'Edgy' Chinese artist faces challenges

As crowds converged for the opening of the Beijing Olympics, their expectation turned into a collective gasp as a red glow appeared from within the stadium known as the Bird's Nest.

Entwining momentum with sturdiness, chaos with order, its vortex of 42,000 tonnes of steel latticework is a marvel of imagination and engineering.

Ai Weiwei, the man who designed it, turned out to be a gentle, thoughtful, but bear-like man. The architects of the stadium, Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland, called him the project's "creative consultant", but Ai said: "I don't need a title - I would prefer 'the Untitled'."

Ai is China's leading artist, one of the most remarkable in the world, and this week his work has arrived for the first time in Britain, to be unveiled in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.

His father was Ai Qing, a painter and China's leading poet. He was first imprisoned - as a communist - by the nationalist regime and then as a dissident during Chairman Mao's cultural revolution.

In 1967, when Ai was 10, Ai Qing and his family were exiled to a labour camp in the Gobi desert. "There", says Ai, "my father was punished by being made to clean the public toilets for five years. He was beaten and kept in very severe physical deprivation." Ai Qing died in 1996.

"I know what I know," Ai says, "because, as a child, I have seen the opposite of freedom. I have seen many people killed, the results of stupidity and cruelty, and the results of courage."

In 1978, Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, before founding an avant garde circle called the Stars. In 1981, he won a scholarship to go to the United States, working in New York's East Village, where he lived for 12 years and, he says, "found myself among friends, artistically - I wanted to stay forever".

But in 1993, when his father fell ill, Ai returned to China, establishing a studio called East Village, then his current one, Real/Fake. There, his installations included painting a Coca-Cola label on to an ancient Han vase and dropping another to smash it, a photograph of which featured on the cover of a book entitled So Sorry.

Another involved Ai's wife, Lu Qing, lifting up her skirt and showing her knickers to the portrait of Chairman Mao that presides over Tiananmen Square.

Turning Ai into the muse for China's second most recognisable monument after the Great Wall meant he could speak his mind.

On the eve of the Olympics, he said: "I feel outraged at the Chinese government and I am disgusted by the way power is abused in this country." But the Olympics, he said, were "a good opportunity for greater transparency in China".

The most striking thing about the Bird's Nest is the way the latticework makes the arena open to the exterior. Many observed this was a way of keeping the smog from settling, by admitting a breeze.

But Ai also says: "It is intended to be a statement about the need for a more open society, open discussion, greater transparency."

But in China, an "edgy" artist has to face greater challenges than critics.

While he was exhibiting in Chengdu last August, Ai's hotel door was kicked down by police who then beat him about the head. Ai's "installation" was a public list of more than 5000 schoolchildren killed by the 2008 earthquake. A month later, in Munich, he suffered a haemorrhage as a result of the blow.

- Observer