Sunday, September 20, 2009

Architect, artist and critic Ai Weiwei suffers cerebral hemmorage after being beat up by Chinese secret police

Attacked while researching the names of children killed in collapse of shoddily constructed schools in 2008 earthquake. Via archinect, Speigel and twitter.

3 comments:

Michael said...

"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century." --Thomas Friedman

Arnaud M. said...

China is a communist dictatorship, no matter what "enlightened" people might say. Those defenders of the communist regime were called useful idiots by the USSR nomenklatura. People like friedman are the useful idiots of today. China is fooling everybody into believing they are becoming more democratic, but their human rights track record says other and Weiwei is sadly only the last victim of those in power. Weiwei, from what I know and read about him believes in freedom but is also naively thinking that he can speak freely about his country without consequences for him. Again, what heppened to him is really sad, yet not surprising. Hopefully he'll recover quick and keep fighting against his government.

Pete said...

It's much more likely that his art comes from bravery and not naiveté. Art is the only thing truly humane in the autocratic and technocratic anthills of contemporary society.