As first reported by AFP on Feb 14, Chinese conceptual artist and activist Ai Weiwei has decided to cancel his planned retrospective at Beijing’s private Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). Primarily through social media such as his personal blog and Twitter, Ai has been a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist regime, as well as a target of intimidation tactics. Since 2008 devoting much of his energy to investigating the deaths of schoolchildren in that year’s devastating Sichuan earthquake, he has variously been detained by police – on one occasion sustaining a beating that ultimately led to emergency brain surgery – placed under house arrest and barred from leaving the country. His show at UCCA had been originally scheduled to open this March, but according to the AFP report the institution then asked him to postpone the opening to a later, unspecified date. Rather than buckle under to what he perceived as political pressure, Ai decided to simply cancel the exhibition, which would have been his most comprehensive to date at a mainland China institution.
UCCA communications director Vivienne Li was cited in the story as explaining that the request was submitted to Ai over concerns that the March date would upset government authorities. Secondary sources analyzing the story speculate that the government is concerned about the current wave of popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. No information on the planned Ai exhibition or its cancellation is available on the UCCA website, which currently lists as its only upcoming exhibition a solo show for multimedia artist Wang Jianwei, “Yellow Signal,” opening Apr 1. The institution itself is undergoing a period of crisis as founder Guy Ullens moves ahead with plans to divest himself of his interests in UCCA and auction off his collection of Chinese contemporary art.