Ai Weiwei, Yayoi Kusama, Inside Out: three life-enhancing projects for 2012

Since I came back to work on Tuesday, reports of three projects have cheered up the dark days of early January. The first is regarding Ai Weiwei, undoubtedly the most significant artist of 2011. At the end of November, a huge show called Absent opened in Taiwan. Forever Bicycles, consisting of 1,200 bicycles, is the most recent installation, which writer James Gaddy puts in the tradition of work with bicycle wheels by Duchamp and Picasso . Is it bad that my first thought was of this Katie Melua song ? Sunflower Seeds also opens in New York at the weekend . Sadly, the health and safety issues that made the installation out of bounds at Tate Modern haven't gone away , so New Yorkers won't be able to walk over them. I feel quite privileged that I managed to do this on the opening night, when it was still possible. Here's what it sounded like. The second project is by Yayoi Kusama, the dot-loving Japanese artist whose Tate Modern retrospective promises to be one of the shows of the year. Kusama, 82, allowed young children to run amok with multicoloured stickers in a fully furnished white room at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia … … with these delightful results . Finally, Inside Out looks like an interesting participatory project, and not just for raging narcissists. You send them a passport picture, they turn it into a poster and send it back to you, and then you stick it (presumably legally) anywhere you fancy. Judging from their participation map , they haven't got anyone to do it in Tanzania yet – could you be the first?