In a new interview with The Guardian in advance of his forthcoming book On Censorship, artist Ai Weiwei talked about experiencing censorship not just in his native China but also in the West—including an incident involving his membership in London’s Royal Academy.
After chronicling some of his storied challenges and acts of defiance against China’s communist regime, Ai told writer Lanre Bakare he feels “the same kind of surveillance, same kind of censorship in the west.”
As Bakare recounts, “Pressed for an example, he tells me a story about the Royal Academy in London, an institution that gave him a landmark exhibition in 2015 and made him an honorary member in 2011 following his detainment in China. In November 2023, an exhibition of new works to be shown at the Lisson Gallery was pulled after he posted a tweet that began: ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world.’ The tweet was deleted, with the artist telling journalists his show had ‘effectively [been] cancelled.’”
After that, according to Bakare, “a vote was then held at the RA to determine whether his membership should be revoked because of accusations that the post was antisemitic.”
Ai told the journalist, “I don’t have the intention of an antisemite. My best friends, they’re all Jewish people. I tweeted millions of tweets on Twitter, but [how is it that] this tweet can cause such trouble? Then they said the procedure is to let the Academicians vote.”’
Ai won the vote, and claims he was asked to write about freedom of speech for RA’s magazine—which then did not publish the piece, saying it did not have room. “For him,” Bakare writes, “this is the censorship in the west, which he argues in On Censorship can be ‘more covert, more deceptive and more corrosive’ than in authoritarian regimes.” Ai added: “I have several cases like this. Happens in Britain and in Germany.”
Bakare notes that the Royal Academy “disputes this account, claiming the decision to drop the piece was made before Ai submitted it. A spokesperson added: ‘Plurality of voices, tolerance and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and seek to protect.’”
