In 1978, Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy and studied animation. [5] In 1978, he was one of the founders of the early avant garde art group the " Stars", together with Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, Mao Lizi, Huang Rui, Li Shuang, Ah Cheng and Qu Leilei. The group disbanded in 1983, [6] yet Ai participated in regular Stars group shows, The Stars: Ten Years, 1989 (Hanart Gallery, Hong Kong and Taipei), and a retrospective exhibition in Beijing in 2007: Origin Point (Today Art Museum, Beijing). [ citation needed] Life in the United States [ edit ] This raincoat has a hole near the waist which is covered with a condom. The work is intended to describe the AIDS crisis as Ai saw it in New York City [7] Ai Weiwei is a larger-than-life character, living in a huge country, dealing with larger-than-life issues." – Gillian McIntyre, interpretive planner of Ai Weiwei: According to What? at the AGO Ai’s rebellion has its roots in his father’s turbulent life. He writes that he was never emotionally close to Ai Qing, who was a famous poet. Yet it is evident that his father’s persecution, first under the Nationalists in the 30s and then as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution, had a profound effect on Ai’s character.

Look around these rooms at these mostly huge artistic gestures and confrontations. By being so big as an artist, Ai Weiwei is both embodying the colossal as China's enduring reality and declaring that, as one Chinese citizen, at least, he won't abide to any binding terms of that reality, in particular with regards to the individual experience. As of 2 September 2009, there were 4,851 confirmed. This video is a tribute to these perished students and a memorial for innocent lives lost. During shooting and production, Ai Weiwei studio experienced significant obstruction and resistance from local government. The film crew was followed, sometimes physically stopped from shooting certain scenes and there were even attempts to buy off footage. All villagers interviewed for the purposes of this documentary have been interrogated or illegally detained by local government to some extent.Ai befriended beat poet Allen Ginsberg while living in New York, following a chance meeting at a poetry reading where Ginsberg read out several poems about China. Ginsberg had traveled to China and met with Ai's father, the noted poet Ai Qing, and consequently Ginsberg and Ai became friends. [12] Sheng Xue, an exiled Chinese author, speaking about the importance of the work Ai did to ensure the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake are not forgotten

He shows me another collection nearby: a mini-forest of twisted, gnarled olive tree roots, requisitioned from neighbouring farmers. “Many things I collect are useless for others,” he says. “But it would be a waste if those things were not being paid attention to. We see everything and we don’t see anything.” In a litany of loss, the names of 5,200 dead Chinese schoolchildren reverberated throughout the room from a loudspeaker." – Marc Ellison, The Toronto StarBeijing National Stadium [ edit ] The Beijing National Stadium at night during the 2008 Summer Olympics Toy, Mary-Anne (19 January 2008). "The artist as an angry man". The Age. Australia. Archived from the original on 25 January 2008 . Retrieved 6 July 2008. As of 2021, Ai lives in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal. [24] He still maintains a base in Cambridge, where his son attends school, and a studio in Berlin. Ai says he will stay in Portugal long-term "unless something happens". [25] Toronto-based interventionist artist Sean Martindale created Love The Future / Free Ai Weiwei during Ai's detention by Chinese authorities in spring 2011. This show of solidarity is intended to raise awareness and further dialogue about the internationally acclaimed artist’s situation, as well as those of others disappeared due to their political and artistic expression. The eight-foot-tall statue is made entirely out of salvaged cardboard Martindale collected in and around Toronto’s central Chinatown neighbourhood. China monitors and censors its net activity more aggressively than just about any country on the planet. These river crabs are indeed everywhere and climbing all over each other in this permanently confined space. And their pincers are sharp and at perpetual work suppressing free speech.

