Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei – Son of an artist and revolutionary

Ai Weiwei was born in Peking on 28 August 1957. His father was the Chinese painter and poet Ai Qing, and his brother is the painter Ai Xuan, who enjoys considerably greater glory in China than Ai Weiwei himself. The family initially lived in very poor conditions as their father had fallen out of favour with the regime due to his critical stance and had been exiled to Xinjiang province. Their dwelling was more of a cave than a house and the father was forced to do menial work to support his family. These experiences had a great effect on Ai Weiwei and had a considerable influence on his later working methods – to his great love pf paper of which his father, the writing rebel, had been forbidden by those in power. His strong-willed father was able to maintain his dignity through all humiliations through the power of his art and Ai derived his own destiny from this overpowering role model: Ai Weiwei did not decide to become a dissident, he was born as one, he explained in an interview. 

Fine art in the conflicts of politics

Ai Weiwei first studied at the Peking Film Academy, meeting fellow students such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who later made names for themselves as directors. Like his father Ai Qing, Weiwei was also critical of the regime: in 1979 in took part in the founding of the artist’s collaboration Stars Group, which opposed the state regulation of art in China. An inclination towards the liberal West led him to New York in the early 1980s, where he lived until 1993, working intensively in the USA on performance and conceptual art, Pop Art and Dadaism. When his father became ill, Ai Weiwei returned to China and settled in the art quarter of Dashanzi. He was involved in experimental art and kept a blog in which he repeatedly criticised the Chinese regime, and which was censured by the state in 2009. He was forbidden to leave China in 2010, and in 2011 the state ordered his studio to be torn down and have the artist arrested.

Political activist or provocateur?

Ai Weiwei received an unprecedented wave of solidarity from all over the world. Politicians from Europe and the USA protested his imprisonment, and the Berlin Academy of Arts accepted him into its ranks as a sign of solidarity. His detention was lifted, but his travel ban remained. He was accused of tax evasion, bigamy, illegal foreign trading, and the dissemination of pornography. Ai Weiwei was eventually permitted to travel to Germany in 2015 and act as guest professor at the Berlin University of Arts. When he contributed to the media storm around the tragic death of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi in the course of the refugee crisis, many critics accused him of instrumentalizing the boy’s fate for his own purposes. He left Berlin four years later in conflict, accusing Germany of incorrigible Nazism, and moved to Cambridge, where people were at least more polite. Cambridge became too academic for him, however, and in 2021 he moved to Portugal where he says he has found a new home.