Demolishing Ai Weiwei’s Studio in Shanghai – The Crab House Video

This video tells the story of Ai Weiwei being invited to build a Studio in Shanghai during the World Expo 2010, building it in 2011, receiving shortly afterwards a demolition notice from the local authorities, hopelessly opposing and finally witnessing to the quick demolition. As a video is not technically or aesthetically remarkable, just like Ai Weiwei’s pictures, but it is astonishing to see how this story combines Bjarke Ingels’s Danish Pavillion in Shanghai’s Expo, an interesting dialogue with Pritzker Price Wang Shu, a building site visit with Jaques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron with parties and performances on the “demolition site”, dialogues with other fellow dissidents and artists, policemen and local authorities and finally the powerful demolition sequence.

By the way, the studio was a great building. I bet it will be re-built, sooner or later.