Pankaj Mishra
In 2011, a Chinese anarchist artist Ai Weiwei exhibited 12 bronze animal heads representing a signs of a Chinese zodiac outside a Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The heads were lengthened replicas of a set designed in a 18th century by dual European Jesuits for a emperor Qianlong as well as displayed in a gardens of a Yuanmingyuan, a emperor's Old Summer Palace. At a time of a exhibition, Ai had disappeared in to detention in China. The domestic controversy overshadowed a work itself, that posed its many searching questions not to a Chinese government, though to a West.
