Ai Weiwei’s galvanising new show

By Marion Coutts

Outside China, Ai Weiwei is an art superstar and his exhibitions proliferate across the globe. His installation “Sunflower Seeds”, where he filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with millions of hand-crafted porcelain seeds, was a major draw in 2010. Inside China it is different. From an official viewpoint, he is seen variously as a critic, a troublemaker and a criminal and his work and references to it are curtailed. In the recent past he has been in detention, on trial, beaten up, under house arrest and left without a passport. From his current show at the Royal Academy in London, Ai emerges as a meticulous multitasker: artist, architect and activist.

You need to be meticulous to be an accurate witness and his piece “S.A.C.R.E.D” (2012, above) is a pivotal work, a series of dioramas built inside steel tanks that draw on his experience of detention in 2011. Ai was imprisoned for over 80 days and accompanied at all times—sleeping, eating, shitting and showering—by two guards. The petty details of this environment, including shampoo, soap, steel bed and noisy fan, are reproduced at half size with himself and his guards in effigy. It’s a deliberately uncanny scale to work with, not exactly miniaturised and too clunky to be a model. Sticky tape covers the walls, chairs, sink and toilet in emulation of the plastic that wrapped each fixture in the cell. It is a basement for sadists. There is a deep and deliberate obscenity to the work, visible only through slots set in doors or ceiling. “S.A.C.R.E.D” has the canon of Western art in its sights and the six scenes of Ai’s degradation point heavily to the Stations of the Cross. Ai is not modest.