As Ai Weiwei's London retrospective shows, his art and his politics can't be separated
For his first major show in Britain, Ai draws on history - the country's and his own - and culture to reveal the trials of life in China
Ai Weiwei is among the world's most famous living artists, but is this entirely because of his art? People who have never seen a single one of his works know of him as a fearless scourge of the central government. So, after he was denied entry to Britain despite having a visa, the very least London's Royal Academy of Arts can do is to set forth an enormous array of his sculptures, installations and films for the first time before the British public.
Ai's gift is humanising conceptual art. When he was a student in New York in the 1980s, Marcel Duchamp was his god - a coat hanger bent into the shape of Duchamp's profile, the hook forming a question mark, is a deft homage - and the ready-made remains his regular medium. Bicycles, humdrum symbols of Chinese daily life, are suspended in silver clusters to make a soaring chandelier. Qing dynasty tables, reconfigured by master craftsmen, become martial arts fighters: two legs planted on the floor and two against the wall as if straining against the pressure of tradition.
Qing stools, strung together and spiralling upwards like a satellite or diadem, invoke the people of the past in a beautiful new form. Each work has its deep local meaning, but each is an emblematic gathering of souls, of human communities as opposed to communism.
Ai remakes the ready-made, but also the destroyed. Ancient carved-wood fragments are massed into a kind of catafalque for the dead (though with discreet handles for a gymnast to swing upon, a typically upbeat addition). What is compacted in this massive block is not just Chinese wood, but also Chinese culture: the curlicues of demolished temples, the fragments of old houses, old furniture, the elements of people's lives - and their livelihoods.
One of the most dramatic works here is a bricked-up temple - or so it appears. Chunks of wall jammed into a carved-wood facade are not in fact ancient but poignantly modern: the remnants of Ai's studio near Shanghai, demolished by the central government before it was even completed on spurious planning charges in 2011.