Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing on 28 August 1957, the son of Ai Qing, one of twentieth-century China's most celebrated poets, per TheArtStory's biography of the artist. When Ai Weiwei was one year old the family was sent to a labour camp and then into internal exile in Xinjiang province, where his father was made to do hard manual labour; they remained there for close to two decades until Mao Zedong's death in 1976 let the family return to Beijing, the same account states. Ai Weiwei enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 to study animation, and TheArtStory's biography records that he became involved with The Stars, an early unofficial artists' group pressing for the right to make work outside state-sanctioned styles.

In 1981 he moved to the United States, and by TheArtStory's account he settled in New York the following year, enrolled at Parsons School of Design and remained in the city for eleven years, making the photographs later published and exhibited as New York Photographs 1983-1993, a body of work that documents the Chinese emigre and downtown art scenes of the period, per Village Preservation's account of his time in the city's East Village. His first solo exhibition, Old Shoes, Safe Sex, was held in New York in 1988 at the gallery now known as Ethan Cohen Gallery, per that gallery's own artist page. He returned to Beijing in 1993 when his father became ill, and after his father's death in 1996 he turned increasingly to furniture, publishing and architecture, per TheArtStory's account.

Back in Beijing, Ai Weiwei became closely associated with a loose colony of avant-garde artists who had settled in a run-down settlement on the city's eastern edge that they called the East Village, after the New York neighbourhood; Village Preservation's account of his time there describes him mentoring the group and helping its members find an audience and a vocabulary; the settlement's own history, per Tate's art-term note on the Beijing East Village, ended in 1994 with a police raid and enforced evictions. With the curator Feng Boyi he produced a sequence of self-published, non-commercial artists' books that circulated outside any state publishing channel: the Black Cover Book in 1994, the White Cover Book in 1995 and the Grey Cover Book in 1997. MoMA's own collection page for the Black Cover Book describes it as a compilation of reproductions of international contemporary art, translated critical texts and new work by Chinese artists, assembled at a moment when almost none of that material was otherwise available inside China.

The same instinct for organising exhibitions rather than only making objects continued in 2000, when he and Feng Boyi co-curated Fuck Off at Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, timed to coincide with the Shanghai Biennale: 46 artists showed conceptual, performance and protest work outside official channels, and China's Cultural Inspection Bureau raided the show and ordered it closed before its scheduled end date, ten days after it opened, per Wikipedia's account of the exhibition. The pattern recurs through his career: publishing, curating and building platforms for other people's work are as much a part of the practice as any single sculpture.

In 2003 Ai Weiwei founded the architectural studio FAKE Design; per Harvard Art Museums' own account of the name, it is a pun on the Mandarin characters fa (development) and ke (class), which spoken together sound close to an English obscenity, alongside its plainer English sense of an assertion of inauthenticity. The studio designed the Beijing space of Galerie Urs Meile, the gallery that has represented him since at least 2006 per the gallery's own biography page, which credits Ai Weiwei as the building's architect as well as its represented artist, an unusual double role for a commercial gallery to record about its own artist.

Ai Weiwei served as an artistic consultant to the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron on the Beijing National Stadium, the 'Bird's Nest', built for the 2008 Olympic Games. He subsequently and publicly disavowed the Games themselves and has said he does not want to be associated with how the building is used today, per CBC News's report on his position; the design credit and the disavowal both belong in the record, since collectors and institutions are routinely asked about one without the other.

After the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008, Ai Weiwei organised a volunteer citizen investigation into the deaths of schoolchildren in buildings that collapsed while nearby structures stood, compiling a public list of the names of the dead where the government had not published one, per TheArtStory's account of the project. The investigation led to confrontations with local authorities; Smithsonian Magazine's report on the demolition of his Shanghai studio situates this activism as the context, though not the stated legal reason, for what followed.

Two years earlier, the Shanghai municipal government had itself invited Ai Weiwei to build a studio in the city's Jiading district as part of a plan to develop a cultural quarter there, and had indicated it would help him secure the necessary permits, per Smithsonian Magazine's reporting. In 2010 the same authorities ordered the newly completed building demolished, officially for lacking proper permits; Ai Weiwei marked the order with a widely reported feast of river crabs for supporters that November, a pun on a Chinese-language euphemism for state censorship, before the building was torn down in January 2011, per Smithsonian Magazine's account. Its roughly 1,500 numbered wooden components are now stored at his current studio in Portugal, kept, in his own words as reported by Smithsonian Magazine, 'to keep a record of history and memories'.

