Colin Gleadell asks if buyers have figured out that there are just way to many of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower seeds:

For anyone keeping track of the price of sunflower seeds, Sotheby’s has a one-ton installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, laid out like a carpet, with an estimate of £370,000 to £490,000. This seems cheap compared with the much smaller 100 kg work which Sotheby’s sold last year for £350,000 ($560,000). But then maybe people have worked out that there an are awful lot of sunflower seeds available. Apart from the 150- ton installation at Tate (of which Tate now owns about 8 per cent), these are various piles of seeds, priced by weight, each of which come in editions of 10.

Joseph Beuys Suit Sells for $96,000 (Telegraph)

The Financial Times did a quick video with Ai Weiwei at his home and studio compound. During their visit we discover that the artist has been issuing IOUs to the numerous supporters who stepped forward to help pay the tax bill government officials claim he failed to pay.

In the room with us are a group of volunteers who are using traditional Chinese brushes to write names in beautiful calligraphy on ornate documents that look like receipts.

It turns out these are IOU notes for the 30,000 Chinese citizens who have sent Ai a combined total of around Rmb9m (£900,000) to help him pay a tax bill that the government slapped him with when it finally released him from what independent lawyers say was an illegal detention without charge.

“Tax crimes should be investigated by the tax bureau, not through secret police detention,” Ai says. “Everyone understands that mine is a political case and tax has just been used as an excuse to justify their actions.”

As with almost every aspect of his life, Ai has turned his detention and subsequent tax charges into a spectacular and intricate piece of performance art, of which the beautiful IOU notes are just one part.

At Home: Ai Weiwei (Financial Times)

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Ai Weiwei has seen an outpouring of support from ordinary Chinese eager to help defend him against the government’s tax fine:

Thousands of individual donors swamped dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Internet account Friday, offering to help him pay a $2.4 million tax bill he was handed earlier this week, in a striking show of defiance against the government.

“It’s amazing,” Mr. Ai said in an interview. “This has become a big movement.”

More than 1,600 supporters had pledged or paid more than 400,000 RMB ($63,500) by mid-afternoon on Friday, just a few hours after the wave of donations began to surge, the artist said.

In defiant gesture, Chinese surge forward to help Ai Weiwei pay tax bill (Christian Science Monitor)

The Kunsthaus in Bregenz / Austria explores the architectural work of Ai Weiwei with a solo show titled Art / Architecture. While not as widely presented as his artistic oeuvre, Ai Weiwei’s work in the field of architecture is extremely important for the artist because of the collaborative – that is social and political – aspect of it. […]

VernissageTV also met with the director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Yilmaz Dziewior, who talks about the idea behind the show, the concept of the exhibition, the significance of Ai Weiwei’s architectural work, and the supporting program.