Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei
Hafenbar, CC BY-SA 2.0 de

The artist and activist.

Ai Weiwei is China's best-known contemporary artist and a critic of the regime. He was detained in 2011 and now lives in Europe.

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957 in Beijing. His father was the well-known poet Ai Qing, who the year after his son's birth was branded a rightist and sent into exile. The family lived in harsh conditions for many years, including in Xinjiang in north-western China. After the Cultural Revolution the family returned to Beijing, and in 1978 Ai Weiwei began studying at the Film Academy there. He was a member of the artists' group the Stars, which demanded artistic freedom.

In 1981 he moved to the United States, where he lived for twelve years, mostly in New York. He studied for a time, photographed the city's artist and activist scenes and was influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. In 1993 he returned to Beijing. In the 1995 photo series Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn he drops an urn some 2,000 years old so that it shatters. He has also painted Coca-Cola logos on ancient pots, to ask what cultural heritage and value really are.

Ai Weiwei was an artistic consultant on the construction of the Bird's Nest, the Olympic stadium in Beijing, but later distanced himself from the Games as propaganda. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake he collected the names of more than 5,000 schoolchildren who had died in poorly built schools. The authorities tried to silence him, and he was beaten by police. In 2010 he filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with Sunflower Seeds, some 100 million sunflower seeds in hand-painted porcelain from Jingdezhen.

In 2011 he was arrested and held for 81 days without charge. His company was then accused of tax offences, and he was banned from travelling. In 2015 he got his passport back and left China. He has since lived in Berlin, Britain and Portugal. The refugee crisis has become a major theme, notably in the 2017 film Human Flow and in a huge rubber boat filled with figures. In 2021 he published the memoir 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.

Today Ai Weiwei is as well known as an activist as he is as an artist. He uses social media skilfully and has become a symbol of the struggle for freedom of expression. Critics sometimes argue that the activism overshadows the art, but his works have made questions of power, memory and human rights visible to a very large audience.