If you want to pronounce his name correctly, say, “I WAY WAY”  

Back in  2011, after I saw this picture of a man in an empty field, I blogged about him and said:

“I’ve been reading about  Chinese artist,  Ai Weiwei — the big praise in London for his ’100 Million Porcelain Seeds.’ Ai Weiwei  has disappeared.  No one knows where he is — but he is probably in a detention center in the middle of nowhere, because he publicly denounced the 2008 Beijing Olympics as  propaganda.

“Weiwei’s  art — bronze replicas, animal heads — will be on display outside Central Park in NYC next month.  He’s got 78,000 followers on Twitter.  He says that he asks questions through the objects he creates. Communist China’s officials do not like questions. His  disappearance has focused international attention on the current bout of repression in China.

“That photo is a guy arranging leaflets for one of Ai Weiwei’s canceled exhibits. My blog  generally supports or puts down this and that — Trump, Glenn Beck’s talk show; silly shoe styles — I’ve been worrying about Muslims, Oprah, and fracking — sometimes I feel like the guy in that empty field  arranging leaflets for an exhibit that people can’t-won’t-don’t  attend.”

Okay! Right now, today, summer of 2013, Ai Weiwei’s work was not just ON the cover of my Time Magazine – it IS the cover of the June 17th  issue. Today, in 2013 he has 218, 591 followers on Twitter, and 3,013 followers on Facebook.

He is no longer “nowhere.” Though he is spied on, and followed by police, he goes to and from his studio in Beijing, where he is creating new works of art, writing and publishing Rap songs and articles about repression in China, and the fact that he cannot travel — the government has taken away his passport.  

Hey, that gives me hope as an artist. Maybe my ideas won’t be noticed or make any difference, or  change what people say or do, but the subjects I’ve written about are in the air, and that  breeds thoughts — breeds words that impel some kind of action — so nowhere is …  well,  it’s more or less somewhere, isn’t it?

Take a look at Weiwei, and what the art world thinks of his “Circle of Animals.”