Ai Weiwei: An Interview

COMPLETELY FRESH. Ai Weiwei is a contemporary artist, writer and humanitarian activist. Born in China in 1957, from 1981 to 1993 he lived in the United States. He currently has three exhibitions in New York: Child’s Play is at the Vito Schnabel Gallery at both 455 W 19th Street and 360 W 11th Street, and What You See is What You See is at Faurschou New York, 148 Green Street, Brooklyn. Ai Weiwei’s exhibitions run to late February 2025.

Ai Weiwei you now have three exhibitions on at the same time in this city which has been very important in your life?

Yes. It was during my age from 24 to 36 and is a full circle of the zodiac – 12 years, and that’s probably the most important period of time.

A time when you read The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and your artistic development was influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns?

Yes. I think I’m pretty fortunate to come from a communist society right after the cultural revolution. You couldn’t imagine how my life was. My father was 20 years in exile in my growing up.

Your father the Chinese poet?

Yes, he was the most important one, but he was exiled. He was almost forbidden to write for over 30 or 40 years. It is a very, very cruel tool, to forbid a writer to write, but he had to go through this re-education. Anyway he studied in Paris and he loved art and that’s why I did the water lilies. It’s really in his memory. You can see a black hole there.

Ai Weiwei how was your childhood in your father’s exile in China?

We have been pushed away from Beijing to a most remote area. My family was just like any refugees you see today, but more tense and in a very much worsened situation because it was punished. Refugees are not necessarily punished, but he was insulted. That’s my childhood.

You wrote a beautiful small book called Humanity, published by the Princeton University Press. Is all your life an action in relation to displacement?

Growing up in such a condition you have begun a lifetime dty and an obligation to speak for the people who lost their voice or who never had a voice. As an artist I’m very privileged just to give my expressions, and those have to relate to my personal life.

Being the son of an important poet must be a proud but difficult heritage for a child. How did you decide to be an artist?

I never decided. I was born an artist. I guess everybody may become an artist, but while you are growing up those chances are just not there. Even with me, my father will never wish me to become an artist or writer because that only means this is a very dangerous position. Millions of people are being punished when they have individual expressions.

You mean in China?

China, but still today in the world. Even in the West, if you wanted to truly be individual you also could get into problems. The whole education is trying to teach people behaving: Be safe and be a good boy.

You started by painting, and then turned to many different artistic techniques, including films, sculpture and porcelain. How did you move from one to another?

It’s my instinct, or my character of so-called being an artist, that means I have free choice, and that can be subversive and so I have to do things against myself. I have to do things I am not familiar with, but I feel are a challenge. That’s why all my work is quite surprising when it comes out. Even to me it is completely fresh. That gave me a reason why I’m still doing it. Otherwise, why should I do it?

Your main studio is now in Portugal and appears in a beautiful painting which is part of the Child’s Play exhibitions, but in the past you had a studio in China and in New York and elsewhere. How did you move from one place to another?

I never had a home, even in China, because as a punished one you don’t have a home. Or, as Karl Marx once said, the working class don’t have a nation. They’re just like my father, being punished at so-called home. I am a traveller, and in each place I would like to have a location I can relate to. That’s why I built my studio in Portugal, at the western end of Europe, and that studio is exactly the same shape as the studio I built in Shanghai which was torn down right after it was built. I thought that maybe now I have a piece of land I will rebuild it, but I don’t want to repeat it so I will use a different method. Instead of using concrete bricks I use the Chinese temple structure, which means the buildings are made of wood with special skills. The whole structure is made like furniture, so there’s not a single nail in this huge complex.

In these New York exhibitions you show mainly works started many years ago. You started using LEGO, or its Chinese equivalent Woma, with Alcatraz in 2014. How did your use of LEGO come about?

You can use it from a so-called artistic point of view because it’s readymade and it’s plastic and it’s seen as something easy and cheap. Art is always being presented as something precious and with a uniqueness, but I love the quality of LEGO. It is only about forty colours, so it’s a challenge to use forty colours to make a very artistic, profound or complicated colour structure. It’s like a game.