![\"Ai](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/7bac5a4f-f83d-4957-b7e6-5d5ca54c2df0.jpg\")
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Ai with his Tree sculptures, part of an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2015<\/p>\n
EPA<\/p>\n
When we last met, a cargo of 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds was on its way through the South China Sea to fill Tate Modern\u2019s turbine hall where it would make Ai Weiwei\u2019s global reputation. Now he is established as the world\u2019s foremost dissident artist, a creator of objects which provoke thought while being beautiful, playful and exquisitely made. Today he wants to show me his latest work, so we wend down a gravel track at a stately pace, accompanied by his Chinese assistants and two huge but gentle Alentejo mastiffs whose names, he tells me, \u201cmean female dog and male dog, but are quite rude words in Chinese\u201d.<\/p>\n
We reach a brick structure as vast as an aircraft hangar, just finished except for the front door, which is en route from China (as is, I later discover, the one to the lavatory). The outside does not prepare you for the miraculous interior: marble floors, 100 wooden pillars of whole pine trunks and vaulted ceilings of interlocking beams. At its heart is a temple courtyard, where rainwater will cascade into 200-year-old bowls. Upstairs is a mezzanine level with seating, the polished cabinets so smooth they feel oddly plastic: \u201cthe wood used by Chinese kings\u201d.<\/p>\n
All trace of him has been erased<\/p>\n
Here, an hour from Lisbon, Ai has recreated the studio he built in Shanghai, which the Chinese government spitefully tore down the moment it was finished. Except this is not a studio, a warehouse or a gallery. Ai is aghast when I say he could hold great parties here. He hates fleeting social encounters and crowds, even his own openings. So what is it for? \u201cI just built it so I have somewhere I can walk around alone and think. It\u2019s peaceful\u2026 And flat,\u201d he adds, \u201cso I don\u2019t trip up, which is important when you are old.\u201d Ai Weiwei, like generations of rich landowners before him, has built a folly.<\/p>\n
\u2022 How China wages vast campaign against dissidents beyond its borders<\/a><\/p>\n I\u2019m here to discuss a slim treatise called Ai Weiwei on Censorship. It describes his treatment by the Chinese government, which has erased all trace of him from the public sphere, and that of his father, the romantic poet Ai Qing, a communist and one-time friend of Mao who was nonetheless exiled as a rightist during the Cultural Revolution. Now Ai says China\u2019s censorship extends beyond its borders, the government pressuring art foundations and galleries to withdraw his work. He claims his Zodiac Heads were removed from an exhibition in Mexico City at the request of the Chinese embassy there.<\/p>\n A scale model of Ai in prison, part of an artwork entitled SACRED<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n So I am keen to ask how he thinks Britain, and the West generally, should address the growing influence of China. Is it a \u201chostile state\u201d trying to wield power via assaults on academic freedom and endemic spying? Should we worry Sir Keir Starmer<\/a> has relinquished the Chagos Islands<\/a> to Beijing-friendly Mauritius and is likely to approve a Chinese mega-embassy<\/a> passing over sensitive cables leading to the City of London?<\/p>\n But Ai is not a politician. He is an artist known for mischief and to my surprise rallies to his homeland\u2019s defence. \u201cChina is never a hostile power,\u201d he says. \u201cNot militarily. If you look at history, England has invaded China three times.\u201d He describes the first and second opium wars, over self-sufficient China\u2019s refusal to buy British goods, then the 1900 Boxer uprising, where eight nations put down an anti-foreigner Chinese rebellion that brought down the Qing dynasty and opened up China to the West.<\/p>\n Now, Ai argues, the situation is reversed. \u201cThe world has two problems. One is created by capitalism, the other is a new world order where the Bric nations, like India<\/a> or even Russia<\/a>, think, \u2018We\u2019re tired of being slaves.\u2019 Everything you enjoy is from China.\u201d He waggles his iPhone. \u201cBut if China makes one penny, the West will make $1. So you enjoyed 40 years of globalisation and the money China accumulated rises up like water. Their level is getting high. And the West is only realising it too late.