The Race to Find New Art Collectors

In early May, Christie’s invited a group of 18 new collectors from China to visit New York. The auction house escorted the guests on guided tours through the Museum of Modern Art, arranged VIP tickets to a local art fair and threw a lavish dinner in the Rockefeller Center ballroom of Christie’s. Auctioneers also reserved […]

New exhibition by Ai Weiwei opens in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s newly refurbished 18th century chapel

WAKEFIELD.- Yorkshire Sculpture Park announces an exhibition by Ai Weiwei, opening in the Park’s newly refurbished 18th century chapel following a £500,000 restoration. The project, the first by Ai Weiwei in a British public gallery since Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern in 2010, is accompanied by poetry readings from the works of celebrated poet Ai […]

Three current Ai Weiwei exhibitions display his wit and courage

Yorkshire Sculpture Park has a strange new tree. Solid yet graceful, inspired by the street vendors of Jingdezhen in southern China, who sell wood for its beauty, “Iron Tree” (2013) is a collection of fragments held together with bolts. It seems to have been in the wars, this tree, much like its maker Ai Weiwei. […]

Ai Weiwei, Lisson Gallery

Ai Weiwei’s activism and his 2011 detention by the Chinese state have made him one of the world’s best-known artists but can you picture his work? Google him, and his portrait, not his art, dominates the images that appear. This is a useful reminder that he’s a top conceptual artist, with a knack for finding […]

A Provocateur’s Medium: Outrage

The 2012 survey of the courageous Chinese artist Ai Weiweiseen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington has finally arrived in New York, and is much improved. The show, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” which opens Friday at theBrooklyn Museum, has been beefed up throughout, but most notably by two installation pieces completed in 2013. One, “S.A.C.R.E.D.,” […]

Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed by Protester at Miami Museum

MIAMI — Officials at the recently inaugurated Pérez Art Museum Miami confirmed on Monday that a valuable vase by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been deliberately destroyed by a visitor in what appeared to be an act of protest.

Who’s the vandal: Ai Weiwei or the man who smashed his Han urn?

An attack on the Chinese artist’s installation in Miami has been condemned as an act of vandalism. Why is smashing art only acceptable if an acclaimed global artist does it? A “protest” at a Miami art museum raises some questions about what exactly art is, now.