Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei is on display at the Seattle Art Museum. Here his Forever Bicycles, which has 42 bicycles welded together, references how bicycles were once ubiquitous in Chinese cities.
Photo: Grant Hindsley
For more than 40 years, Ai Weiwei has transformed personal experiences, empathy and global politics into visionary art forms that tickle the eye and challenge the brain, making him one of the world’s most cerebral conceptual artists.
“Given everything you’ve done,” I asked him here at the Seattle Art Museum, where a major retrospective of his work is on exhibit, “do you consider yourself first an artist, a social critic or a political activist?”
“I like to have labels,” he said. “To be ‘artist’ will not offend me.” So far, so good. But then he said, “I prefer to be a critic or some kind of historical thinker or social activist.”
In truth, Ai Weiwei, at 67, is all those things as evidenced by this, his largest show ever in the U.S., “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei.” With more than 130 pieces from the 1980s to the current decade, it tracks his progression from painting, which he abandoned early, to social criticism through ordinary objects reimagined to symbolize his take on human rights, freedom of speech, Chinese culture and disasters, both natural and man-made.