Chinese artist, architect, and dissident; the most internationally visible critic of the People's Republic of China working in an artistic idiom, and one of the handful of living artists whose political activity has become inseparable from the reception of the work itself. His father was the poet Ai Qing, who was declared a rightist in 1958 and sent with his family into internal exile in Xinjiang for sixteen years — a biographical fact that shapes almost everything Ai has subsequently made.
Ai lived in New York from 1981 to 1993, returned to Beijing, co-founded the avant-garde space China Art Archives and Warehouse, and — as architectural consultant to Herzog & de Meuron — collaborated on the design of the Beijing National Stadium (the "Bird's Nest") for the 2008 Olympics, which he later publicly disowned as "a fake smile" covering the regime's human-rights record. The break with the Chinese state became explicit after the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake: Ai's Citizens' Investigation project collected, with volunteer help, the names and identifying details of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren killed in the collapse of shoddily built schools, and published them online in defiance of the government's refusal to release the figures. Retaliation followed: a police beating in Chengdu in 2009 that required emergency cranial surgery in Munich; the demolition of his Shanghai studio in 2011; 81 days of incommunicado detention in April–June 2011; a $2.4 million tax bill that was crowdfunded by over 30,000 Chinese citizens; and the confiscation of his passport until 2015.
The work itself operates across an unusually wide set of forms. Sunflower Seeds (2010) — 100 million individually hand-painted porcelain seeds, filling the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern — is both a meditation on mass production and one of the most literally collective works of recent art (1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen). Remembering (2009), the Munich facade installation made from 9,000 children's backpacks, is keyed to the Sichuan schoolchildren. Straight (2008–12) takes 150 tons of rebar recovered from the collapsed Sichuan schools, straightened by hand, and lays it on the floor. Since 2015 Ai has been based in Berlin, Cambridge, and Portugal and has turned substantial attention to the global refugee crisis — the film Human Flow (2017), the installation Law of the Journey (2017), the boat-life-jacket wrapping of the Konzerthaus Berlin (2016).