\u201d He chuckles. \u201cHistory is a rollercoaster. Now you\u2019ve passed your peak \u2014 enjoy going down. In 200 years, you will go up again.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n Does he think westerners are softer? \u201cMuch, much! And getting weaker and weaker. We say in China it\u2019s hard for three generations of a family to be wealthy. Because the third, they don\u2019t even know what money means. It\u2019s automatically in their accounts. So people become \u2026 a designer.\u201d He laughs. \u201cChina became strong because people work hard with no holidays. Not just eight hours, but ten, twelve hours. That\u2019s how they bring their children to your British schools, Cambridge and Oxford.\u201d The West, he says, cannot take tuition fees from China and then moan when it tries to restrict academic freedom or complain about Chinese spying \u201cbecause you\u2019ve become the underdog. You cannot compete with China, so you blame it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ai\u2019s Forever Cycles installation in Rio de Janeiro, 2019. It was made using more than 1,000 stainless steel bicycles<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n I ask if he cares Taiwan<\/a> may soon be invaded. He replies it is territorially part of China, adding, \u201cI don\u2019t think that Taiwan has that much freedom. It\u2019s just a little puppet of the western establishment.\u201d Likewise, although he supports the release of Hong Kong protesters such as Jimmy Lai<\/a>, he doesn\u2019t believe, as a British colony, it was ever a democracy.<\/p>\n \u2018Censorship is strong in the West too\u2019<\/p>\n China, as Ai knows, is an autocratic surveillance state that imprisons without trial and has the world\u2019s highest execution rate. Yet in his book he writes, \u201cAt its core, censorship functions in fundamentally the same way under authoritarian regimes and in so-called free societies.\u201d Does he really think censorship is no better in the West? It is not just in China, he says, where your iPhone is listening to you. \u201cThe media in the West also has strong, strong censorship. CNN or the BBC, it doesn\u2019t matter. In China, the power is state power. But here it can be huge companies, business, even cultural institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n His book describes how a social media post in November 2023 resulted in the cancellation of his exhibitions in London, Paris, Berlin and New York. What Ai doesn\u2019t say is that just a few weeks after Hamas<\/a> killed 1,200 Israelis, he tweeted in Chinese, \u201cThe sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world,\u201d and, \u201cFinancially, culturally, and in terms of media influence, the Jewish community has had a significant presence in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n Wasn\u2019t this just sensitivity about a recent atrocity? Ai says breezily that \u201cthe situation developed absolutely with my prediction. I just announced it a little earlier.\u201d Where once his Twitter feed railed at the Chinese government, now on X it is solely about Gaza<\/a>. He sees the conflict as \u201ca modern test for the world to say who is defending human rights, who is defending freedom of speech. There\u2019s nobody. Only the powerless people maybe walk on the street to do little demonstrations, but they are often beaten by the state police. And that evens out the so-called free world and authoritarian state, because they do the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Ai with some of the 100 million ceramic seeds that comprised his Tate Modern installation in 2010, also below<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n I balk at his false equivalence. Are western democracies \u2014 where he now happily makes art and money without surveillance or censorship \u2014 really no better than China? The project that caused the Chinese authorities to fracture his skull, necessitating life-saving brain surgery, was his naming of the 5,000 children killed in poorly constructed schools during the Sichuan earthquake. Such a story would have been blown wide open by a free press.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat about Julian Assange<\/a> in your British custody almost 12 years hiding in these embassies?\u201d he says. \u201cOr [Edward] Snowden, still hiding in Russia?\u201d Many believe he\u2019s a Putin asset, I say. At this Ai, unused to being challenged, gets exasperated. \u201cYou\u2019re interviewing an artist,\u201d he says. \u201cNow you want to talk about politics?