There's trouble at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. First, it was announced that Guy Ullens is divesting himself of the institution that he founded, and in fact getting out of Chinese art entirely, after having faced various roadblocks to realizing his vision in the Chinese capital. Now, celebrated artist Ai Weiwei has canceled his upcoming retrospective at the UCCA after Chinese authorities pressured him to delay it. The show, which had been scheduled for March, was to be the politically outspoken artist's first major retrospective in mainland China.

"The timing is sensitive and politically they feel it is not suitable at the moment," Ai told AFP. UCCA communications director Vivienne Li was quoted in the same article as saying that the Beijing art institution did not want to upset authorities by exhibiting a such a "sensitive" artist at the wrong time.

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The precise nature of the timing issues is not immediately clear, though it could well have to do with the current popular uprisings across the Middle East. Notoriously, the Chinese Communist Party has blocked searches for "Egypt" on various Web sites. In the past, authorities have subjected Ai — who is known for speaking out against abuses by the party — to various travel restrictions timed to correspond with world events, recently denying him the ability to travel to South Korea because the trip coincided with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

However, the cancellation also coincides with another sensitive event — the news that Guy Ullens, founder of the Ullens Center, has decided to divest himself of the institution which he opened in 2007, apparently at least partly in frustration at the challenges of working in China. He is looking for private owners to take over.

"The Chinese have been nice, we've had very nice relationships, we've never had censorship," Ullens told the Art Newspaper, responding to a question about rumors that locals resented an art initiative spearheaded by a foreigner. "The problem is they have structures and you need to have Chinese partners to navigate the structures. So it's true, to some extent it's true."

He also said that while he had originally conceived of the Ullens Center to show his own holdings of Chinese art, "That idea was very quickly shot down." Ullens said that he had previously formed a partnership with the Minsheng Art Museum, run by Mingshen Bank, but now describes that collaboration as "dead."

Having failed to create a Chinese space for his collection, Ullens — widely credited with being the first Western collector to invest in Chinese contemporary art, jump-starting world-wide interest — now plans to sell off his entire collection of Chinese art in stages, starting with a 106-lot sale at Sotheby's Hong Kong on April 3. Most intriguingly, he says he will now focus on collecting young Indian artists, explaining "I don't want to keep going in the same area."

The Art Newspaper article mentions the delay of Ai Weiwei's solo exhibition, though Baron Ullens simply commented, "Being on time in China is a problem."