Ai Weiwei launches new exhibit

Dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Jan. 30 said the Chinese state's razing of his studios still fails to make "any sense" to him, as he launched his first design-focused exhibition, due to open in London in April.

Ai's love of artifacts and traditional craftsmanship will be at the heart of the show which will feature hundreds of thousands of objects collected by the Chinese artist since the 1990s from Stone Age tools to Lego bricks.

The pieces will be laid out on the floor in five "fields" to be seen in the context of "China's rapidly changing urban landscape," London's Design Museum said.

Among them will also be thousands of fragments from Ai's porcelain sculptures which were destroyed when the bulldozers moved in to dismantle his studio in Beijing in 2018.

Weiwei, who has lived in Europe since 2015, remains perplexed by the destruction of his studios, another in Shanghai was reduced to rubble in 2011.

"Still it doesn't make any sense why they have to do it... they just wanted to do something to punish me," he told the launch of his Making Sense exhibition in a pre-recorded interview from his studio in Portugal.

"But punish me for what? As an artist they're punishing the individualism, they are punishing the freedom of speech," he continued.

"They are punishing anybody trying to make a question or argument about their legitimacy."

He has previously spoken of gentrification of whole neighborhoods and the pushing out of migrant workers as possible reasons for the demolition.

Loss of cultural memory

The son of a poet revered by former communist leaders, 65-year-old Ai is perhaps China's best-known modern artist and helped design the famous "Bird's Nest" stadium for Beijing's 2008...