Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has come out on Instagram with a stream of posts attacking the Chinese government, and its ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, as president Xi Jinping starts a high profile four-day state visit to Britain.
Ai, who has long been critical of the Chinese government, was arrested in 2011 and held for three months without charge. He was later fined over alleged crimes of tax evasion -- a move his supporters say is politically-fuelled.
In the new Instagram post, the artist displays his tax documents, laid out in several rows, saying: "Chinese ambassador to the UK is not telling the truth. Here are all the tax documents that the police illegally seized and then returned along with my passport after four years."
He followed up with a tighter shot of the documents, saying: "中国驻英大使刘晓明愿意和我一起聊聊“发课税案”吗？掩盖歪曲真相的国家是没有前途的，你不为自己的未来担忧吗?"
Translated, he said: "Would the Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming be keen to discuss (his tax) case? A country that distorts its facts doesn't have a future, aren't you concerned about your future?"
Ai was reacting to Liu's recent Sunday night broadcast on the BBC, where the ambassador said Ai was "never put behind bars."
When Mashable asked on Instagram if the government found anything amiss in his documents, he responded saying that the government held his documents in order to prevent him from proving his innocence.
"他们并不想发现一件并不存在的什么，而是要阻碍我们证明清白的证据," he said, which translates literally to: "They didn't find anything that didn't exist, but just withheld evidence of my innocence."
Liu has scarcely concealed his disdain for Ai. He said on a Channel 4 News segment last week that the artist was not innocent, but under investigation for fraud. He added that Ai's exhibition going up in London "shows how free China is."
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Ai's tax case and police detention in 2011 wasn't the first time Ai clashed with the Chinese government. In 2009 he needed cranial surgery after being punched by a police officer in Chengdu.
In 2011, authorities confiscated Ai's passport after releasing him from his 81-day detention, so he couldn't travel.
He said this was done to prevent him from further embarrassing the country, but authorities later successfully slapped a 15 million yuan bill on him for tax evasion. Ai tried to challenge the case in 2012, but lost his appeal in a local court hearing.
Leaving his studio to pay the fine at the Beijing tax bureau in July 2011, Ai told reporters he "felt robbed" after "paying the ransom" of the enormous sum.
Much of the tax bill was covered by donations from several tens of thousands of people, who had sent money to him by wrapping cash around fruit and throwing it into his compound, or had folded cash into paper planes and thrown those in.
In July this year, the Chinese government returned his passport, and he was able to travel to the UK to attend a major show put on by the Royal Academy of Arts featuring his installation of dead trees. However his application for a six-month visa was denied.
His last London project in 2010, titled "Sunflower Seeds", had him filling the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall with 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds.