Ai Weiwei is among the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists and one of China’s most outspoken critics. His sculptures, photographs, installations, and public artworks often repurpose recognizable Chinese forms and materials to address today’s most pressing contemporary social concerns. An outspoken human rights activist, Ai was arrested by Chinese authorities on April 3, 2011, and held incommunicado for eighty-one days. Since his release, he has been prohibited from traveling abroad and subjected to ongoing government surveillance. Despite these restrictions, Ai continues to extend his practice across multiple disciplines, using exhibitions and social media to communicate with a global public. @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz is Ai Weiwei’s largest site-specific project to date.
Cheryl Haines is principle of Haines Gallery and founding executive director of the FOR-SITE Foundation, both organizations located in San Francisco. For over twenty-five years, Haines has developed exhibitions and site-specific public programming that has advanced the discourse on art about place. Haines’s dynamic curatorial stance presents challenging and provocative exhibitions by artists who explore cultural and environmental issues through a wide range of media. Over time, this position has expanded to include producing public, site-specific commissions on a national scale. Haines is the curator of @Large.
Maya Kóvskaya, based in Delhi and Beijing, is an award-winning political cultural theorist, art critic, curator, and independent scholar with two decades of combined experience in the Chinese and Indian art and cultural worlds. She has written extensively about contemporary art and the changing topologies of the public sphere and is currently conducting research for a book of “epistemological investigations” into the performative politics of art viewed in relation to ecology in Asia. Kóvskaya holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is one of the art world’s leading public intellectuals. He is co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects, Serpentine Gallery, London. Previously, he was curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. Since 1991 he has curated over 150 exhibitions internationally. A prolific writer and interviewer, Obrist has produced numerous publications forming an encyclopedia of contemporary art and ideas from the 1990s onward. His recent publications include Ai Weiwei Speaks (Penguin, 2011) and A Brief History of Curating (JRP|Ringier, 2008).
David Spalding is an internationally recognized writer, curator, and editor based in San Francisco. Over the past decade, he has published over one hundred texts on contemporary art, contributing regularly to monographs and periodicals such as Artforum and Frieze. His most recent book projects are King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou-choi (Damiani Press, 2013) and Doublethink: Kata Legrady and Wang Luyan (Pékin Fine Arts, 2014). Previously, Spalding was curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.