A couple of days left. we have received almost $4000 worth of receipts!

do keep the receipts coming, good karma gonna bless you!

happiness to one and all,

hf

Hi everyone.

Apologies for the radio silent. They are being sent out in the following weeks. The first batch to China will be out first and international shipping will follow very soon after. They should reach all before Feb ends.

Thank you for your patience.

And happy (lunar) new year one and all!


hf

hi the next 5 pieces of the series are up.

with the smaller pieces from £59

www.highlyframable.com

enjoy.

Here are pics of the T-shirt and prints to be given away. Each hand printed, unique.

20 pics to be uploaded??

Sounds a bit optimistic...

there are still no clear reasons from the authorities. it has been 3 years.
he's not allowed to speak freely. everything is restricted.
and yes, the photos are meant to raise questions, even why AL can't be with Ai. please help raise them to your friends & family.

this is all wrong. the chinese govement are lovely - they are best mates with our PM and they make the nice apple products we all fetish and adore - how could such a cuddly set of best mates possibly suppress free speech ?

oh, hang on a minute, I seem to remember an image from the deepest darket past


macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/george11/files/2011/10/Tank-Man1.jpg

Very very true Albert but that's not what's being discussed and not the point.

You can use a similar argument on most countries....where do you want to start.

Although in general China is improving I am not sure most other countries are....didn't a UK hospital just have a family chased across Europe and arrested because they wanted to take their dying child with a brain tumour to a private hospital in another country???

How many kids did the UK or US bomb in Iraq....what did they do about the bombing of Palestine etc etc etc

But why don't you just read the article. Now if there's to be a campaign on China suggest you take a look at what has just happened in Hong Kong rather than a fat rich artists passport that was taken cause he did not pay his tax.

Complete bollox. Not true at all. He can show his work wherever he likes in China in the same way any other artist can

Read the article in a Timeout for christsake it's hardly the mouth piece of the communist party.

Sorry but your tales are ridiculous. I was looking at timeout just the other day as going there shortly and saw the article hence zi posted it I. It's entirety on a thread. I did not look for it. It was also published in a Beijing.

so it's on the web, was in loads of hotels in Beijing and Shanghai newsagents etc all the places people get timeout. He speaks openly about the Govt etc 

He's not shown much in China as he is not very well known and that's about it really

Not sure of the point of this Gental what does it prove nothing really.

As say he does not seemed to be banned from the internet as yahoo is widely available and it's there.

Some Swiss bloke looks just like another NY times article same bollox as Highly Frameable

Think you'll find what really happened is the Gallery which is probably state owned so the management chairman bods said they don't want him in here which they are allowed to do anywhere really.

So he is not banned from showing art that Govt gallery just said no. Likewise the Swiss guy will have had his local management and they will have been told to sort it or no big guys would attend the opening and the ceremony....your choice etc etc.

re him not being in the film much is probably because he is fat and a crap actor. Should not have sold his name off for a s**t film...bit like the skate boards and Ai Wei Wei burgers in a previous thread

if he is so banned why is he featured and in Shanghai & Beijing Timeout??? Why is he easy to look up on the internet.

there are big clampdowns on tax, fraud and bribes in China and I am not surprised the govt officials want little to do with him as they probably have well used pockets as it were. That's why he was pulled

email us your pics aicantbehere@gmail.com
we'll post it on your behalf!

His Alcatraz @large team has landed, and one of them has brought the message of "Ai Can't Be Here" with them.

We hope more would voice their protest. Art lovers and artists, help defend the right to express in any way you can.


Here's a nice catch up for all who are not familiar with Ai Weiwei. Enjoy + Peace.

nothing about the children of Sichuan earthquake...



China sting shows censors fear posts that incite unrest

19:00 21 August 2014 by Aviva Rutkin

Last year, violence broke out in a north-western corner of China, when members of the local Uighur population – an ethnic minority in China – faced off against the police. Dozens of people were reportedly killed, and social media lit up with posts about the riots. But as China's many censors got to work, many posts also quickly disappeared. But how did the government decide which could stay and which had to go?

A group of US researchers can help answer that question. They have lifted the lid on Chinese online censorship – by pretending to be censors themselves. They found that the censors of China's social media sites are only worried about posts that may incite mass protests, rather than ones that poke fun at individual politicians, for example.

Acting like a social media start-up, Gary King at Harvard University and his colleagues built a fake website, bought a domain name and server space inside China, and populated the site with their own posts. Then, they obtained a copy of the software that helps Chinese website administrators censor their content so they stay out of trouble with the authorities. When questions about how the software worked came up, answers were just a phone call to customer service away.

"We could call customer service and say, 'How do we stay out of trouble with the Chinese government?' They would say, 'Let me tell you,'" says King. "Customer service was pretty good at their job."

Reverse engineering
The software could automatically block posts that came from banned IP addresses or contained problematic keywords. But many of the censorship choices were still deferred to human judgment. Some sites held posts for manual review within 24 hours; others automatically published the post, and a person would check in later to decide if it was OK.

If in-house human censors, rather than software, were calling the shots, then perhaps the researchers could divine insight into the minds of both government and independent censors by examining their choices carefully. King's team went back to real social media sites such as Sina Weibo. Of the 100 sites, 20 were run by central government, 25 were by overseen by local authorities, and 55 were privately owned.

