Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei (born May 18?, 1957, Beijing, China) is a Chinese artist and activist who produced a multifaceted array of creative work, including sculptural installations, architectural projects, photographs, and videos. While Ai’s art was lauded internationally, the frequently provocative and subversive dimension of his art, as well as his political outspokenness, triggered various forms of repression from Chinese authorities.

Early life and work

Ai’s father was Ai Qing, one of China’s most renowned poets. Shortly after Weiwei was born—most sources state on 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 locales. They were first sent 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 become interested in art, and in 1978 he enrolled at 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. Settling in New York City, he attended Parsons School of Design (part of what is now the New School) and actively engaged 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 the French artist Marcel Duchamp and the German sculptor Joseph Beuys. Among his early creations exhibited at 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 in place of its neck. There was little market for Ai’s work, however, and in 1993, when his father fell ill, he returned to Beijing. Exploring the fraught relationship of an increasingly modernized China to its cultural heritage, Ai began creating works that irrevocably transformed centuries-old Chinese artifacts—for instance, a Han dynasty urn onto which he painted the Coca-Cola logo (1994) and pieces of Ming- and Qing-era furniture broken down and reassembled into various nonfunctional configurations.

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The 1990s: avant-garde books, FAKE, and Fairytale

Between 1994 and 1997 Ai collaborated on three books that promoted avant-garde Chinese art; they were published outside official government channels and became signposts for China’s underground art community. His profile increased in 2000 when he cocurated an exhibition of deliberately outrageous art as an alternative to that year’s Shanghai Biennale. After building his own studio complex on the edge of Beijing in 1999, Ai turned toward architecture, and four years later he founded the design firm FAKE to realize his projects, which emphasized simplicity through the use of commonplace 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 explore the city for the duration of its Documenta art festival.

Early activism and Sunflower Seeds

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 a suitable forum for his often blunt criticism of the Chinese government. Through the blog, Ai publicly disavowed his role in helping to conceive the design of the National Stadium (popularly dubbed the Bird’s Nest) in Beijing, claiming that the 2008 Olympic Games for which the structure had been built were tainted by official corruption and amounted to government propaganda. Furthermore, nearly a year after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake—in which shoddy construction was suspected to have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of children in collapsed public schools—Ai lambasted officials for not having released details on the fatalities 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 transferred his online presence to Twitter.) Later in 2009 he was assaulted by police in Chengdu, where he was supporting a kindred activist on trial. Among the artworks that resulted from Ai’s “citizen investigation” was Remembering (2009), an installation in Munich in which 9,000 coloured backpacks were arranged on a wall to form a quote, in Chinese, from an earthquake victim’s mother.

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Architecture: The Built World

Ai earned praise in 2010 for his installation, at Tate Modern in London, of 100 million hand-painted porcelain “sunflower seeds,” which were produced by some 1,600 Chinese artisans. Until the exhibit was roped off because of a feared health hazard, Ai had encouraged visitors to walk upon the seeds, considering the fragile sculptures a metaphor for the downtrodden Chinese populace.

In late 2010 Ai was notified that a studio complex in Shanghai that he had recently built at the invitation of the city’s mayor was scheduled to be razed. Though 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 that suggested injustices on the part of Shanghai’s government may have been the underlying 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.

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