Ai Weiwei, known to many simply as Ai, is one of the most widely recognized living artist-activists. A persistent critic of state surveillance, corporate capitalism, and the way power infiltrates daily life, he has spent decades using art to expose systems that most people would ignore. His practice treats culture as a battlefield, and art as one of the last venues where power can be publicly questioned or overturned.
Born in Beijing in 1957, Ai spent his childhood in political exile because his father, the poet Ai Qing, was labeled a “rightist” under Mao. He moved to New York in 1981 to study at Parsons, and absorbed the city’s experimental energy before returning to Beijing in the 1990s to help shape an underground art scene outside state control.
His work ran contrary to the official narrative: Han dynasty urn fall (1995) – in which he dismantles a 2,000-year-old relic and shatters the idea of who owns history; perspective study (1995–2017) he photographed himself raising rebellious hands at global monuments from Tiananmen Square to the White House. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he led a civilian investigation to identify thousands of children killed in the collapse of school buildings. The resulting demonstration was an indictment of state negligence that attracted international attention. After being detained for 81 days in 2011, he left China and continued to work and speak freely, most recently from Lisbon, Portugal. Last year, amid the war with Russia, Ai took his first exhibition to Kiev, Ukraine.
Shame!2024, four stretchers of World War II clothing stitched with hundreds of buttons. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
Neolithic Coca-Cola Vase2015, Paint on pottery. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
Last week, his first solo show came to India, at Delhi’s Nature Morte Gallery, presented with Galleria Continua, bringing together 15 works tracking cultural fault lines over nearly three decades – China’s turmoil, global supply chains and the world’s escalating crises. Five-thousand-year-old Neolithic axes and Qing dynasty chairs have been painted white to suggest the flattening of history; Neolithic vase with Coca-Cola logo Corporate-era warnings appear to be flaring; Four World War II stretchers stitched with hundreds of buttons Shame!; and a wall of Lego “paintings” – remakes of iconic works by Hokusai, Vermeer, da Vinci, Monet, VS Gaitonde, SH Raza and A. rearing – Draws them into the pixel age.
In an email interview, ahead of his visit to the India Art Fair next month, Ai talked about power, fallacy and why art still matters. Part:
Q: How do you feel about your first Indian exhibition and what conversations do you hope to inspire?
Answer: Although I had never been to India until now, it is a country that fills my imagination with both divine quality and deep, worldly social character. This mysterious place always makes me think of Buddhism, which has had a lasting and profound impact on China.
In my childhood I encountered the works of Indian poet [Nobel laureate] Rabindranath Tagore on my father’s book shelves. To the Chinese, his appearance resembles that of a spiritual practitioner dedicated to inner cultivation: a keen gaze, a full beard, and a long, flowing robe, evoking in me a sense of a familiar kind of foreignness.
During the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s, a period of political harshness, all my father’s books were burned by the authorities. So to be able to come here at this time, feels like a blessing.
I hope that my modest exhibition can serve as a prologue, a catalyst, that can inspire young artists and thinkers to consider the dialogue between humanity and nature. These dialogues remind of Tagore’s poetry [Gitanjali, 1913]: : You empty this weak vessel again and again, and always fill it with new life.. The poem is full of hope. The source of hope lies in experience itself. One cannot completely reject hope, just as one cannot reject experience.
“The situation China and India are facing today is the situation facing the entire world: autocracy, concentration of power, the decline of humanity’s spiritual life, and the era of materialism has reached its peak.”
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
Q: You have chosen works that span thousands of years and many traditions. What connects them?
A: It has been my ongoing endeavor to provide a new interpretation and meaning to familiar objects: how objects survive history, change under power, and continue to speak over time.
Question: Despite their shared history, India and China are often seen as political rivals.
A: China and India are more closely connected than I ever thought or could fully understand. These are two countries that have always had their own cultures and these continued uninterrupted for 4,000-5,000 years, making both of them a unique presence in the cultural history of the world. This long continuity has allowed both cultures to develop deeper ways of understanding the human condition. In both Indian and Chinese cultures, these questions have been deeply lived, contemplated and recorded.
Q: You raise philosophical questions across all civilizations. How do you assess the state of human life today?
A: The situation that China and India are facing today is the situation facing the entire world: autocracy, concentration of power, the decline of humanity’s spiritual life, and the age of materialism that has reached its peak. Humanity under globalization has never really realized, or even imagined, such a situation, a time that seems almost like an abyss.
Monet’s water lilies2023, reimagined in toy bricks. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
White Relics of State History of Emerging Futures2025, in mixed media. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
VS Gaitonde’s untitled2025, reimagined in toy bricks. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
Q: With surveillance, digital control, and AI shaping everyday life, where do you see artistic freedom headed?
A: Today, in our lived reality, we can see that human lives are increasingly controlled and monitored through reinforced discourses of power and digital systems. Artificial Intelligence (AI) constantly absorbs what ordinary sentient beings of the mundane world do – their joys and sorrows alike.
At such a moment, art is like a stick held in the hand of a spiritual practitioner or a leaf falling under the Bodhi tree. No matter how confusing the outer world becomes, or how close to the hell of suffering it seems, the inner world can remain blooming. This is where art exists in the world: as self-cultivation and as resistance.
I believe that precisely because we live in an age that is constantly diminishing, canceling, or erasing the inner life of individuals – a technological age – art has more reason to exist than in any other period, because only through self-reflection can humanity continue to move forward.
pollock in blue2019, in toy bricks. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
stone axes1993–1999, white stone and paint. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
ceramic column with refugee motif2017. | Photo credit: ©Ai Weiwei, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua/Duccio Benvenuti – Art Store
Ai Weiwei’s solo show can be seen from 15 January to 22 February at Nature Morte, Paddy Mill Complex, Chhatarpur, Delhi.
The interviewer specializes in reporting on art, design and architecture.