From the mid-2010s Ai Weiwei was based mainly in Berlin for several years; M+ Museum's own biographical note on the artist records that he has since divided his time between Berlin, Cambridge in England and Montemor-o-Novo in Portugal. He first visited Portugal in 2019 and bought a property near Montemor-o-Novo, a farming town about 100 kilometres southeast of Lisbon, the same day, citing the country's pace of life and its light, per the Associated Press report of June 2021.

The studio he has since built on that property, about 30,000 square feet around a central courtyard, uses traditional Chinese timber joinery of a hundred wooden pillars notched together without nails, deliberately echoing the plan and proportions, though not the material, of the demolished Shanghai studio, per Smithsonian Magazine's account of the building. It is this Portuguese studio, rather than any single named residence, that this page records as where his practice currently operates.

No catalogue raisonne of Ai Weiwei's work has been published, and no authentication board or artist's foundation could be found for this page; the closest thing to a public authority is the pattern visible in how auction houses catalogue his work. Phillips's own lot page for Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, sold in London on 29 June 2015, records that each of the twelve bronze heads carries its own individual certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. Sotheby's own account of his editions describes them as 'produced under close studio oversight and released in tightly controlled numbers', with at least one collaboration, a skateboard edition, accompanied by a signed certificate of authenticity, per Sotheby's article on the editions market.

That system covers the editioned, collector-facing side of the practice. It does not appear to extend to the one-off public and museum commissions: the Middelheim Museum's own collection page for the Bridge Without A Name records the work as a permanent acquisition under an object number, with no certificate mentioned at all, and none could be found on the museum's site. The two halves of the output are therefore verified by two entirely different kinds of paper: a studio-issued certificate for an edition, and an acquiring institution's own collection record for a unique commission.

Ai Weiwei's standing auction record is Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, a bronze edition of six plus two artist's proofs, sold at Phillips in London on 29 June 2015 for 3,442,500 GBP with premium, against a published estimate of 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 GBP; Phillips's own public lot page does not separately publish the hammer price, only the price realised inclusive of premium. A gold-plated edition of the same work had sold at Phillips five months earlier, on 12 February 2015, for 2,882,500 GBP with premium, per MyArtBroker's market summary, which draws on the auction houses' own published results. Individual works from Sunflower Seeds, the porcelain installation first shown at Tate Modern in 2010, have also traded at auction in far smaller quantities than the roughly 100 million seeds that covered the Turbine Hall floor, since the vast majority of the piece remains a single indivisible Tate holding rather than a market edition, per Tate's own page on the work.

Below the headline lots, MyArtBroker's summary records a run of results in the high five to low seven figures in GBP for individual sculptures, marble and porcelain works and works on paper across Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips sales between 2012 and 2018, consistent with an artist whose primary market runs through a small number of represented galleries rather than published price lists, and whose secondary market is led by a handful of large-edition sculptures rather than by unique paintings.

The Middelheim bridge is not abstract decoration: Middelheim Museum's own collection page describes Ai Weiwei taking an existing footbridge in the park and replacing its deck with planks cut to trace the outline of China's national borders, so that crossing it is deliberately uneven, an invitation, in the museum's own description, to reflect on the tension between the Chinese state, its people and the world beyond it. Sunflower Seeds carries a comparably plain, documented meaning rather than a hidden one: Ai Weiwei has said, as reported in coverage of the work's making, that sunflower seeds were a treat shared even by the poorest households during his childhood, so that a floor of a hundred million individually hand-painted porcelain seeds converts a private memory of scarcity and small shared pleasure into an object about mass production, individual labour and number.

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads reproduces, at a larger scale and without the missing seven originals, the twelve bronze zodiac fountainheads removed from the Old Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, when Anglo-French forces sacked it in 1860, a documented episode of nineteenth-century imperial plunder that individual original heads have since resurfaced from and been the subject of restitution demands and high-profile sales; Ai Weiwei's version restages the set complete, making the gap in the historical record itself part of what the sculpture shows. None of this rests on a hidden programme: the artist and the institutions that show his work have stated these readings plainly, and the absence of anything more esoteric behind them is itself the honest finding.