s orbit, see this Frontline/World piece that aired last week on PBS.
