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Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy Access. Our Supporters Make a donation Individual Support. The year-old remains uncontactable more than 12 hours after officials held him at the capital's airport. Ai, who designed the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium, has been an outspoken critic of the government. Although he has repeatedly experienced harassment, he appeared to be relatively protected by the status of his late father, a renowned poet, and his international profile. Last year, he created the Sunflower Seeds installation for Tate Modern.
His detention comes amid what human rights campaigners have described as the harshest crackdown on activists and dissidents in over a decade.
At least 23 people have been criminally detained, mostly in relation to incitement to subversion or creating a disturbance. Three more have been formally arrested and more than a dozen are missing, including high profile human rights lawyers. Officials detained Ai at immigration control as he attempted to catch a flight to Hong Kong for business.
An officer told an assistant travelling with him that the artist had "other business" and could not board the plane. Uniformed and plainclothes police surrounded and searched his studio in Caochangdi, in the north of the capital.
Power to the neighbourhood was cut off. Men who appeared to be plainclothes officers grabbed the phone of a Guardian journalist who photographed the scene and deleted the image.
A uniformed man said: "You are not allowed to be on this street. You must leave. A staff member told the BBC Chinese news service that officers had taken away eight of Ai's assistants and volunteers. A friend of the artist tweeted that most had been released but that his wife Lu Qing and two employees remained out of contact. Police are thought to have searched two other properties relating to Ai and visited the mother of his two-year-old son.
If Ai Weiwei stays in custody, this will mark the most high-profile detention yet. As I wrote last year in my Profile of Ai , this is not the first time that he has been detained, But early indications suggest that this detention may be something different. The search warrant, the carting off of his staff, the level of coordination—these are not the hallmarks of action by a local precinct. It was local cops, after all, who arrested Ai in the western city of Chengdu, in August ; he was beaten and, four weeks later, underwent emergency surgery for a subdural hematoma—a pool of blood on the right side of his brain caused by blunt trauma.
Ai, typically, turned the encounter with the authorities into a meditation on government and the individual, composing a body of work that juxtaposed documentary footage of his negotiations with police against photographs of him in the hospital with a drain protruding from his scalp. Pressure on Ai has been building. In July he was briefly put under house arrest, and in January Shanghai authorities turned his studio into rubble.
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