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China isn’t the only country imposing limits on creative expression, argues the provocative artist

‘Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.

Ai’s own work was bolshie and anathema to custodians of good taste. His Study of Perspective series showed him raising a middle finger at global sites – among them Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower, the White House – that are expected to produce awe, delight, reverence. In the self-explanatory photographic sequence Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), itself the follow-up to Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo (1994), he asked viewers to decide who was the bigger cultural vandal: himself, a mere artist – or a Chinese state for whom iconoclasm was a defining feature of its modernising project. A 2000 exhibition in Shanghai that he helped to stage bore the name Fuck Off. (Its Chinese subtitle was “Ways to Not Cooperate’”.)

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