According to What?

The Ontario Art Gallery offers a chance to discover the work of Ai Weiwei who has become not only a big name in contemporary art but also a tireless activist in the march against Chinese state censorship.

China is always in the eye of the storm. Following the polemics in the wake of the “non-appearance” of Ai Weiwei at the Venice Biennale in June – substituted, due to the inauguration of two parallel installations and participation with the German pavilion, by his fierce mother – this time the artist returns to the international spotlight in Canada, at Toronto.

Ai Weiwei is currently under house-arrest without a passport and has been detained for 81 days by his country's authorities, days that the world of international culture has lived through with baited-breath as the Chinese government have not given any news concerning his physical or psychological condition.

The exhibition “According to What?” is a chance to discover the work of someone who over recent years has become not only a big name in contemporary art but also a tireless activist in the march against Chinese state censorship. At the Ontario Art Gallery, Ai Weiwei presents over 30 of his most significant works developed over a career spanning well over twenty years (from 1983 to 2012), with a complex project that brings together photographs, sculptures, videos, installations and architectural documentation.

Beginning at the Mori Art Center in Tokyo, new work has been added to the exhibition at every showing (it has already travelled to Washington and Indianapolis) and represents a meaningful cross-section of Chinese society, with its creeping contradictions and all too often unknown social dramas. Over the course of time, Ai Weiwei's work has become increasingly lucid and coherent in terms of understanding the encounter between east and west: from the period in which the artist explored New York celebrity and icons of the west by photographing leading names in American art in New York, monuments of our culture and the rejection of his own traditions realised via the documentation of the distribution of antique vases from the Han dynasty.

There are traditional vases with western advertising logos (Coca-Cola), a long carnival-like snake obtained by joining together hundreds of children's nylon rucksacks, as well as dozens of bicycles made in the Forever factory – now on the point of going under due to the cultural changes in China – reassembled in a circular structure to symbolise infinity, and wooden stools for artisans transformed into elaborate geometric spheres, thus losing their original function. Weiwei's works are profound cultural reflections on a society that is all too often known only through stereotypes and popular beliefs.

But “According to What?” is also a scorching act of accusation against the tragic silence that surrounds a number of dramatic events in modern China. The design of the Olympic stadium in Beijing, that Ai Weiwei realised with Herzog & de Meuron, was followed by the artist's boycotting campaign against the Olympic committee who surrounded the sporting event with falsity, presenting a surreptitiously blanketed country to the world.

The most dramatic moment however occurs in two sections of the exhibition: the first altogether personal and the second strongly collective: Ai Weiwei presents a photograph taken with his own cellphone when the police locked him up along with a series of x-rays that show the brain haemorrhages caused by the blows received and accompanies these images with marble reproductions of the instruments of control that he is forced to live with (cameras, handcuffs). In a second part meanwhile, via a documentary (a painful list of 5196 names) and an installation, Ai Weiwei brings the attention of the world to the earthquake of Sichuan that on 12 May 2008 caused the death of thousands and thousands of schoolchildren from the province. Immediately after the terrible cataclysm, the Chinese artist went to the site and began an investigation against the Chinese state to discover the causes for the collapse of the local schools: poor quality materials and faulty building methods demonstrated it to be the direct responsibility of the Chinese Republic.

The most symbolic work in this extraordinary, touching, heart-rending, powerful and revealing inquiry is Straight (2008-2012): 38 tonnes of steel reinforcing bars salvaged from the site of the earthquake that Ai Weiwei has restored to their original straightness (having been completely bent out of shape by the earthquake) and laid out on the ground to form a continuous wave that extends over 70 square metres.