Lego has admitted its decision to reject Ai Weiwei’s request for a bulk order of its bricks in 2015 was a “mistake”.
Vice-Chairman Kirk Kristiansen told The Wall Street Journal an employee had misinterpreted the company’s policy on political neutrality.
In October 2015, the Chinese artist said his request was declined because Lego considered his planned exhibition to be too political.
Ai Weiwei is known for criticism of the Chinese government.
“It was an internal mistake,” Kirk Kristiansen said.
He said the decision had been made “very low in the organization by our consumer service department”, and that Lego’s board had not been involved at the time.
Kirk Kristiansen’s son and successor Thomas added: “It is a typical example of what can go wrong in a big company.”
Lego’s refusal to provide bricks for Ai Weiwei’s artwork on political dissidents prompted people around the world to donate bricks at “Lego collection points” set up in different cities.
Ai Weiwei ended up making a new series of artworks based on the incident as a commentary on freedom of speech and political art.
In January 2016, Lego decided to stop asking bulk customers what they wanted to do with the bricks.
It said such customers should instead make clear that Lego does not endorse works shown in public.
The artist said Lego’s U-turn was a victory for freedom of speech.
Ai Weiwei also appeared to react to Lego’s decision by posting a picture on Instagram of a young boy sticking bricks onto his face, accompanied by a grinning emoji caption.
Lego has announced it is reversing its policy on bulk purchases and will no longer ask customers what they want to use the bricks for.
The U-turn follows a recent controversy involving Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
In October 2015, Ai Weiwei accused Lego of censorship when it refused to sell its bricks directly to him.
Lego said its policy was to reject requests if it believed the bricks would be used to make a political statement.
Ai Weiwei wanted to make an artwork on political dissidents.
The artist ended up using bricks donated to him by the public for an exhibition in Melbourne, Australia.
In a statement posted on its website on January 12, Lego said it used to ask customers ordering bulk purchases for the “thematic purpose” of their project, as it did not want to “actively support or endorse specific agendas”.
“However, those guidelines could result in misunderstandings or be perceived as inconsistent, and the Lego Group has therefore adjusted the guidelines for sales of Lego bricks in very large quantities,” it said.
As of January 1, 2015, Lego will instead ask that customers make clear the group does not support or endorse their projects, if exhibited in public.
Lego’s decision to refuse Ai Weiwei’s request angered the artist, who accused the company of censorship and discrimination, and of attempting to define political art.
Ai Weiwei also linked Lego’s stance with plans for a new Legoland in Shanghai.
The controversy sparked a public backlash resulting in supporters around the world offering to donate toy bricks.
Ai Weiwei set up “Lego collection points” in different cities, and ended up making a new series of artworks based on the incident as a commentary on freedom of speech and political art.
A group of 12 gold-plated animal head sculptures by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has sold for £2.8 million ($4.3 million) at the Phillips auction house in London on February 12.
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, which features 12 sculptures representing the Chinese zodiac, set a new auction record for the artist.
Ai Weiwei has made a number of versions of the zodiac sculptures, but this was the first complete set to come to auction.
The artist’s previous auction record of $1.2 million was set by Map of China last April.
The zodiac sculptures were inspired by a set of smaller sculptures that formed an 18th Century fountain clock at Emperor Yuanming Yuan’s Beijing imperial retreat.
The fountain clock was ransacked by French and British troops in 1860. Ai Weiwei worked from the seven surviving originals and imagined the five others, using images found in tapestry and print.
“This set of 12 heads continues Ai Weiwei’s tradition of re-interpreting cultural objects whilst questioning perceptions of authenticity and value,” auction house Phillips said in a press release.
The sculptures, which sold to one of three telephone bidders, were originally purchased from the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York.
Several larger versions of the same sculptures have been cast in bronze and have been displayed in both New York’s Grand Army Plaza and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
Ai Weiwei is helping to launch The Space – a website dedicated to digital art.
