When asked what his greatest unfinished project is, Ai Weiwei answers: “that will be death.”
63-year-old Ai, the man named “the most powerful artist in the world” in 2011 by ArtReview, is famous for such enigmatic responses. Like Warhol, he’s built a career around his strikingly eccentric persona: his work, which includes Han Dynasty vases spray-painted with Coca-Cola logos and a 30-foot sculpture made out of bicycles, is very much a celebration of the odd, bold, and larger-than-life.
Yet Ai’s fame extends far beyond the art world. For the last few decades, his name has been splashed across international headlines and he’s garnered a global reputation—not as an artist, but as a political dissident.
Ai is an outspoken champion of human rights and free speech. In his native China, he’s known as a fierce critic of the government’s authoritarian policies. His first experience of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) excesses came when he was a boy: during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution when his father was denounced for anti-communist activities and exiled to Xinjiang in the distant northwest.
Ai grew up cleaning toilets in a labour camp. Later, when Chinese citizens were allowed to travel abroad, he went to New York to attend Parsons. He returned in 1993, educated and already armed with the sharply satirical style and unflinching boldness of vision that would go on to define his career.
In the face of a puritanically conformist society, his early work offered a bold, uncensored individualism. A photo series published in the early 90s shows him leaping across the frame, naked and contorted into ridiculous poses. Ai titled it “grass mud horse covering the middle”: a name which in spoken Mandarin sounds like a slur about mothers and the Communist Party.
Other pieces are even more overtly scathing. His film project So Sorry investigates the Sichuan earthquake, revealing the backdrop of government corruption and shoddy construction that contributed to the devastating death toll. His Surveillance Camera sculptures mockingly symbolize China’s omnipresent state oversight, while his striking installation Free Speech Puzzle—dozens of shattered porcelain shards forming a fractured map of China—is a critique of the country’s denial of civil liberties.
In 2010, he crafted an elaborate exhibit named Sunflower Seeds for the Tate: the piece, consisting of 100 million seeming identical ceramic seeds, is meant to represent the CCP’s view of citizens as a dehumanized collective.
Unsurprisingly, Ai’s dissidence did not go unpunished for long. In 2011 he was arrested by Chinese authorities without charge and held for 81 days. His company—the sarcastically named Beijing Fake Culture Development Ltd—was shut down. When Ai’s passport was finally returned to him 4 years later, he fled to Germany, and later to Cambridge in the UK.
Half a decade later, Ai remains surprised by his own fame. “The secret police told me,” he said to Smithsonian, “everybody can see it but you, that you’re so influential.” Having survived persecution and been driven out of his home, his beliefs remain as radical as ever: he even refuses to listen to music, associating it with the Communist propaganda of the old days.
Ai is not your typical freedom fighter. Despite his now international renown, he seems reluctant to let Western media frame him as a glamorous resistance hero, insisting: “I don’t believe that much in my own answer”.
His most recent creations include a feature documentary on the refugee crisis, a visual display of bombs throughout history, and painted face masks in support of the Hong Kong protests. Over the last three decades, Ai’s career has been both prolific and diverse. Whatever he produces next—sculpture or video, photograph series or performance art—we can be sure that it will haunt the popular imagination for many years afterward.
