This may be my last post about Ai Weiwei, because, after a very full-on couple of days, the exhibition is now open to Friends for a few days before opening to the public on Saturday.   It has been fascinating watching someone of such international celebrity remain so calm and unexpectedly low key, pleased mainly to be free and with his son.   I finally succumbed to the universal urge to photograph him when he met Edmund de Waal.   There was an encounter between two people with a particular interest in the craft of making:-

Now that the exhibition is installed, it is possible to get a sense of the full scope of its ambition before the crowds descend.   It’s on a grand scale, as Sidney Smirke’s galleries both allow and encourage, each space discreet, but flowing fluidly into the next.   The grandest of the galleries is devoted to an arrangement of metal bars in a wave, symbolising the lost lives of children in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan owing to poor building construction.   96 tons:-

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Trees are up in the courtyard, thanks to the contributions of more than 1,000 people to our Kickstarter campaign.   The paraphernalia of installation has been removed and the surrounding barricades, but not the old black armchair which this morning looked like a piece of detritus, but turns out to be carved in marble and based on Ai Weiwei’s father’s armchair:-

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I went into our exhibition first thing this morning to see how it looks and how those who have been installing it have fared over what has obviously been a long weekend.   I found the exhibition hard to judge last week because the process of installation has been so long and complicated with our own art handlers supplemented by others from the studio.   It’s nearly there, just waiting for the finishing touches and probably work on the lighting.   I like seeing exhibitions going up and how they come together.   This exhibition has, of course, been conceived and planned remotely which makes it all the more remarkable.

We had the press conference this morning for our Ai Weiwei exhibition in which all of the world’s press, including the television stations, descended on the RA, as will probably be evident from the news programmes later today.   What was interesting was the quality of the discussion and the fact that it was as much political and cultural as it was artistic.   There was repeated questioning about the emotional impact of his incarceration and inability to travel and a dawning recognition of the significance of the fact that, after more than a hundred exhibitions which he has done internationally over the last four years, this is the first one that he has actually been able to see.