It is hardly surprising that politics is in his blood. Ai Wewei was suckled on state oppression, having spent his first 19 years in a labour camp, when his father – the famous Chinese poet Ai Qing – was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement, and made to clean toilets. It is therefore not surprising that among the big ideas of this exhibition, that match the scale of the big site-specific installations (including love of country and history, heritage and value), is the overriding theme of political protest against an oppressive regime. And there is much to protest about: Whether it’s the venality and corruption of local government officials in cutting corners in the construction of public buildings, that directly led to the death of thousands people in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008; to the demolition of his substantial studio – that had taken a year to build – by the same local authorities that had invited him to build it – at their expense – in the first place; or his detention without trial for 81 days in 2011, the first 30 of which were in handcuffs, in an attempt to break him psychologically once and for all.

Many of Weiwei’s exhibited works may be viewed as ‘disobedient objects’ of protest, much like the defaced currency, woven banners or political video games that are increasingly a feature of modern political protest movements everywhere. The main difference may be that the latter are largely the product of spontaneous and anonymous folk art, whilst Weiwei’s pieces are made by armies of artisans and labourers and overseen by a titan of the art world.

Works like Surveillance Camera and Video Recorder for example – both masterfully crafted out of marble, to reference Ming dynasty tomb offerings of everyday objects made of precious materials – are Weiwei’s own heavily symbolic disobedient objects. The Surveillance Camera makes reference to the twenty or so government cameras trained on his studio residence in Caochangdi. In counterpoint to that is the Video Recorder, referencing the hand-held camera that Weiwei has frequently used to record many significant events. You may be watching me, taunts Weiwei, but I am also watching you.

What emerges from the exhibition is Weiwei’s skilful manipulation of the medium of politics, turning every reverse into an advantage. And so for example, the deafening silence of the culpable state with regard to its responsibilities following the devastating earthquake, is turned into a tangible and moving sculptural response (‘Straight’); a tabular roll call of dead children, and a filmic record of his findings. Similarly the tragic story of the demolished studio is turned into a series of filmic, photographic and sculptural art works, that are a potent portrayal of injustice.

A powerful case in point is his series of work entitled S.A.C.R.E.D.. Several forbidding looking iron boxes allow voyeuristic glimpses into Wewei’s suffering at the hands of the authorities. He may be glimpsed being interrogated, eating, sleeping, shitting and showering in a small, blindingly lit cell, and always in the company of two intimidatingly uncommunicative guards. Weiwei’s dignified and reverential suffering appears to ironically reference Christ’s stations of the cross, and it is no coincidence therefore to discover that these boxes were exhibited in a Venetian church three years ago.

The baroque atmosphere of an Italian church is also referenced by the gaudy gold wallpaper surrounding the exhibition space, where religious imagery is replaced with the Twitter symbol – as a deceptively vulnerable looking metaphor for popular freedom – menacingly targeted by big brother’s surveillance cameras and decorative swags of handcuffs. Impossible to ignore, yet too big to destroy (one hopes), the all-powerful one-party state is facing its unlikely nemesis in Ai Weiwei, who is perhaps as deceptively vulnerable as that little tweeting bird.

Ai Weiwei’s charismatic personality and features are now completely emblematic of the downtrodden artist, and the many award-winning films, and rolling news of his current status are carefully followed by an empathetic international audience. In China – despite government attempts to marginalise him – he is a powerful role model for plugged-in artists and politicised youth and a growing figurehead for change.

It is both his personal bravery and resilience, as well as his confident fluency in the language of post-modern creative thinking, that has enabled him to outwit the omnipotent but unimaginative Communist party at their own game. Weiwei’s twelve year stay in the U.S. was undoubtedly a turning point in his career. There he became familiar with the work of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, and began creating conceptual art by his interventions with readymade objects. Tellingly he has cited Marcel Duchamp as “the most, if not the only, influential figure” in his art practice. Whereas in the West the once anti-materialist conceptual art movement has consumed itself, by become now fully commodified and shorn of meaning, Weiwei’s work remains focused on the bigger picture of China (frequently represented in outline in his work) and its future.

But this David and Goliath story for modern times is complicated by its post-modern context. It is as if this modern Chinese David (Weiwei the political champion), is the avatar of his own creator (Weiwei the artist), using the international language of conceptual art, its excoriating power of irony and its properties of nihilistic subversion, to fight a very real battle for freedom. Weiwei is both the machine and the ghost within his ambitious art project, whose medium is big boy politics. This however is not a virtual war-game, but a dangerous real one with blood and scars and plenty of suffering.

In many ways Ai Weiwei’s art is a kind of Agitprop in reverse, turning the tables on the one-party state; and China is the ultimate readymade on which his interventions are being made. Now that – with the help of this exhibition – we have a fuller picture of the man and his art, we must indeed reevaluate the potential of art in the 21st century. Through his heroic commitment to human rights, art and China, Wewei has given truth to that formerly hypothetical debating favourite, that far from just imitating life, art can in fact change the world.