🇨🇳Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei was born into Chinese literary aristocracy and sent into exile before he could walk. His father, Ai Qing, was one of China's most celebrated poets — a man whose reputation was so high that Mao Zedong read his work personally. In 1958, when Weiwei was one year old, Ai Qing was declared a "rightist" during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the family was exiled to the far northwest of China: first to Heilongjiang province near the Soviet border, then to Xinjiang, where they lived for sixteen years in a pit house they dug themselves. The boy grew up in a desert among outcasts, watching his father clean the communal latrines as part of his "re-education." The experience of state power exercised arbitrarily against an individual — and the individual's insistence on surviving it with dignity — would become the animating principle of everything Ai Weiwei would later make.

In 1978 Mao was dead, the Cultural Revolution was over, and Ai Qing was rehabilitated. The family returned to Beijing. Weiwei enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy, where he was classmates with the director Zhang Yimou, and began making art in the city's underground scene. In 1981, at twenty-three, he received a visa to study in the United States and moved to New York, where he would remain for twelve years. He enrolled briefly at Parsons School of Design but largely educated himself through the city — visiting museums, absorbing the legacy of Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Warhol, and making street photography that documented the lives of Chinese immigrants in Manhattan. He sold paintings at weekend markets to survive. He taught himself woodworking. He lived in the East Village and Williamsburg before those neighbourhoods were transformed, and he watched the New York art world with the attentive detachment of someone who belonged to no school and answered to no dealer.

He returned to Beijing in 1993 to be near his dying father and remained. The city he came back to was unrecognisable — a construction site of Olympic ambition and economic transformation — and Weiwei threw himself into it. He designed his own studio compound in Caochangdi on the Beijing outskirts, began blogging prolifically about Chinese politics and society, and worked as the artistic consultant on the design of the Beijing National Stadium — the "Bird's Nest" — for the 2008 Olympics. Then, when the stadium became a symbol of the state's triumphalist spectacle, he publicly denounced the Games and refused to attend the opening ceremony.

What transformed him from a significant artist to an international symbol was the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. When shoddy school construction — the result of government corruption — caused thousands of students to die in buildings that collapsed while adjacent government offices stood intact, Weiwei launched a citizen investigation to compile the names of every child who died. He and volunteers collected 5,385 names through social media and interviews. He published them. The government had suppressed the numbers. His studio, being demolished by authorities in Shanghai without permit in 2010, became a global cause. In October 2010, his Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern — Sunflower Seeds, one hundred million individually hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds covering the entire hall floor — drew 100,000 visitors in its first week.

In April 2011, as he was about to board a flight in Beijing, he was detained by Chinese security forces without charge. He was held for eighty-one days in secret detention. The international outcry was immediate and sustained — Tate Modern, MoMA, and hundreds of institutions worldwide ran campaigns demanding his release. He emerged to find that his Beijing studio had been demolished and a tax evasion charge had been fabricated against him. His supporters crowdfunded the $1.8 million "fine" via donations sent to him as folded origami cranes — a gesture he found characteristic of both human absurdity and human grace. In 2015 his passport was returned and he left China. He has not returned.

His subsequent work has ranged across documentary film, architecture, installation, and social media — he was one of the most followed artists on Twitter and Instagram until his accounts were repeatedly suspended. His refugee crisis work, including Law of the Journey (a 70-metre inflatable refugee boat, 2017) and installations constructed from life jackets collected on the beaches of Lesbos, brought his activism into direct dialogue with the defining humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century. He currently divides his time between studios in Cambridge, Portugal, and several other European cities, producing work that continues to treat the political as inseparable from the personal and the aesthetic as inseparable from the ethical.