The $13.5 million project will commission and showcase new art for audiences around the world.
Ai Weiwei has given the names of victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China to a 24-hour launch event taking place at London’s Tate Modern this weekend.
He hopes the names will be used to create “a meaningful piece of digital art”.
The launch event for The Space at Tate Modern featured a video message from Ai Weiwei from his studio in Beijing
Ai compiled the list of names of 5,196 student victims via his blog after accusations that shoddy construction work had caused the collapse of thousands of classrooms during the quake.
The dissident artist has made a number of artworks about Sichuan, including Nian (“Remembrance”), a sound installation of the students’ names being recited by 3,444 individuals rallied from a Twitter campaign.
The launch event for The Space at Tate Modern featured a video message from Ai Weiwei from his studio in Beijing.
“It gives another opportunity and a platform for artists or somebody like me to work with. I believe many, many young people and students will love it,” he said.
The Space will feature some 50 new art commissions a year.
Speaking on Friday, launch director Ruth Mackenzie said that not every commission was expected to be a success.
But she hoped that potential “Picassos or Eisensteins” would submit ideas to The Space for a paid commission.
“[Visitors] might come and have a have good laugh because it didn’t work out, or you might come and see history and see the invention of an entirely new art form,” she said.
The launch weekend features a “hackathon” in the Tate’s Turbine Hall with around 150 artists creating digital artworks from scratch over a 24-hour period.
Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson’s interactive digital art work Moon has been loaned to Tate Modern for the event. It is the first time it has been displayed in a UK Gallery.
Alex Graham, who chairs The Space – which originally launched as a pilot in 2012 – described the project as “a gallery without walls”.
The 2012 pilot had more than 1.5 million visits, an average of 40,000 per week.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has chosen a former chapel in Yorkshire as the venue for his next month’s exhibition in the UK.
Ai Weiwei will send 45 antique Chinese chairs to be laid out in the 18th Century chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
They will be shown alongside three sculptures from May 24.
Ai Weiwei in the Chapel will be the artist’s first exhibition in a public British gallery since he filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with thousands of porcelain sunflower seeds in 2010.
Ai Weiwei will not travel to the sculpture park, near Wakefield, for the occasion.
Ai Weiwei will send 45 antique Chinese chairs to be laid out in the 18th Century chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
A strident opponent of the Chinese state, Ai Weiwei’s passport has been confiscated and his travel strictly limited.
The wooden chairs are part of his Fairytale-1001 Chairs series and date from the Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911/12.
Visitors will be invited to “take a seat and consider freedom, refuge, sanctuary and their antonyms”.
A 6m- Iron Tree sculpture will also be on show, as will his porcelain sculpture Ruyi and the marble Lantern.
The exhibition will reopen the chapel after a $800,000 refurbishment.
As well as being an outspoken dissident, Ai Weiwei is one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.
Ai Weiwei was the highest-placed artist on ArtReview magazine’s annual power list in 2013.
Artist and dissident Ai Weiwei’s appeal against a tax evasion fine has been rejected by a Chinese court, his lawyer says.
Police barred Ai Weiwei from attending court in Beijing’s Chaoyang district to hear the verdict delivered.
Tax authorities imposed a 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) fine on Ai Weiwei’s firm for tax evasion in 2011.
Supporters say the fine is politically motivated and Ai Weiwei wanted the court to overrule the penalty.
”We will keep appealing, until the day comes when we have nothing to lose,” Ai Weiwei said via Twitter.
His lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who was in court for the verdict, told reporters that the ruling was ”totally without reason”.
Ai Weiwei’s appeal against a tax evasion fine has been rejected by a Chinese court
The artist, a outspoken critic of the government, was detained for almost three months without charge last year.
After he was released, he was accused of tax evasion and the fine imposed.
The Chinese authorities maintain that the firm, called Fake Cultural Development, owes them money and it must be paid back.