I’m a big teapot … Left Right Studio Material, an installation of fragments from porcelain sculptures destroyed when Ai’s Beijing studio was demolished. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian By having loose tea around three houses, it creates a certain environmental presence and further explores the use of ordinary daily materials. Ai designed the cover for 17 June 2013 issue of Time magazine. The cover story, by Hannah Beech, is "How China Sees the World". [192] Time magazine called it "the most beautiful cover we've ever done in our history." [193]After his release, his sister gave some details about his detention condition to the press, explaining that he was subjected to a kind of psychological torture: he was detained in a tiny room with constant light, and two guards were set very close to him at all times, and watched him constantly. [74] In November, Chinese authorities were again investigating Ai and his associates, this time under the charge of spreading pornography. [75] [76] Moving from east to west, Chang'an Boulevard traverses Beijing's most iconic avenue. Along the boulevard's 45-kilometer length, it recorded the changing densities of its far-flung suburbs, central business districts, and political core. At each 50-meter increment, the artist records a single frame for one minute. The work reveals the rhythm of Beijing as a capital city, its social structure, cityscape, socialist-planned economy, capitalist market, political power center, commercial buildings, and industrial units as pieces of a multi-layered urban collage. Tinari, Philip (1 June 2007). "A kind of True Living: The art of Ai Weiwei". Archived from the original on 17 March 2012 . Retrieved 19 January 2011. Forever Bicycles is a 32-foot (9.8m) sculpture made of many interconnected bicycles. The sculpture was installed as 1,300 bicycles in Austin, Texas, in 2017. [163] The sculpture was moved to The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and reassembled as 1,254 bicycles in 2019. [164]

Now, Ai Weiwei is a political artist, but he's not, I don't think, an innately dissident one. Rather, his dissent isn't grounded in any wholescale rejection of his culture's precepts or challenges to that self-conception. What makes him so unique and such trouble to officials is that his work, his thinking, even his life clearly and happily embrace a fundamental principle of Chinese society: the colossal. As a sequel to Ai Weiwei's film Lao Ma Ti Hua, the film so sorry (named after the artist's 2009 exhibition in Munich, Germany) shows the beginnings of the tension between Ai Weiwei and the Chinese Government. In Lao Ma Ti Hua, Ai Weiwei travels to Chengdu, Sichuan to attend the trial of the civil rights advocate Tan Zuoren, as a witness. So Sorry shows the investigation led by Ai Weiwei studio to identify the students who died during the Sichuan earthquake as a result of corruption and poor building constructions leading to the confrontation between Ai Weiwei and the Chengdu police. After being beaten by the police, Ai Weiwei traveled to Munich, Germany to prepare his exhibition at the museum Haus der Kunst. The result of his beating led to intense headaches caused by a brain hemorrhage and was treated by emergency surgery. These events mark the beginning of Ai Weiwei's struggle and surveillance at the hands of the state police. Ai Weiwei is also a notable architect known for his collaborations with Herzog & de Meuron and Wang Shu. In 2005, Ai was invited by Wang Shu as an external teacher of the Architecture Department of China Academy of Art. [166] Jinhua Park [ edit ] " Archaeological Archives" designed by Ai Weiwei inside the Jinhua Architecture Park. As of 14 April 2009, the list had accumulated 5,385 names. Ai published the collected names as well as numerous articles documenting the investigation on his blog which was shut down by Chinese authorities in May 2009. [36] He also posted his list of names of schoolchildren who died on the wall of his office at FAKE Design in Beijing. [37]

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He survived in New York by doing part-time jobs and becoming a street artist sketching tourists in Times Square. He had few friends and, at one point, his sense of isolation was so acute that he refused to answer the door to callers at his grotty apartment on the Lower East Side. For inspiration, he lingered long in downtown galleries and secondhand bookstores. He met, and briefly befriended, Allen Ginsberg, a champion of his father’s poetry, and for a time shared a loft with the performance artist Tehching Hsieh who happened to be spending a year tied to fellow artist Linda Montano with an 8ft rope. They were, writes Ai, “models for me in terms of their unflinching commitment to an artistic vision”. In 2018, Ai Weiwei received Marina Kellen French Outstanding Contributions to the Arts Award granted by the Americans for the Arts. [222]