Ai Weiwei – An Artistic Voice of Conscience

Amid cascading crises around the world throughout the year 2020, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei—once imprisoned and still excoriated and feared by China’s authoritarian government—amplified his voice even more on behalf of democratic movements and in support of imprisoned and oppressed dissidents and ordinary people.

Art against authoritarianism

Ai has continued to speak out forcefully, through art, film, and activism, against state-sponsored violence, recently focusing his advocacy on behalf of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; the 43 students violently “disappeared” from a rural teachers’ academy in Mexico in 2014, allegedly at the hands of law enforcement colluding with organized crime; refugees from the Syrian civil war and other crisis points; and China’s harassed, surveilled, and imprisoned Uyghur minority.

His 2020 documentary film shines a light on the more brutal aspects of the Chinese government’s handling of the massive lockdown after the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan. 

For many people, Ai has long served as a symbol of the human rights struggle worldwide and as a shining example of creativity, individualism, and perseverance in the face of constant threats and harassment. 

His 2013 work S.A.C.R.E.D. consists of an installation in six parts: “Supper,” “Accusers,” “Cleansing,” “Ritual,” “Entropy,” and “Doubt.” These close-to-life-size dioramas depicted the artist, surrounded by prison guards, as he endured the daily routine of prison. The work is anchored in Ai’s own experience of 81 days of imprisonment at the hands of China’s government in 2011. 

Life on the margins

Ai, born in 1957 in Beijing, is known for a richly varied body of work. He has produced paintings, architectural creations, sculptural installations, video art, photography, and concept pieces. The originality and quality of his artistic vision have drawn praise from critics and members of the international public, even as his provocations of current political orthodoxy and outspokenness on issues of artistic freedom have drawn reprisals in the form of arrests, detainment, harassment, and even torture from the Chinese government. 

Ai is the son of the celebrated poet Ai Qing, who developed a Western-style “modern” poetry and produced numerous lyrical and narrative works. Soon after the birth of his son, the Chinese government accused Ai Qing of being a “rightist,” and sent him and his young family into exile.

Ai Weiwei thus spent his early years in the remote province of Heilongjiang, in the northeast part of China, and Xinjiang, the autonomous region in the northwest. From this period of his life under China’s Cultural Revolution, Ai carried into adulthood a visceral understanding of what it felt like to be the object of discrimination. The family was unable to return to Beijing until after the unraveling of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. 

In 1978 Ai matriculated at the Beijing Film Academy. Even so, he spent much of his time among a collective of artists known as the Stars Arts Group, or simply “the Stars.” The avant-garde group put the rights of self-expression, individualism, and freedom of speech at the center of their ethos. Members drew on contemporary social issues and personal life experiences as subjects, a focus that put them sharply at odds with the state-supported style of socialist realism.

Refused an official exhibit space in 1979, the group staged an unauthorized exhibit on the railings of the China Art Gallery. Ordered to take down the show, they held a pro-human rights protest march, which led officials to relent and allow them to exhibit inside the halls of the gallery. Four years later, the “Stars” came under mounting political pressure, forcing them to disband. While other members left for Europe, Ai went to New York in 1981. 

An international voice for freedom of expression

In New York City, Ai studied at the Parsons School of Design and immersed himself in the city’s artistic subculture. At first concentrating on painting, he found inspiration in the works of French artist Marcel Duchamp and the German performance artist Joseph Beuys. 

Duchamp, originally a Cubist artist influenced by the trend of Futurism, was known for his “ready-made” works for which he repurposed common objects and modified them slightly to become works of art. Beuys’ work was notable for its fusing of sculpture, performance art, and political activism, all in furtherance of his goal of making the world a more peaceful, inclusive, and democratic place. Contact with the works of these and other innovative artists pointed Ai toward his embrace of sculpture and other new forms.

But Ai had difficulty selling his work, and he went home to China in 1993 after learning his father was ill. (Ai Qing would pass away in 1996.) As he re-adapted to life in Beijing, Ai began to delve into the tensions building between the traditional culture of China and its rapid industrialization in the modern world. He started transforming artifacts of Chinese classical culture into modernist works. For example, he once painted a Coca-Cola symbol on an urn dating from the Han dynasty.

The mid-1990s saw Ai collaborating on several books on avant-garde art, all produced outside government-sanctioned channels. In 2000 he helped curate a show of art designed purposely to shock, coinciding with the Shanghai Biennale art festival. He established his own Beijing-area studio and began to work on architectural pieces, later founding FAKE, a design company that made use of simple, easily obtained materials. 

In 2007 Ai presented Fairytale, a conceptual art project informed by his understanding of the use of space. Fairytale involved the transportation of precisely 1,001 everyday Chinese street vendors, students, police officers, and people from other walks of life—accompanied by an equal number of chairs—to Germany, following them as they traveled through the city of Kassel during the Documenta art festival. For some of the people who made up this living exhibit, it was the first time they had seen anything of the world outside China.

After his release from prison in 2011, China refused to allow Ai to leave the country until 2015, when he was reunited in Germany with his young son. In 2018 the government razed Ai’s studio with no warning, forcing him to observe and mourn its destruction from exile.

Today, Ai lives in England, continuing his vocal criticism of the Chinese government, despite continued harassment and the banning of his name on government-controlled Chinese social media.