The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who disappeared into police custody in Beijing after he was detained April 3 trying to board a flight for Hong Kong, is a fully 21st-century figure, globalminded, media-savvy, widely networked. He is also the embodiment of a cultural type, largely unfamiliar to the West, that dates far back into China’s ancient past.

In a 30-year career Mr. Ai has combined, often at calculated personal risk, both aspects of his persona to create a role as an outspoken critic of the Chinese government .

China acknowledged on April 7 that Mr. Ai is indeed in custody. He was under investigation, a spokesman said, for “economic crimes.”

From a Western perspective, Mr. Ai’s career fits a familiar profile.

In the 1990s he painted Coca-Cola logos on ancient Chinese pots, broke up classical Chinese furniture and photographed himself making a single-digit rude gesture in front of the White House, the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square.

But gradually such Duchampian moves have given way to large-scale, socially critical projects. For a conceptual piece called “Fairytale” at the 2007 Documenta in Kassel, Germany, he placed 1,001 antique Chinese chairs, available for use, throughout the exhibition. He built an outdoor structure from 1,001 doors salvaged from Ming and Qing houses that had been eliminated by rampant development in Chinese cities. Through the Internet he recruited 1,001 Chinese citizen-volunteers to come to Kassel to live for the duration of the show.

In short, he brought a sense of China that was at once inviting, puzzling and pathetic. Politically, he was coming to be known to the Chinese authorities : a late-1970s free-speech agitator, later a member of renegade art movements, and a full-time resident of New York from 1981 to 1993. But as an international celebrity he was still considered an asset to Beijing at a time when the country was making an all-out effort to become a major cultural presence prior to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

With this in mind the Chinese government asked Mr. Ai to collaborate with the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron on the design for the Olympic stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest. He did so. The result was a triumph.

Then he denounced the Olympics as a ploy to disguise the repressive nature of China’s regime . And after the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, he used films and a blog to denounce Sichuan officials for financial corruption that resulted in structurally faulty schools. His accusations of a cover-up extended to the highest levels in Beijing.

To anyone familiar with China’s harsh official politics, the silence from the government in Beijing was perplexing. But at this juncture, both parties were almost ceremonially enacting ancient roles. In Chinese culture, going back to Confucius, there has been a tradition of individual scholars and intellectuals denouncing rulers for wrongdoing that was bringing disharmony to society.

But Mr. Ai’s attacks on political authority grew sharper, more persistent, more amplified, and what immunity from reprisal he might once have enjoyed was soon gone.

In 2009 he was beaten by the police and underwent surgery for a cerebral hemorrhage. The same year, his blog was shut down . In 2010 he was put under house arrest in Beijing while a newly built studio in Shanghai was razed by city authorities .

And recently, after popular uprisings in the Arab world , the Chinese authorities have initiated a virulent crackdown, and Mr. Ai is far from alone in feeling the force of it .

But this May an outdoor sculptural piece by Mr. Ai, called “Circle of Animals/ Zodiac Heads,” will be installed at the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. They are based on a set of similar sculptures that once adorned a fountain at the 18th-century imperial Summer Palace called Yuanming Yuan near Beijing. In 1860 French and British soldiers occupying China torched the palace and carried off the zodiac heads, an act that to this day evokes popular outrage in China as an example of colonialist humiliation and of everything hateful about the West.

Getting all the heads back - only some have been returned - has become an impassioned nationalist mission. What can the Chinese feel about Mr. Ai symbolically plunking the whole set down in New York ? and, later this year, in London and Los Angeles?

He has symbolically reconstituted an iconic piece of China’s patrimony, but he has done so, perversely, on enemy turf. Yet in the end only one political reality matters: if China prevents Mr. Ai from appearing at the sculpture’s New York debut on May 2, much of the rest of the world will demand to know why.


HOLLAND COTTER