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Ai Weiwei: the dissident artist

As I write, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been in detention for 51 days and 6 hours. I know this so precisely because someone who goes by the handle "loveaiww" has placed a counter on the web. On the door of my flat is a poster with a silhouette of Ai, made from a photograph taken during a period when he was interested in getting (and giving) weird haircuts. His round head is surmounted by two long tufts of hair, like horns. It looks wild, comic. "Weiwei works here" says the text.

We are all Ai Weiwei, is the message. Where we are, he is too. And wherever he is, we are with him.

Ai disappeared on 3 April, as he was about to board a plane at Beijing international airport. Until 16 May, when his wife secured a 10-minute visit, there was no official word of his whereabouts. Three days after he vanished, Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, put up a story saying he was to be charged with "economic crimes". It was only online for a few minutes, before being taken down. Around the world supporters mounted protests outside Chinese embassies and consulates. In New York a couple of hundred of us were corralled at the side of the busy West Side Highway, the police having thoughtfully positioned us almost out of sight of the consulate and forbidden the organisers to use a megaphone. On 20 May the Beijing police finally confirmed that a company owned by Ai was being investigated for tax evasion. There is still no word of when he will be charged, let alone released.

As a global art star, co-architect of the Beijing Olympic stadium and outspoken dissident, Ai has become internationally famous. His recent Sunflower seeds installation at the Tate Modern won him an enthusiastic British audience. Zodiac Heads , a group of giant bronzes recreating pieces looted from Beijing's Old Summer Palace by British troops during the second opium war, is currently on show at Somerset House. There is no comparable figure in Europe or America. Imagine if one of the faded British celebrities of the 1990s Sensation generation, or the New York art-market titans who paint in $3,000 suits were using their money and fame to confront corruption and become a voice for the powerless. The publication of Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 has, for the first time, given non Chinese speakers access to writings which circulated among millions of people until the authorities took the blog offline two years ago. Ai's comments on everything from street furniture to capital punishment have become an integral part of his identity as an artist. "All people have a responsibility to speak their opinion on things," he wrote in 2006, "to state the simple principles of their lives." Ai exercises this responsibility in a muscular way, berating his fellow citizens in the strongest possible terms. "The People, the so-called People, are really simple-minded loafers . . . who have abandoned their rights and responsibilities, who walk like ghosts on the ever-widening streets, and whose true emotions, dreams and homes are long lost." China is "a land with no truth, no justice and no soul". His criticisms often have a bitter humour. "If national honour did exist, it would merely be something that the autocrats busied themselves with ruining.