When Ai Weiwei (b.1957) arrived in Europe in 2015, fresh from state-imposed house arrest, he was greeted as a hero. Museums and galleries fell over themselves to host exhibitions devoted to the West’s new favourite dissident – even while those galleries continued, mysteriously, to participate in Chinese art fairs. Nobody dared say it at the time, but his actual art – vast, chaotic installations and whimsical sculptures that drew on Chinese folklore – was even then just a bit dull.

Soon enough, the artist was positioning himself as the voice of the global dispossessed, in the process (to borrow someone else’s phrase) morphing into a kind of Chinese Banksy. His work became self-aggrandising in tone and ever more naff in form, in the process losing any trace of subtlety. A particular low came when the artist laid down on a Greek beach and posed as the drowned Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, an ‘awareness-raising’ stunt as ill-judged as it was risible.

Jason Arday’s death is dreadful – and enraging

Jason Arday wasn’t the victim of a ‘racist witch hunt’

What a dead bird taught me about the English class........

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