While Ai weiwei is a designer for Fake Cultural Development, his wife is the legal representative of his company.
The artist said earlier that police, stationed outside his home, had barred him from attending the court hearing.
”If I can’t even appear in court, what more does this country have to do with me?” he said over Twitter.
Security was tight at the court with reports of both uniformed and plainclothes police in the area and people, including journalists and diplomats, being turned away.
Ai Weiwei, 55, has said that the tax bill is pay-back for his activism and challenged it on the grounds that proper procedure had not been followed.
The Beijing court agreed to hear the case, in a surprise move.
“The entire judiciary is shrouded in darkness,” he said from his home in northeast Beijing after the verdict.
Born in 1957 in Beijing, Ai Weiwei, the son of one of China’s most famous poets, Ai Qing, has played a key role in contemporary Chinese art over the last two decades.
His involvement in the design of Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium brought him international prominence.
But he fell out of favor with authorities with his outspoken criticism over the Olympics and the devastating May 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
In December 2010, he was among a group of activists and critics banned from travelling. A month later, his studio in Shanghai was demolished after officials said he had failed to obtain planning permission for the building.
He was then detained in April 2011 at Beijing airport.
Chinese political activist and artist Ai Weiwei says police have prevented him from leaving his Beijing studio to attend a court hearing on his tax evasion case.
Ai Weiwei said that a number of police cars arrived at his studio and an employee filming the vehicles was roughed up.
Tax authorities imposed a $2.4 million fine on Ai Weiwei’s firm for tax evasion in 2011.
Supporters say the fine is politically motivated.
The Chinese authorities maintain that the firm, called Fake Cultural Development, owes them money and it must be paid back.
Ai Weiwei said that a number of police cars arrived at his studio and an employee filming the vehicles was roughed up
While Ai Weiwei is a designer for Fake Cultural Development, his wife is the legal representative of his company. She is believed to be attending the hearing in Beijing.
Ai Weiwei, 54, said on Twitter that the police had destroyed the camera of one of his employees. There were also photos showing injuries that his employee suffered after being roughed up by police.
The artist, a outspoken critic of the government, was detained for almost three months without charge last year. After he was released, he was accused of tax evasion and the fine imposed.
Ai Weiwei has said that the tax bill is pay-back for his activism. He challenged the fine in court, saying proper procedure was not followed.
A Beijing court then agreed to hear the case, a move that caught him by surprise.
London gallery Tate Modern bought Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s “sunflower seeds”, a work made up of 10 tons of porcelain seed replicas.
Tate Modern has acquired around eight million of the 100 million porcelain reproductions.
They make up just under 10% of the original work, commissioned for the Tate’s 2010’s Unilever Series.
It saw 100 million seeds spread over the floor of the gallery’s vast Turbine Hall.
Shortly afterwards it was cordoned off over health and safety fears because of ceramic dust. The gallery initially had plans for visitors to be able to walk on the seeds.
London gallery Tate Modern bought Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's "sunflower seeds", a work made up of 10 tons of porcelain seed replicas
The work was on display at Tate Modern from June 2011 to February 2012.
Each porcelain seed had been individually handcrafted by skilled artisans in the city of Jingdezhen, which is famed for its production of Chinese Imperial porcelain.
The work has been purchased for an undisclosed figure with assistance from the Tate International Council, the Art Fund, and private donations.
It’s thought the remaining seeds will go back to the artist.
As well as being a popular Chinese street snack, sunflower seeds have a political meaning for the Chinese artist.
During the Cultural Revolution, propaganda images showed Chairman Mao as the sun and the mass of people as sunflowers turning towards him.
Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei was recently named as the most powerful person in the art world.
The announcement came after he spent more than two months in detention.
Ai Weiwei’s arrest in April 2011, as he boarded a Beijing flight bound for Hong Kong, prompted a global campaign for his release.
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