For part of the year, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei works in a cavernous 30,000-square-foot studio on the underground levels of a former 19th-century brewery in Berlin. Its triple-height vaulted cellars, which Ai, a self-taught architect, renovated himself after leaving his native China in 2015, are now pristine and well-lit, but when he first visited the long-abandoned subterranean space, it was “completely dark,” he says, “like an underworld.” In that way, it recalls the underground home where the artist lived for five years as a child, a place he calls “the black hole”: a bare shelter on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert in the remote Xinjiang region, one of the sites where Ai’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, was exiled following China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s. In that half-buried home, Ai first encountered the authoritarianism and censorship that he has now spent four decades resisting, ridiculing and at times enduring again, as a defender of human rights and self-proclaimed political “troublemaker.” Today, he travels frequently, stopping in Berlin; Cambridge, England, where his sixteen-year-old son, Lao, his only child, attends school; and Montemor-o-Novo, a town in the countryside of southern Portugal whose sunny climate reminds him of his childhood in the desert. That approximately 20-acre property hosts a few assistants, as well as many cats, dogs, birds and fish and a reconstruction of his wooden Shanghai studio that was demolished by local authorities in 2011. Ai is used to constant movement, and to the possibility of displacement. “The concept of a home has never been truly established for me,” he says.
On a recent visit to his Berlin studio, I followed Ai, 67, down a narrow staircase into an austere, windowless alcove. Its concrete floor was scattered with twisted steel rods from the installation work “Rebar,” which Ai made in China between 2008 and 2012, sourcing the metal from school buildings flattened by the devastating Sichuan earthquake. “Rebar” and similar works made in response to the earthquake critique the government’s corrupt construction regulations and lack of transparency in the tragedy’s aftermath. This is one of the projects that, in addition to his prolific online writings, helped turn Ai into one of the most famous dissident artists of the past few decades. The resulting surveillance and a government-ordered detention eventually drove him to leave Beijing for Berlin, a city he says appealed to him for its mix of “ruin” and “new life.” In Ai’s archival room, a large world map that helped him plan his documentary on refugees, “Human Flow” (2017), leaned against a wall beside an overgrown fiddle-leaf fig tree. On display elsewhere were dozens of antique Qing dynasty wooden chairs, from the participatory project “Fairytale” (2007), for which Ai conveyed 1,001 volunteers from China to the Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.
Accumulation — the head-spinning accrual of hundreds, thousands or millions of identical objects — is fundamental to Ai’s interventions, which often comment on both collective action and consumer culture. Sometimes he finds items that speak directly to a predetermined theme or event, as with his headline-making installation of discarded refugee life jackets affixed to the facade of Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 2016. But if he finds the right object, he may conceive of a whole project around it. Ai began collecting flea-market antiquities in the mid-1990s, when he lived in China, and now acquaintances and strangers alike frequently tip him off about underappreciated goods that are available in astronomical quantities. One such message is how he came into possession of 30 tons of clothing buttons from a defunct British factory. (“‘No’ is not in my vocabulary,” he says.) After years spent classifying the buttons into 9,000 different categories, his team has begun sewing them into new, textile-based works. Some of these are currently on display at Lisson Gallery in London, which had canceled his 2023 show after the artist’s public comments about the Israel-Hamas war. In this exhibit, Ai continues his defense of free speech, with button-adorned block letters spelling out profanity-laden catchphrases across World War II military stretchers and tents. Alongside these works are re-creations of pieces from the Western art historical canon made out of Legos, a material that’s become his trademark in recent years.
