Ai Weiwei China, 1957
Biografie
Ai Weiwei’s artistic practice stands at the intersection of conceptual rigour and traditional Chinese craftsmanship, repurposing ancient materials and techniques to interrogate contemporary political realities. Whether shattering Han dynasty urns, assembling millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds, or reconstructing Qing-era furniture in nonfunctional configurations, Ai creates works that are acts of both creation and destruction, preservation and critique.
His installations invite physical engagement and audience participation, dissolving the boundary between viewer and artwork to forge immersive experiences that compel confrontation with uncomfortable truths about state power, cultural erasure, and human rights. The materials—porcelain forged at 1,300 degrees through a thirty-step process by sixteen hundred artisans, alongside centuries-old architectural fragments salvaged from demolished structures—carry the weight of history and labour, embodying the artist’s central concern with the value and dignity of individual lives within vast collective systems.
Born in 1957 in Beijing, Ai Weiwei is the son of Ai Qing, one of China’s most celebrated poets. His father’s persecution as a rightist intellectual during Chairman Mao’s anti-intellectual campaigns profoundly shaped the artist’s consciousness and practice. The family endured twenty years of exile in remote villages near the North Korean border and in Xinjiang province, where Ai Qing was forced to perform hard labour, including cleaning communal toilets. In these harsh conditions, young Ai acquired practical skills—furniture-making and bricklaying—that later informed his sculptural approach. Living under circumstances he describes as “extremely harsh,” with education “almost non-existent” and access to only a single encyclopedia, Ai developed an understanding of survival, resourcefulness, and the power of information that permeates his mature work.
In 1978, following the family’s return to Beijing at the end of the Cultural Revolution, he enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy and became active in the Xingxing (“Stars”) collective of avant-garde artists before departing for the United States in 1981. At Parsons School of Design in New York City, he immersed himself in the city’s vibrant artistic subculture, encountering the transformative influence of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture. These concepts would fundamentally reorient his practice toward an art of ideas rather than traditional aesthetics. His early exhibited works in New York in 1988, including a wire hanger bent into Duchamp’s profile and a violin with a shovel handle for a neck, declared his allegiance to the alchemical possibilities of transformation and recontextualization.
Ai Weiwei’s contributions to contemporary art extend far beyond formal innovation; he has redefined the artist’s role as witness, investigator, and advocate. He has established a paradigm in which aesthetic production and political activism are inseparable. His work exists in direct lineage with Duchamp’s conceptual provocations and Beuys’s conviction that art possesses social agency. Yet, it pushes these inheritances into territories of risk and consequence few Western artists have confronted. The monumental Sunflower Seeds installation at Tate Modern—one hundred million individually hand-painted porcelain seeds covering the Turbine Hall floor—functions simultaneously as a minimalist landscape, labour monument, and meditation on individuality within collectivism. This installation evokes memories of hardship from Ai’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution, magnifying the significance of individual effort within vast systems of production. His investigations into the Sichuan earthquake school collapses and his documentation of refugee crises demonstrate art’s capacity not merely to represent social injustice, but to intervene in public discourse and memory actively.
As a recipient of the Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award and Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, Ai has established himself as an indispensable voice in global conversations about freedom, dignity, and the transformative power of artistic expression.
Kunstwerken
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Ai WeiweiGuardian, 2024view more details -
Ai WeiweiCats (Black), 2022view more details
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Ai WeiweiCedar, 2022view more details
