Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei is China's best-known contemporary artist and its most prominent dissident abroad. Born in Beijing in 1957, he is the son of Ai Qing, one of the most celebrated poets of the revolution, who was denounced in the Anti-Rightist campaign the year Ai was born and exiled to Xinjiang and then to a labour camp in Heilongjiang, where he cleaned public latrines. The family lived for years in a pit dug in the ground. Ai studied at the Beijing Film Academy and moved to New York in 1981, where he spent twelve years, worked odd jobs, photographed the East Village and absorbed Duchamp and Warhol. He returned in 1993 as his father fell ill, and became a central organiser of the Chinese avant-garde. He co-designed the Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics with Herzog and de Meuron, then publicly disowned the games as state propaganda. After the Sichuan earthquake that year killed thousands of children in schools built to poor standards, he organised volunteers to compile the names of over five thousand of them, which the government had not published. He was beaten by police in Chengdu in 2009 and needed surgery for a brain haemorrhage. His work uses repetition and destruction: a hundred million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds, a photograph of himself dropping a Han dynasty urn, backpacks spelling a mother's words about her dead child. He was detained without charge for eighty-one days in 2011 and then presented with a large tax bill; supporters sent donations by folding banknotes into paper planes over his studio wall. He left China in 2015 and has worked on refugee subjects since.
- Lived: 1957 CE – ?
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: painter, activist, architect