The researchers wrote more than 1000 comments about controversial topics, such as artist Ai Weiwei's music, a village protest in Panxu, and the Uighur riots in Xinjiang. The researchers tracked if and when the posts were taken down.

"The censorship programme is like an elephant tiptoeing around. It leaves big footprints," says King. "We can look at those footprints and learn things about the intentions of the Chinese government that would be difficult to learn otherwise."

Collectivism a no-no
To their surprise, the posts that were most likely to be censored were those that mentioned collective action in the real world, like a protest or a boycott. Even posts that praised the government could be censored if they also referenced collective action.

Meanwhile, criticism and complaints often made it through to publication. A satirical post about the Uighur situation went viral, and only got censored about 10 per cent of the time.

King suspects this is because the government is more worried about regime stability than anything else, so they exert most of their pressure on posts that could jeopardise their power. "They don't care what anybody says about them in and of itself. They care what people will do with that information," he says.

Degrees of criticism
Before this study, we only had "very impressionistic understandings" of the Chinese government's priorities, says Susan Shirk, director of the 21st Century China Program at the University of California, San Diego. The findings suggest that censorship decisions are more nuanced than previously thought.

"It's really an amazing piece of work, to be able to do that kind of intervention and look at the impact of the intervention. Nobody has ever done anything quite like that before," Shirk says. In some ways, the censorship system is tighter than we thought, she says, and in some ways looser.

Min Jiang at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is more sceptical of the results. She suspects there are still some kinds of complaints that the government would want to censor, like Western media reports that expose abuses of power. "Criticism has many different degrees," she notes.

Dangerous arts by salman Rushdie

THE great Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern, a former power station, is a notoriously difficult space for an artist to fill with authority. Its immensity can dwarf the imaginations of all but a select tribe of modern artists who understand the mysteries of scale, of how to say something interesting when you also have to say something really big. Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider once stood menacingly in this hall; Anish Kapoor’s “Marsyas,” a huge, hollow trumpet-like shape made of a stretched substance that hinted at flayed skin, triumphed over it majestically.
Enlarge This Image

Rodrigo Corral and Jennifer Carrow
ROOM FOR DEBATE

The Artist vs. the State
Can there be true artistic freedom without political freedom in China?
Join the Discussion
Last October the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei covered the floor with his “Sunflower Seeds”: 100 million tiny porcelain objects, each handmade by a master craftsman, no two identical. The installation was a carpet of life, multitudinous, inexplicable and, in the best Surrealist sense, strange. The seeds were intended to be walked on, but further strangeness followed. It was discovered that when trampled they gave off a fine dust that could damage the lungs. These symbolic representations of life could, it appeared, be dangerous to the living. The exhibition was cordoned off and visitors had to walk carefully around the perimeter.

Art can be dangerous. Very often artistic fame has proved dangerous to artists themselves. Mr. Ai’s work is not polemical — it tends towards the mysterious. But his immense prominence as an artist (he was a design consultant on the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics and was recently ranked No. 13 in Art Review magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful figures in art) has allowed him to take up human rights cases and to draw attention to China’s often inadequate responses to disasters (like the plight of the child victims of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province or those afflicted by deadly apartment fires in Shanghai last November). The authorities have embarrassed and harassed him before, but now they have gone on a dangerous new offensive.

On April 4, Mr. Ai was arrested by the Chinese authorities as he tried to board a plane to Hong Kong. His studio was raided and computers and other items were removed. Since then the regime has allowed hints of his “crimes” — tax evasion, pornography — to be published. These accusations are not credible to those who know him. It seems the regime, irritated by the outspokenness of its most celebrated art export, whose renown has protected him up to now, has decided to silence him in the most brutal fashion.

The disappearance is made worse by reports that Mr. Ai has started to “confess.” His release is a matter of extreme urgency and the governments of the free world have a clear duty in this matter.

Mr. Ai is not the only Chinese artist in dire straits. The great writer Liao Yiwu has been denied permission to travel to the United States to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, which begins in New York on Monday, and there are fears that he could be the regime’s next target. Among the others are Ye Du, Teng Biao and Liu Xianbin — who was sentenced last month to prison for incitement to subversion, the same charge leveled against the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, now serving an 11-year term.

The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime.

We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.

Not all writers or artists seek or ably perform a public role, and those who do risk obloquy and derision, even in free societies. Susan Sontag, an outspoken commentator on the Bosnian conflict, was giggled at because she sometimes sounded as if she “owned” the subject of Sarajevo. Harold Pinter’s tirades against American foreign policy and his “Champagne socialism” were much derided. Günter Grass’s visibility as a public intellectual and scourge of Germany’s rulers led to a degree of schadenfreude when it came to light that he had concealed his brief service in the Waffen-SS as a conscript at the tail end of World War II. Gabriel García Márquez’s friendship with Fidel Castro, and Graham Greene’s chumminess with Panama’s Omar Torrijos, made them political targets.

When artists venture into politics the risks to reputation and integrity are ever-present. But outside the free world, where criticism of power is at best difficult and at worst all but impossible, creative figures like Mr. Ai and his colleagues are often the only ones with the courage to speak truth against the lies of tyrants. We needed the samizdat truth-tellers to reveal the ugliness of the Soviet Union. Today the government of China has become the world’s greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei, Liao Yiwu and Liu Xiaobo.

Propaganda