The noted Chinese artist and perennial dissident Ai Weiwei recently announced that Lego, a Denmark-based company, had refused his request to purchase more than a million of the tiny toy bricks for an Australian display of his work “Trace,” a collaborative endeavor with U.K.-based human rights group Amnesty International, that depicts political prisoners around the world in
The ongoing exhibition “@Large: Ai Weiwei at Alcatraz” is both revelatory and heart-wrenching, a stunning and sobering work by an artist who understands firsthand the fragility and pricelessness of freedom.Detained without warning or charge for 81 days in 2011, Ai Weiwei now lives and works in a courtyard house with a teal blue gate in the Caochangdi arts district of Beijing.