In 2019, he announced he would be leaving Berlin, saying that Germany is not an open culture. [22] In September 2019, he moved to live in Cambridge, England. [23]

Ai is referring to one of his best-known works: his spectacular 2010 installation of 100m porcelain sunflower seeds that filled the vast Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern. Each seed was handmade and painted in China. The scale of the work and the labour involved seemed inconceivable – yet, the artist pointed out, China’s population is over 10 times that figure. Released in November 2021, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows is a memoir that documents the life of Ai Weiwei with a focus on his father, the renowned Chinese poet, Ai Qing. The book begins by documenting Ai Weiwei's relationship with his father and the parallels between their lives and struggles before describing Ai's success as an artist and his constant struggle with the Chinese authorities over censorship and personal freedoms. [182] Music [ edit ]Ai Weiwei: I think art has to deal with our daily experience, emotions and our aesthetic judgment, which of course relates to our morals and philosophy. All my work either directly or indirectly relates to my experience here.

From 1981 to 1993, he lived in the United States. 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. [8] 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. [9] Later, he moved to New York City. [6] He studied briefly at Parsons School of Design. [10] 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. [11] 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. His work, his life and the oppressive government reaction to both embody everything art means to us: a fearless consideration and critique of contemporary culture, a compassionate consideration of life as it is lived and the necessity of being able to stand up and speak our minds on those subjects." – Dave Berry, The National Post Look around these rooms at these mostly huge artistic gestures and confrontations. By being so big as an artist, Ai Weiwei is both embodying the colossal as China's enduring reality and declaring that, as one Chinese citizen, at least, he won't abide to any binding terms of that reality, in particular with regards to the individual experience. In 2008, Ai curated the architecture project Ordos 100 in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia. He invited 100 architects from 29 countries to participate in this project.Most artists who had such a notion would have been content to use any rebar rods for the sculpture, but Ai Weiwei decided he needed to recover and restore the real rods that had really failed to keep those more than 5,000 real children from dying so senselessly. Ai's father was the Chinese poet Ai Qing, [3] who was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement. 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. [4]

Forever Bicycles is a 32-foot (9.8m) sculpture made of many interconnected bicycles. The sculpture was installed as 1,300 bicycles in Austin, Texas, in 2017. [163] The sculpture was moved to The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and reassembled as 1,254 bicycles in 2019. [164] The 30-foot (9.1m) sculpture's bicycles are made to resemble the Shanghai Forever Co. bicycles that were financially out of reach for the artist's family during his youth. a b "Ai Weiwei". Groninger Museum. 28 February 2008. Archived from the original on 26 May 2010 . Retrieved 6 July 2008. A film by Ai Weiwei, CIRCA 20:20, was screened on global network of billboard screens in London, Tokyo and Seoul in October 2020. [201]The Design Museum exhibition, called Making Sense, draws from right across Ai’s career, including more of his industrial-yet-human scale installations. These include stone-age tools, smashed pottery from his Beijing studio (that one was demolished by the authorities in 2018), plus some 100,000 cannonballs and 200,000 broken spouts from teapots or jugs – all handmade in ceramic during the Song dynasty, roughly 1,000 years ago. They’re a reminder of how China was a prodigious manufacturing hub, founded on human labour, long before the industrial revolution. They’re also a reminder that Ai collects a lot of stuff: spouts, roots, cannonballs, pets, passport stamps. Han dynasty vases with the Coca-Cola logo brushed onto them is one of the artists' longest running series, begun in 1994 and continuing to the present day. [153] Grapes [ edit ] Ai WeiWei's marble sculpture resembles a Surveillance Camera to express the alarming rate of how technological advancements are being used in the modern world. [148] WeiWei created this sculpture in response to the Chinese Government surveilling and incorporating listening devices in and around his studio, located in Beijing. The Chinese government did this as punishment for WeiWei's outspoken criticism of the Chinese Government. [149] He Xie/Crab [ edit ] In 2006, Ai and HHF Architects designed a private residence in upstate New York for the investor Christopher Tsai. [167] According to The New York Times, the Tsai Residence is divided into four modules and the details are "extraordinarily refined". [167] [168] In 2010, Wallpaper* magazine nominated the residence for its Wallpaper Design Awards category: Best New Private House. [169] A detached guesthouse, also designed by Ai and HHF Architects, was completed after the main house and, according to New York Magazine, looks like a "floating boomerang of rusty Cor-Ten steel". [170] Ordos 100 [ edit ] But for a Chinese artist, particularly a Chinese artist raised during the culture revolution when smashing old culture was cynical, disastrous political dictate, smashing a valuable vase must mean something more.