Ai Weiwei’s debut solo show in India is undoubtedly brilliant. It is no mean feat to showcase and celebrate an outspoken artist amidst an atmosphere of cancel culture, boycotts and shutdowns that are governed by which side of today’s political ideology you stand at. A collection of his dozen pieces spanning across decades lives up to his reputation of being one of the strongest art activists and political commentators on human rights abuse that the world of arts has seldom seen in the recent past.But here is the big BUT. He has chosen not to comment on India’s current state of censorship and the authoritarian control of political commentary in public spaces. The growing campaigns of hate, bulldozer politics and minority lynching have not yet found space in his latest works in India. Is he unaware of the ground reality? One doubts it. Is he being careful and cautious for now? Certainly, yes.Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation), 2025.This was reinforced when I asked him a question about how to encourage artists and performers in India to be unafraid of the truth and find courage to speak out. Pat came his uncharacteristic response. “How to encourage people to speak out? I say that how do you encourage people to eat? When they are hungry, they eat. When they’re tired, they go to sleep. I don’t think you can make people speak out if they’re happy not to speak out.”He fails to acknowledge that not speaking out doesn’t always reflect a happy state of mind. It comes with the fear of being silenced too, amid a constantly looming threat of tax raids and police FIRs.Ai has often tried to explain that an art work should be considered lifeless if it is unable to make people think or feel its dissent. But this is precisely what three of his latest pieces of work especially made for his debut solo show in India are – lifeless. They lack his signature outrage that he has mastered in juxtaposing with artistic aesthetics.Surfing (After Hokusai), 2025.Made with hundreds of pieces of Lego toy-blocks, the three artworks for his India show are the reproduction of paintings by Indian modern masters S.H. Raza, V.S. Gaitonde and a classic pichwai (traditional cloth art). They are a beautiful tribute to the legacy of Indian art but lifeless replicas that carry zero reflection of our times today undergoing an unprecedented fraying of India’s social fabric.Porcelain Pillar with Refugee Motif, 2017.Mona Lisa Smeared in Cream, 2023.I say this because his other Lego works from the past, which are also currently on display at New Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery, are more in line with his international reputation. His Lego work featuring the most famous Japanese work, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’, has an addition of the boat people riding the wave to depict modern refugees and migrants – primarily from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia – who risk dangerous, unauthorised sea crossings to escape conflict, persecution or extreme poverty.Similarly, for his Mona Lisa work in Lego, he has used white-coloured Lego blocks on her hands to depict the cake that had once been thrown at the original painting in the Louvre by a climate activist. His art is like a masterclass on how to keep alive a rigorous dialogue that an artist should have with his/her viewer about life, lived experiences and the right to human rights.A tall pillar of a set of six large Chinese vases piled one top of the other are in the colours of creamy white ceramic with blue motifs. At first glance, it looks like a traditional work, but up close you notice that the motifs are on the lives of war refugees. The vases show bomb attacks, the destruction of homes, migration through boats, living in tents, etc.A set of four military body stretchers from World War 2 are hung on the wall with multiple buttons stitched onto each stretcher to spell out the expletive ‘FUCK’. It’s his take on how frequent conflicts across different parts of the world not just mess up your life, but similar to the buttons from a factory, how daily war also seems to be mass-produced for commercial gains by certain countries.F.U.C.K., 2024.The largest work in the show is a 15-metre-long massive Lego recreation of Claude Monet’s Waterlillies. Ai introduces a dark, pixelated, black-and-white portal on the right side of this triptych. This represents the door to the underground, desert dugout in Xinjiang, China, where he and his father, poet Ai Qing, were exiled in the 1960s. Weiwei experienced a second exile in his adult life.For a brave and dissident artist who was once detained by Chinese authorities for 81 days in prison in 2011, he has recently made peace with what he defines as China’s upward phase in humaneness and personal freedom. Spending most of the last decade in exile, he finally had the chance to return home in 2025 and meet his nonagenarian mother.Water Lilies, 2025.Ai himself is 68 years old and one hopes that the world’s favourite activist will keep finding the strength to use his voice on issues of human rights, freedom of speech and government accountability.Sahar Zaman is an award-winning author, multimedia journalist, cultural curator and an advocate of the Orange Economy. She has founded Asia’s first web-channel dedicated to the arts, called Hunar TV.