\u201d I\u2019m interested in your opinion. \u201cI hope you can publish it!\u201d<\/p>\n Like all political exiles, Ai clearly has a complex relationship with his homeland. His childhood was spent at the edge of the Gobi desert, an area known as Little Siberia, where his father was forcibly \u201cre-educated\u201d by being made to clean communal latrines. The family lived in a subterranean animal shelter without light, plagued by lice and rats. In his fascinating memoir 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, he recalls his father being paraded before a barracking crowd wearing a dunce\u2019s hat, head bowed. Yet even then, Ai Qing never stopped loving his country, writing elegiac patriotic poems. After Mao\u2019s death, the party admitted he\u2019d been wrongly accused. He and his work were rehabilitated.<\/p>\n The key to his art? \u2018Little acts of mischief\u2019<\/p>\n Ai Weiwei\u2019s teenage years coincided with an easing of state control, a sense of broadening possibility. But at art school he found his fellow students pretentious and privileged. He writes, \u201cI soon learnt that I did not fit in with the new post-Mao order any more than I had fitted in with the Maoist order that had shaped \u2014 or deformed \u2014 my childhood.\u201d So, one of the first Chinese permitted to study abroad, he left for New York with just $30. Too cussed to take his exams, he lost his scholarship, and made money by cleaning houses or sketching street portraits. \u201cNot a good place to spend your youth,\u201d he says. \u201cYou know, crazy!\u201d Although fascinated by western art, especially Andy Warhol, in 12 years he barely sold a work.<\/p>\n Ai Weiwei\u2019s History of Bombs at the Imperial War Museum, London, 2020<\/p>\n RICHARD POHLE\/THE TIMES<\/p>\n Then in 1993, when his father was ailing, he returned to China and, seeing his country with fresh eyes, he found himself as an artist. The following 22 years, until he went into exile, \u201cwere my best moment, even if I was being put through many trials\u201d. As Beijing became one gigantic building site, diggers exhumed ancient artefacts which, in a society that erased its own history, had no value. Ai bought mountains of jade, pottery and ancient furniture, trying to figure out how it was made.<\/p>\n The internet was in its infancy and the Chinese authorities did not yet understand its subversive power. Ai\u2019s art was borne of \u201clittle acts of mischief\u201d, like painting the Coca-Cola logo on a 2,000-year-old urn or photographing himself giving the finger at Tiananmen Square. \u201cThey have weapons; they have military and police,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the only thing they don\u2019t know how to deal with is humour.\u201d<\/p>\n Although untrained, he set up an architectural practice, FAKE, designing calm, simple buildings in contrast to the bling towers replacing old Beijing. He was invited to help design what became the Bird\u2019s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games, but his growing disgust with the government meant he never visited it.<\/p>\n The Sichuan earthquake enraged him because the government refused to release \u2014 or even collect \u2014 the dead children\u2019s names. So he and volunteers went door to door to record them. Then he used children\u2019s backpacks to write in Chinese characters on the outside of the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich a mother\u2019s words: \u201cShe lived happily in this world for seven years.\u201d<\/p>\n Ai\u2019s work often presents small, identical objects en masse \u2014 the backpacks, sunflower seeds, his recent works made with Lego<\/a> \u2014 with curiously moving results. It is hard not to think of nameless, indistinguishable Chinese workers, either under Mao or toiling in soulless iPhone factories now.<\/p>\n We sit in Ai\u2019s folly at a beautiful Chinese table where an assistant brings green tea. Above us is a camouflage net, but if you look carefully the dark patches are images of cats. Playful, clever Ai. He made it for an exhibition in Ukraine, which he has visited three times during the war. Yet he rarely puts his work on his studio walls. To him, the process of making art is what matters, not the end product: \u201cYou know, you eat something, you digest, then later you go to toilet. You just flush it away \u2014 into a gallery!