Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei (, English pronunciation: (help·info); born 28 August 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist.

Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile.

As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights.

In 1958, the family was sent to a labour camp in Beidahuang, Heilongjiang, when Ai was one year old.

They were subsequently exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang in 1961, where they lived for 16 years.

Upon Mao Zedong's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the family returned to Beijing in 1976.

In 1978, Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy and studied animation.

In 1978, he was one of the founders of the early avant garde art group the "Stars", together with Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, Mao Lizi, Huang Rui, Li Shuang, Ah Cheng and Qu Leilei.

He was among the first generation of students to study abroad following China's reform in 1980, being one of the 161 students to take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) in 1981.

For the first few years, Ai lived in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

He studied English at the University of Pennsylvania and the Berkeley Adult School.

Later, he moved to New York City.

He studied briefly at Parsons School of Design.

From 1981 to 1993, he lived in the United States.

The group disbanded in 1983, yet Ai participated in regular Stars group shows, The Stars: Ten Years, 1989 (Hanart Gallery, Hong Kong and Taipei), and a retrospective exhibition in Beijing in 2007: Origin Point (Today Art Museum, Beijing).

Ai attended the Art Students League of New York from 1983 to 1986, where he studied with Bruce Dorfman, Knox Martin and Richard Pousette-Dart.

He later dropped out of school and made a living out of drawing street portraits and working odd jobs.

During this period, he gained exposure to the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, and began creating conceptual art by altering readymade objects.

Ai befriended beat poet Allen Ginsberg while living in New York, following a chance meeting at a poetry reading where Ginsberg read out several poems about China.

Ginsberg had traveled to China and met with Ai's father, the noted poet Ai Qing, and consequently Ginsberg and Ai became friends.

When he was living in the East Village (from 1983 to 1993), Ai carried a camera with him all the time and would take pictures of his surroundings wherever he was.

The resulting collection of photos were later selected and is now known as the New York Photographs.

At the same time, Ai became fascinated by blackjack card games and frequented Atlantic City casinos.

He is still regarded in gambling circles as a top tier professional blackjack player according to an article published on blackjackchamp.com.

In 1993, Ai returned to China after his father became ill.

He helped establish the experimental artists' Beijing East Village and co-published a series of three books about this new generation of artists with Chinese curator Feng Boyi: Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995), and Gray Cover Book (1997).

In 1999, Ai moved to Caochangdi, in the northeast of Beijing, and built a studio house – his first architectural project.

In 2000, he co-curated the art exhibition Fuck Off with curator Feng Boyi in Shanghai, China.

Due to his interest in architecture, he founded the architecture studio FAKE Design, in 2003.

He investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

In 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Capital International Airport on 3 April, for "economic crimes".

He was detained for 81 days without charge.

Ai Weiwei emerged as a vital instigator in Chinese cultural development, an architect of Chinese modernism, and one of the nation's most vocal political commentators.

Ai Weiwei encapsulates political conviction and his personal poetry in his many sculptures, photographs, and public works.

In doing this, he makes use of Chinese art forms to display Chinese political and social issues.

In 2011, Ai was arrested in China on charges of tax evasion, jailed for 81 days, and then released.

The government had confiscated his passport and refused him any other travel papers.

After being allowed to leave China in 2015, he has lived in Berlin, Germany, in Cambridge, UK, with his family, and in Portugal.

Ai's father was the Chinese poet Ai Qing, who was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement.

Following the return of his passport in 2015, Ai moved to Berlin where he maintained a large studio in a former brewery.