© Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei was born in 1957 in Beijing, China. He attended the Beijing Film Academy, and upon moving to New York in the 1980s, continued his studies at the Parsons School of Design. The diversity of his artistic production includes installation, sculpture, photography, performance, documentary filmmaking, architecture, social media and public art projects. A staunch defender of human rights and the freedom of expression, his work taps into the human condition, addressing injustices and truth, advocating for humanity, and providing a critical lens through which to examine humanity’s relationship to nature and the environment and confront systems of economic, political and societal power.
Ai Weiwei is a global citizen, a passionate social activist, creative visionary, and one of the most provocative artists of our time. He grew up as a refugee in his home country. As the son of one of China’s most renowned poets, Ai Qing, his family was exiled to remote provinces along the Northern borders, where they lived and worked in labor camps during China’s Cultural Revolution, before being allowed to return to Beijing in 1976. From 1981 to 1993, Ai Weiwei lived in New York where he absorbed the influences of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns. He returned to China in 1993 and helped found the Beijing East Village, a community of experimental, avant-garde artists. In April 2011, he was secretly detained for 81 days by Chinese authorities without charge. In July 2015, the artist’s passport was finally returned. Ai Weiwei emerged as a vocal commentator of China’s authoritarian regime and more and continues to create art that transcends the matrix of Eastern and Western ideas.
Major solo exhibitions include Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2022); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK (2022); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2021); Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal (2021); Imperial War Museum, London, UK (2020); K20/K21, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); OCA, São Paulo, Brazil (2018); Corpartes, Santiago, Chile (2018); Mucem, Marseille, France (2018); PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Sakip Sabanci, Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2017); Public Art Fund, New York, NY, USA (2017); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2017); Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2016); 21er Haus, Vienna, Austria (2016); Helsinki Art Museum, Finland (2016); Royal Academy, London, UK (2015); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany (2014); Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN, USA (2013); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., USA (2012); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (2011); Tate Modern, London, UK (2010) and Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2009).
In 2022 Ai Weiwei was awarded with the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association. He won the lifetime achievement award from the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2008 and was made an Honorary Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2011. His role as an activist and champion for human rights has been recognized through the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2012 and Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2015.