Ai Weiwei

artist and activist

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist, born in Beijing, China in 1957, who has produced a diverse body of work, including sculptural installations, architectural projects, photographs, and videos. While Ai’s art has received international acclaim, the often provocative and subversive nature of his art, as well as his political outspokenness, has led to various forms of repression by the Chinese authorities.

Ai’s father was Ai Qing, one of China’s most famous poets. Shortly after Weiwei’s birth – most sources say August 28, 1957, but others suggest May 13 or 18, 1957 – Communist officials accused Ai Qing of being a rightist, and the family was exiled to remote locations. They were sent first to the northeastern province of Heilongjiang and then to the northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang before being allowed to return to Beijing in 1976, at the end of the Cultural Revolution. As a youth, Weiwei had been interested in art, and in 1978 he enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, though he found more creative and intellectual stimulation as part of a collective of avant-garde artists called Xingxing (“Stars”). Eager to escape the restrictions of Chinese society, he moved to the United States in 1981.
United States in 1981. Settling in New York City, he attended the Parsons School of Design (now part of the New School) and became active in the city’s fertile subculture of artists and bohemians.
Although Ai initially focused on painting, he soon turned to sculpture, inspired by the ready-made works of French artist Marcel Duchamp and German sculptor Joseph Beuys.
Among his early creations, exhibited in a solo show in New York City in 1988, were a wire hanger bent into the shape of Duchamp’s profile and a violin with a shovel handle instead of a neck.
There was little market for Ai’s work, however, and in 1993, when his father fell ill, he returned to Beijing.
Exploring an increasingly modernized China’s tense relationship with its cultural heritage, Ai began to create works that irrevocably transformed centuries-old Chinese artifacts, such as a Han Dynasty urn painted with the Coca-Cola logo (1994) and pieces of Ming and Qing furniture that were disassembled and reassembled into various non-functional configurations.
Between 1994 and 1997, Ai collaborated on three books that promoted avant-garde Chinese art; published outside official government channels, they became signposts for China’s underground art community. His profile rose in 2000, when he co-curated an exhibition of deliberately outrageous art as an alternative to that year’s Shanghai Biennale.
After building his own studio complex on the outskirts of Beijing in 1999, Ai turned to architecture, founding the design firm FAKE four years later to realize his projects, which emphasized simplicity through the use of everyday materials. An architectural notion of space later informed Ai’s Fairytale (2007), a conceptual project that involved transporting 1,001 ordinary Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, to live in the city for the duration of the Documenta art festival.
In 2005, Ai was invited to write a blog for the Chinese web portal Sina. Although he initially used the blog as a means of documenting the mundane aspects of his life, he soon found it to be an appropriate forum for his often blunt criticism of the Chinese government. Through the blog, Ai publicly disavowed his role in designing the National Stadium (popularly known as the Bird’s Nest) in Beijing, claiming that the 2008 Olympic Games, for which the structure was built, were tainted by official corruption and amounted to government propaganda. And nearly a year after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which shoddy construction was blamed for the deaths of thousands of children in collapsed public schools, Ai blasted officials for failing to release details of the deaths and mobilized his growing readership to investigate. The blog was soon shut down, and Ai was placed under surveillance, though he refused to curtail his activities. (He shifted his online presence to Twitter.)
Later in 2009, he was assaulted by police in Chengdu, where he was supporting a fellow activist on trial. Among the artworks that resulted from Ai’s “citizen investigation” was Remembering (2009), an installation in Munich in which 9,000 colorful backpacks were arranged on a wall to form a quote, in Chinese, from the mother of an earthquake victim.
In 2010, Ai won praise for his installation at the Tate Modern in London of 100 million hand-painted porcelain “sunflower seeds” made by some 1,600 Chinese artisans.
Until the exhibition was roped off due to health concerns, Ai had encouraged visitors to step on the seeds, viewing the fragile sculptures as a metaphor for China’s oppressed people.
In late 2010, Ai was notified that a Shanghai studio complex he had recently built at the invitation of the city’s mayor was to be demolished.
Although local authorities cited Ai’s failure to obtain a required permit as the reason for the
Although local authorities cited Ai’s failure to obtain a required permit as the reason for the demolition, Ai himself speculated that two documentary films he had made suggesting injustices on the part of the Shanghai government may have been the impetus. Ai was briefly placed under house arrest to prevent him from attending a party at the complex in November, and the site was demolished two months later. Also in November, Ai launched another citizen investigation following a deadly fire in a Shanghai high-rise apartment building.
In April 2011, Ai was detained for alleged “economic crimes”-it was later revealed that he was accused of tax evasion-as part of a broader crackdown on dissent.
on dissent. He was released on bail more than two months later, with Chinese state media reporting that he had confessed to the charges against him. In November, however, Ai was slapped with a 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) tax bill. He fought the bill with the help of private donations, but his final appeal was rejected by the court in September 2012, and shortly thereafter he announced that FAKE’s business license had been revoked. International media coverage of the incidents brought further attention to Ai’s art. In May 2011, while he was still in detention, his public installation Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, featuring bronze sculptures inspired by the Chinese zodiac, was unveiled in New York City and London. The work was created for the 2010 São Paulo Biennial.
A major career retrospective, “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”, which originated in Tokyo in 2009, premiered at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The documentaries Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) and Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case (2013) chronicle the artist’s achievements and vicissitudes.
In the mid-2010s, Ai turned his attention to the global refugee crisis with several projects, including a temporary installation of 14,000 life jackets around the pillars of the Konzerthaus Berlin concert hall (2016).
The life vests were collected by Ai on the Greek island of Lesbos, where he spent several months with his
studio stayed for several months during the height of the Syrian civil war, when hundreds of asylum seekers arrived daily en route to Europe after braving a perilous sea journey from Turkey. The installation was reportedly intended not only to raise awareness of the crisis, but also to serve as a tribute to those who died during the journey.
Ai later premiered the documentary Human Flow at the 2017 Venice Film Festival. The film follows the plight of millions of displaced people in 23 countries, through intimate interviews with individual refugees and drone footage of sprawling makeshift camps. That same year, a series of the artist’s public sculptures titled Good Fences Make Good Neighbors (a reference to a line in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”) were installed throughout New York City. The pieces included Arch in Washington Square Park, Gilded Cage at an entrance to Central Park, and Five Fences on the north portico of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building. Ai stated that the works were a response to the United States’ shift toward exclusionary immigration policies.
During this time, Ai’s troubles with Chinese authorities seemingly continued when his studio was demolished again in 2018. The space was part of the ZuoYou (Left Right) art district in Beijing, and Ai was aware that it, like other art districts in China, was slated for demolition as part of a redevelopment program.
However, the demolition began without warning, and some of his artworks were damaged. Ai stated that he did not see the surprise destruction as an act of political retribution against him specifically, but rather as an example of China’s discriminatory practices against all artists and those who practice free expression.
In 2020, Ai released Coronation, a documentary about the Chinese government’s response to the growing health crisis in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 pandemic originated. From Europe, where he had been based since 2015, Ai directed a crew of volunteers to film the city’s strict containment measures and their impact on daily life. Ai told the story of his life and that of his father in 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir (2021).

Citation Information

Article Title: Ai Weiwei
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 09 February 2024

URL: https://www.britannica.com
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ai-Weiwei

Access Date: February 20, 2024