Chinese authorities are razing one of the Beijing studios of dissident artist Ai Weiwei. He said that demolition crews showed up without advance warning, and have begun the process of tearing down the studio.

Ai has been a longtime critic of the government, and on Saturday, he began posting videos to his Instagram feed of the studio's destruction. "Farewell," Ai wrote. "They started to demolish my studio 'Zuoyuo' in Beijing with no precaution." — NPR

“Whenever Weiwei is involved, he offers more than just a formal solution,” Mr. Herzog said by phone from Basel. “I think that’s why we get along well. We can develop concepts together without being bound by personal taste.” — The New York Times

“Everybody in China has been moved to a new location or a new city, new town, new apartment... But with such a big movement, or revolutionary change, there is very little discussion or very little meaningful challenge — intellectual challenge — about what architecture is in this fast developing society.”

Despite the country's building boom, Ai says that the state of China's architectural philosphy has largely remained stagnant because conversation is stifled. — asiasociety.org

the artist says we should not “sentimentalise or romanticise” the crisis, which has seen more than 2,000 children die on their way to Europe. [...]

Ai first visited Lesbos on Christmas Day last year, and has since dedicated most of his life to helping refugees there, even moving his studio to the island. [...]

“The goal is to make everyone conscious of the struggle of refugees. We need to protect humanity. The fight is endless. If we don’t fight, our children have to fight,” he says. — theartnewspaper.com

The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is visiting Lesbos to document the plight of thousands of refugees who arrive daily on the Greek island by boat from Turkey. For the past two days, Ai has been photographing orange rubber dinghies coming into shore, families huddled around fires, people queuing to register at the Moria refugee camp and piles of discarded lifejackets, among other scenes [...]

It is understood Ai will be creating a work in response to the refugee crisis. — theartnewspaper.com

Herzog & de Meuron have the widest approach to architecture varying their style for each job. In this sense they epitomise the global search for an architecture of pluralism, one flexible enough for very different cultures...The high quality of the work is as notable as the wit; the amount of production as much as its personality. -RIBA President Stephen Hodder — architecture.com

In Beijing, Ai Weiwei is back with a vengeance. The dissident Chinese artist has had four solo shows in the Chinese capital, ending an implicit exhibition ban that had been in place since his arrest in 2011. The fact that the shows, which opened in June, were permitted with minimal interference beyond one amended opening date surprised everyone, including Ai. “I never planned to have a few shows all at once,” Ai tells us. — The Art Newspaper

It’s a Thursday morning in Beijing, and the world’s most famous living artist, Ai Weiwei, is sitting with one of the world’s most controversial technologists, Jacob Appelbaum, in the second-floor lobby of the East Hotel. [...]

On a whim, Ai suggests that they call Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living for the last two years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. [...]

Ai and Assange talk for several minutes about the mundanities of the dissident life. — fusion.net

Welcome to prison, and a celebration of liberty. Ai Weiwei, the big man of Beijing, has spent years discovering pockets of freedom in the most straitened circumstances, resisting every effort by the Chinese government to shut him down.

This week he opens a major new exhibition in a place that makes that resistance literal: on Alcatraz [...]. The United States has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. But this prison is decommissioned, and Ai is using it to extraordinary effect. — theguardian.com

Ai’s studio, called 258 Fake, has become China’s equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Factory. And Ai himself has increasingly taken on Warholian overtones: there is now little distinction between Ai the artist who creates artworks, and Ai the dissident who gets beaten by the cops. (In 2009, police pummelled his face, causing a cerebral haemorrhage.) Both are merged in an ongoing performance in which the man has become the art, and the art is the man. — aeon.co

A major exhibition opens in Berlin this week of the work of Ai Weiwei, China's most famous artist. Events like this are the very thing that protect him against further repression at home. The show is packed with moving works that are critical of the regime. — spiegel.de