Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei, Wade-Giles romanization Ai Wei-wei, (born May 18?, 1957, Beijing, China), 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.
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.
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.
In the mid-2010s Ai turned his attention to the global refugee crisis with several projects, including a temporary installation of 14,000 life vests around the columns of the Konzerthaus Berlin concert hall (2016). The vests were collected by Ai on the Greek island of Lesbos, where he and his studio stayed for several months during the height of the Syrian Civil War, when hundreds of asylum seekers arrived each day on their way to Europe after braving a perilous sea journey from Turkey. The installation was reportedly intended not only to call attention to the crisis but also to serve as a tribute to the individuals who perished during the passage.
In 2020 Ai released Coronation, a documentary about the Chinese government’s response to the growing health crisis in Wuhan, the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. From Europe, where he had been based since 2015, Ai directed a crew of volunteers to film the city’s strict lockdown measures and their impact on everyday life. Ai recounted the story of his life and that of his father’s in 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir (2021).