Photograph Source: Catherine Cheng – CC BY-SA 4.0

Last October, I mentioned Ai Weiwei, but was perhaps insufficiently sympathetic. At best, his art bursts with loud, defiant, and impossible to ignore courage. He has detractors, for sure, but sometimes his Zen-like obfuscation is irresistible.

For what it’s worth, we both lived in New York beginning in 1983. He stayed there another four years after I left in 1989. Then there was Lesbos in 2015. He arrived on the Greek island soon after me, both of us trying to understand the first wave of refugees later weaponised as evidence of Europe’s supposed downfall. My work there was reportage. His was described by the prolific Binoy Kampmark here as “a form of ritualised pornogrification that finds gold in crushing victimhood.” To be fair to Ai Weiwei, his installations from the island highlighted true stories within true stories, functioning less as statements than as acts of witness.

Which is why I was grateful to be invited to an event in central London where Ai Weiwei was due to speak about his recent book On Censorship—described as a rallying cry in an age of “big data, mass surveillance and intrusive new technologies of control.” This was only a few days before the 20-year prison sentence was handed out by Chinese authorities to Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai. Roger Thorp of Ai Weiwei’s publishers—Thames and Hudson—told me the idea for the book came during a book fair trip he was making to Bologna, where Ai Weiwei happened to be showing at Palazzo Fava. “I was immediately reminded what a powerful voice against oppression he was,” Thorp said.

It is true. Ai Weiwei’s relationship with censorship shapes his work, his movements, even the limits imposed on his body. Censorship is the force he pushes against, and the material he works with—Thorp described the book as emerging in much the same way. Not planned so much as necessary, as if the subject itself was pushing to take physical form.

“It is the responsibility of a........

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