Ai Weiwei

Not only was he one of the representatives for Germany at its national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, he also had a solo exhibition, Disposition, across two venues in La Serenissima. That show included Straight, the first project developed using the long steel reinforcing bars retrieved from schools that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and which was also shown at Ai’s first major museum solo show in the US, at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, at the beginning of the year. 

Why Germany, you ask? Ai is also developing a new studio in Berlin (underneath that of his friend the artist Olafur Eliasson), has been offered a professorship at the city’s University of the Arts (UdK) and will have a solo show at its Martin-Gropius-Bau in 2014. All this as the Chinese authorities continue to hold his passport, meaning that he is unable to travel, even while his art can. 

As well as being one of the world’s leading (and wittiest) artists, Ai has become prominent for his social activism and repeated desire to hold the Chinese authorities accountable to the people, through his artworks, his interviews or his blog posts (now collected in book form). In doing so he has been prominent in reconnecting art – the coverage of which is so dominated by questions of economic value in much of the mainstream media – with issues of social and cultural value, and their links to more conventional aesthetics. And that’s not all; in between everything else, Ai found time to release a heavy-metal single and accompanying video, Dumbass, ‘a kind of self-therapy’, according to the artist, in response to his 81-day detention by the Chinese authorities in 2011.