Weiwei day

Every winter, Tate Modern hands control over its Turbine Hall, London's largest enclosed exhibition space at a bit more than 100,000 cubic meters, to a single artist. That person is invited to do with the space/fill it as he or she sees fit. Not much is off-limit, not even structural damage to the building itself, as Doris Salcedo demonstrated.

The eleventh Turbine Hall commission was announced last fall. It fell to Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist that I was not only unfamiliar with but had in fact never heard of before. That doesn't mean much. Last year's black box of perceived infinity was by an artist I didn’t know, and it was brilliant.

I'm not sure this year's commission deserved the same praise. The far quarter of the Turbine Hall's floor space was covered ankle-deep in one hundred million porcelain replicas of sunflower seeds, seemingly identical but in fact all unique because they were painted by hand in small workshops. The material accompanying the installation talked loftily about the analogies to the artist's homeland: the millions in blue identikit Mao suits, with identical hair and, to Western eyes, faces are all individuals.

I didn't think much of the curator's philosophizing, and I didn't think much of the installation. Had I visited during the opening weekend, my verdict might have been different. People were allowed onto the bed of sunflower seeds and invited to touch the art and play with it and to hang out and chill, as if it were the gravelly seaside at Brighton. Then fine dust was noticed, produced by the continuous grinding of pebble against pebble under people's feet, and Health and Safety cordoned off the area. Visitors were restricted to contemplate a deserted beach, too far away to discern differences among the seeds or even recognize them as such.

After my visit, I still didn't know much about Ai Weiwei. He is Chinese and a successful public figure with a large audience in the West. Surely he must be a poodle or a parrot of the regime. The authorities wouldn't allow otherwise... I should have known better. A year ago, the New Yorker profiled Ai Weiwei in a thoughtful and rather prescient piece ("he could end up in jail"). Who is this guy?

Throughout his artistic career, Ai Weiwei has been fighting the system from within, challenging state control of the arts and tirelessly demanding political democracy. He's conflated his life and his activism into one big piece of art, with his blog (shut down by the authorities but recently published in English translation) and nearly continuous Twitter posts relating every minute of his existence.

Using whatever measure of transparency exists in China, he exposed the corruption and hypocrisy of the system, most notably the failings surrounding the Sichuan earthquake. In a country of one-party rule, he became a one-man opposition party that relentlessly tested and pushed the limits of civic possibility. To put it succinctly, he was a major pain in the ass of the Chinese so-called Communist Party.

On 3 April, the Party struck back. Ai Weiwei was detained without charges and hasn't been seen since. Nor has there been any information on his whereabouts or the reasons for his disappearance. In all likelihood, he's waterboarding in some detention center in the far corner of China to pay for his impertinence and self-confident individuality.

There have been protests, from governments and NGOs, but the art world has been curiously slow to react. I read an article the other day that put the inaction down to envy at his popularity, but I can't believe that. As such, I'm glad that a few signs of hope have appeared in London this weekend and I decided to see them one by one.

I started out at Lisson Gallery near Edgware Road, two exhibition spaces filled with sculpture and video that still can't convince me of Ai Weiwei's artistic merit (detached from his political existence). One of the outside walls was plastered with posters quoting Ai Weiwei. They go a long way to explaining why Ai Weiwei is behind bars (or worse). One says, "Liberty is about our rights to question everything". Indeed.

Visitors were encouraged to sign a petition calling for the artist's release and to take copies of the posters home with them. The opportunity to have your picture taken, in front of the gallery and with a "Free Ai Weiwei" sign in your hand, was apparently restricted to the opening night of the exhibition, for which I was one day late.

From Edgware Road I went to Trafalgar Square and walked down the Strand. On the right side is Somerset House. Its courtyard was adorned with twelve enormous Ai Weiwei bronzes, recreations of zodiac sculptures that once been part of a fountain at an imperial retreat in Beijing. Given that the courtyard at Somerset House is one big fountain itself, the heads were a good match. But there was no Free-Ai-Weiwei activism.

My last stop of the day was Tate Modern. The sunflower seeds had all been packed up in the enormous bags they had come in, ready to be – what? Sent back to China and dumped on Tienanmen Square? Made to disappear in the North Sea? Auctioned off at Sotheby's? Nobody knows.

In response to Ai Weiwei's arrest, huge letters have been affixed to the outside of the former power station, calling for his release. With all I've read and learned, and in ignorance of the official charges, I'm happy to join the chorus: Release Ai Weiwei!