Ai Weiwei Reflects on 40 Years of Art and Activism Ahead of Major U.S. Retrospective
On view at the Seattle Art Museum through September 7, this sprawling show highlights how the dissident artist has continued to question forms of power throughout his impressive four decade career
What makes Ai Weiwei a dissident? His cheeky “Study of Perspective” photos where spatial relationships are dictated by his middle finger flipping off iconic locations like Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower, and the White House? The defiant rock music video he made while under house arrest in Beijing? Or is it the Mueller Report he created with Lego bricks? To Ai Weiwei, it’s all part of being human.
“The so-called activism or resistance is a necessary condition for human existence,” says the artist ahead of his new exhibition “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei” at three venues of the Seattle Art Museum. “As art is part of the embodiment of human nature, it naturally carries these attributes.” It is the artist’s largest American exhibition to date.
Ai Weiwei was not even one when his father, the prominent Chinese poet Ai Qing, was accused of “rightism” and criticizing the communist regime. He was exiled to a remote area of Northeast China in 1958. Around 500,000 people were persecuted by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, and the elder Ai was forced to leave Beijing with his family and work at a labor camp for defending female author Ding Ling, who was imprisoned and accused of “liberalism and individualism.”
In 1961, the family was sent to Shihezi, Xinjiang, where they lived in harsh conditions for 16 years. “At the camp we had to live in an underground dugout and were subjected to unexplainable hatred, discrimination, unprovoked insults and assaults, all of which aimed to crush the basic human spirit rooted in my father’s beliefs,” Ai wrote in a 2018 Guardian op-ed. “As a result, I remember experiencing what felt like endless injustice.”
Those formative years led to Ai Weiwei using art as a tool for activism, becoming a dissident artist who isn’t afraid to use his art to speak out against injustice. The artist followed his father’s lead; in 1995, he famously dropped a 2,000 year-old Han Dynasty urn, resulting in one of his most pivotal works. The act was his way of criticizing the destruction of Chinese artifacts during the Cultural Revolution. Over a decade later, in 2008, the artist made it his responsibility to research the number of student lives lost to call out the Chinese government for their shoddy school construction. Two years later, his rabble-rousing caused the Chinese government to detain him for 81 days with no formal charges, locking him in a padded room that he would commemorate by creating a 1:1 reproduction based on his memory, the exterior featureless because his eyes were covered when he entered. Fast forward to 2020, when Trump falsely declared that voting by mail leads to voter fraud; the artist responded in Duchampian style with a United States Postal Service mailbox—his own version of a readymade.
The result of these injustices are now in Seattle in a must-see exhibition that spans the Seattle Art Museum (through September 7, 2025), Seattle Asian Art Museum (March 19, 2025 to March 15, 2026), and Olympic Sculpture Park (May 17, 2025 to May 17, 2027).
The survey spans Ai’s 40-year career and comes at a time when the U.S.—and the world—is at a particular moment of strife. In the U.S., freedom of speech is clearly under threat in the aftermath of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest, anti-DEI rhetoric blaming people of color for aviation disasters and the California wildfires, and ICE cracking down on illegal immigrants. “As an artist, regardless of living in China or in the U.S., there are not many differences despite two different regimes,” Ai Weiwei told Galerie. “The main characteristic of how they maintain their regime is the control of political discourses. The U.S., in this respect, is not much better than China.”
The exhibition features 130 works, beginning in 1983, two years after Ai moved to the U.S., when the artist lived in New York, documenting his experience through black-and-white photographs, ending a few years ago with his large-scale Lego-filled rendition of Monet’s Water Lilies. The artist’s range pushes boundaries, challenging authority using various materials, mediums and platforms, from social media to sculpture to video, photography, and Legos, his current medium of choice.
“Although this exhibition contains over a hundred works, to me, they are one single piece—an indivisible entity,” the artist shares. “They all revolve around a very simple theme, despite being created using different methods, materials, and addressing different times and regions. All these artworks are part of the narrative about humanitarianism, and they inevitably touch upon various aspects of what humanitarianism entails—from human rights to justice, politics, as well as aesthetics and ethics.”
Marcel Duchamp’s influence on Ai Weiwei is seen in several pieces. There’s the profile he created of the French artist with a coat hanger in 1986. Myriad readymades, like a rain coat with a condom that he made that same year as the AIDS crisis consumed New York, the works made from bicycles in the early aughts that referenced Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, and the 18th-century Chinese porcelain vessels juxtaposed against replicas. A 1987 photo shows the artist standing behind a Duchamp sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Like Ai, Duchamp expressed his disdain for authority through Dadaism, the anti-war and anti-capitalist movement born in Europe around World War I.
Provocative and intriguing, the exhibition travels through various phases of Ai’s career like his time in New York from 1982 to 1993, where the artist hung Andy Warhol’s portrait of Chairman Mao in his East Village apartment, prompting him to create a triptych of the Chinese Communist Party’s former chairman in 1985. It follows his return to Beijing, where he became fascinated by Chinese antiquities before anger consumed him enough to call out the Chinese government’s failure to construct earthquake-safe schools. His detainment and subsequent house arrest and government surveillance are marked by marble cameras. In the teens when Ai filmed refugees for two years, traveling to 23 countries and 40 refugee camps. “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei” is both a reflection of both humanity’s injustices and a visual biography of the artist’s life through Ai’s humorous, irreverent, and rebellious lens.
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According to the artist, a lot has shifted since the beginning of his career. “Today’s art, across the globe—or at least in most Western contexts—forms an integral part of what is often termed the ‘new world order,’” he said. “This phenomenon reveals itself through several defining traits, including finance, capital, and industrial wealth, as well as the discourses and languages they shape and command. From the realm of education to the conduits of communication and the platforms of performance, every facet is imbued with the pervasive influence of money and power.”
“If every individual can make effort to act on [their] own belief, then the change will happen,” said Ai. Turns out, it’s the right time for an exhibition that questions power and criticizes authority, calling them out for their greed and wrongdoings. If there’s anything an artist in Trump’s America should do, it’s follow Ai Weiwei’s lead.
“Art and the artist, in the challenges we face today, continue to grapple with the same fundamental struggle: the tension between individual self-awareness and power,” said Ai. “At times, relatively speaking, this struggle is not as visibly pronounced. Yet in an era where power is highly concentrated, this contradiction only grows more intense.”
