After being locked up for 81 days in a secret location in China two years ago and not being able to reveal his work, Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei is back and this time he has gone big. Again. The Venice Art Biennale shows three large-scale works of the Chinese artist and activist: titled Bang, Straight and S.A.C.R.E.D. The works are a refurbishment of his days in detention, a kind of therapy or exorcism he had to do to get those endless days with nothing to do, sitting and waiting in a tiny room, out of his system.

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Renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s latest installation at the Galleria Continua in San Gimignano consists of 760 bicycles stacked on a raised stage. Viewers can walk through and interact with the installation at various angles and perspectives because the bicycles are physically attached to each other, creating one single structure. As always, Ai Weiwei’s work is visually stunning and unique, and his exhibit can be viewed until February 16.

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Ai Wei Wei, a Chinese-born contemporary artist, is equal parts famous and infamous. Art collectors swooned for his exhibition at the Tate Modern, the world spent weeks within his design of the Beijing Olympic Stadium, Art Review named him #1 in their top 100 Power List (2011), and there was hardly a corner of the Earth that escaped the news of his jailing due to his political dissidence. Now, in continued hot pink dissidence, Ai Wei Wei goes Gangnam Style.

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Curators Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma put together a zany show earlier this month in which they screened five documentary films by Ai Weiwei alongside works by Indian artists that shared similar themes, all political and irreverent in nature. Sharma met Weiwei at the Gwangju Biennale International Curators Programme 2010 in South Korea and got him interested in showing in Mumbai.

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Internationally renowned contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, who has been subject to increasing pressure and intimidation from Chinese authorities, was recently detained again, resulting in global outrage.

Apologists for the Chinese government say that China is ‘more complicated’ than Westerners understand, but there simply should not be place in the world for regimes that jail, beat, and terrorize citizens for the things they say or the art they make. Watch Ai’s recent TED talk which he delivered in a pre-recorded video.

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My friend Lee Ambrozy, who is the editor of Artforum China, translated all the blog posts written by preeminent contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei between 2006 and 2009 before Chinese officials shut it down.

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Ai Weiwei has always been one of my favorite contemporary Chinese artists. The simple visual puns and sly humor of his work always floor me, and his recent installation at the Tate Modern in London, which consists 100 million hand-painted, porcelain sunflower seeds carpeting the floor of the main hall, is simply over-the-top amazing.

The joke here is that working class people in China eat a lot of sunflower seeds. But these seeds are maid out of a luxurious material and individually created by artisans. Apparently, the traditional black slip used to paint the seeds scraped off, forming hazardous dust, so viewers can no longer romp around on the seeds, but the very spectacle of the piece, even minus the interactivity, is pretty impressive.

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