\u201d<\/p>\n This process, he says, is how humans figure out meaning. Yet artificial intelligence can deliver a \u201cperfect\u201d end result in seconds. \u201cThat kind of technology will collapse the learning process, the wondering who we are. If we know everything, we become nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018On my tombstone it will say, \u201cI\u2019m such a failure\u201d \u2019<\/p>\n Ai cuts a solitary figure. He socialises only with close friends and split up with his wife long ago, a few years after his son, \u201ca gift from the universe\u201d, was conceived with the film-maker Wang Fen. Does he mind being alone? \u201cIt takes us a long time to really understand and appreciate the meaning of being alone,\u201d he says gnomically. \u201cBut it\u2019s not easy, right?\u201d He wonders if the age of \u201cfree love, free dating\u201d is better than arranged marriages like that of his parents, who weren\u2019t in love when they married but \u201cbecame as one, like two trees growing together\u201d.<\/p>\n Becoming a father changed his perception. \u201cIt\u2019s like, before you build yourself in a solid cube. Then once you have a child, there\u2019s a window open. Then you can look through the window and say, \u2018Oh my God, there\u2019s a huge field over there.\u2019 \u201d He recently went with Ai Lao on a fishing trip to the Lake District. Just this morning he says his son texted to say he\u2019d seen a photograph of his father taken when his mother was pregnant. \u201cI was young but much fatter. And my son said, \u2018It makes me happy to see you\u2019re much skinnier in Portugal. You\u2019re healthy, I\u2019m glad.\u2019 I was deeply touched by that.\u201d<\/p>\n Ai Lao says he doesn\u2019t want his father\u2019s money, which will be a substantial fortune. I ask Ai if he feels guilty he is so rich and he makes me repeat the question while he films it. Then he says his whole life\u2019s work is worth less than one recently sold Klimt<\/a> or what a Silicon Valley magnate makes in a week. \u201cOn my tombstone it will say, \u2018I\u2019m such a failure,\u2019 \u201d he says. He doesn\u2019t care what will happen to his work after his death. \u201cI can give to an institution or I can burn it. I don\u2019t care about money.\u201d<\/p>\n With his son, Ai Lao, at Munich airport, 2015<\/p>\n PETER KNEFFEL\/DPA<\/p>\n Ai grew up with nothing, in a system without private property, which has steeled him to be an artist nomad. He says he doesn\u2019t miss China, where his mother still lives, when there are so many places \u2014 \u201cRussia, India, Africa\u201d \u2014 he has never been. He claims writing his memoir got China out of his system, but it is clearly deep in his bones. He has used Portugal\u2019s noted ceramic industry to make installations, but says nothing beats Chinese porcelain. Even the padded jacket he wears, which he designed, was made in China. As are a newly arrived row of exquisite hardwood cabinets he shows me. Each has a circular hole through which you see the different phases of the moon.<\/p>\n Age has made him reflect on the parallels between his life and his father\u2019s: both were dissidents and exiles. But Ai Qing was ultimately forgiven. Speaking of Chinese cultural aggression in the West, Ai says, \u201cChina is just trying to cope with the situation. And very often, it\u2019s a little bit clumsy. If I gave advice to them, maybe it would be better. But of course they don\u2019t like me.\u201d I wonder if Ai Weiwei secretly longs for redemption too. <\/p>\n Ai Weiwei will be interviewed by Stephen Sackur on January 31 at an event hosted by the How To Academy in central London (howtoacademy.com<\/a>). Ai Weiwei on Censorship (Thames & Hudson, \u00a312) is published on January 29. To order, go to timesbookshop.co.uk<\/a> or call 020 3176 2935<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last time I met Ai Weiwei was in 2010 at his studio in the semi-rural outskirts of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-372938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Ai](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/9eb35c60-5712-430a-8dde-6ab3bab17c38.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"BRAZIL-CHINA-ART-WEIWEI\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/516165d3-9b1a-470d-b9fb-8a219953343b.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n![\"Ai](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/60d0c9dc-8ba8-4b3b-805d-e737aab07467.jpg\")
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