Artistic licence

A YEAR ago Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist, was stopped by the authorities as he boarded a plane in Beijing and told that his departure could endanger the state. He was covered with a hood, transported to a country hotel with blacked-out windows and then to a military compound. For 81 days two guards observed him at all times, even as he slept. Handcuffed to a chair, he was subjected to about 50 interrogation sessions, many of which started with the question: “What is your occupation?” When Mr Ai replied that he was an artist, his inquisitor would pound the table and say, “Anyone can call himself an artist. I think you are at most an art worker.”

Mr Ai holds a singular position as an artist. His work is a distillation of political comment, social engagement and formal beauty. His abduction and the globalising power of the internet have made him internationally famous. Yet commercial gain is not Mr Ai's main objective. At 54, he has exhibited in many galleries, but he is not represented by a New York powerhouse. His work has been bought by notable private collectors and important museums in America and Europe, but the prices of his art have remained comparatively low. This may change when Sotheby's sells a one-tonne edition of “Sunflower Seeds” (estimated at $600,000-800,000) in New York on May 9th.

Mr Ai's political problems are the latest episode in an extraordinary life. His father, Ai Qing, was a poet whose work is now studied in Chinese schools. But the elder Ai spent 18 years in the cold after being denounced as a “rightist” in 1958, and was sentenced to hard labour in the remote region of Xinjiang. Despite having taken a few courses at the Beijing Film Academy, Mr Ai has little formal education. “Fortunately my father was a literary man,” Mr Ai explains. “When I was growing up, he was forbidden to write but I still can hear the way he used language when he spoke.”

A crucial part of Mr Ai's education was a 12-year stint in New York beginning in 1981. He did various odd jobs, documented his life in photographs and, most importantly, became a fan of Marcel Duchamp, a French conceptual artist famous for his ready-made urinal. On his return to Beijing in 1993, Mr Ai became particularly interested in the crafts that had been wiped out by China's Cultural Revolution. He made art and supported himself by buying and selling antiques. Much of his early work reflects this combination of activities. Mr Ai would paint Western trademarks, such as the Coca-Cola logo, on antique vases, and have traditional artisans reassemble old stools and tables into surreal sculptures. He forged a new category of art, christened the “ancient ready-made” by Philip Tinari, a Beijing-based curator.

By 1999 Mr Ai was successful enough to build a distinctive modernist brick home and studio in the Caochangdi art village on the outskirts of Beijing. He set up a design practice with a name that plays on the English word “fake”, but which when pronounced in Chinese comes out as something close to “fuck”. “I like the double meaning,” says Mr Ai. “You can see my attitude to opening a company.” He also worked as a consultant on the “bird's nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Mr Ai took up writing in 2006 when he was offered a blog by Sina, a Chinese internet-service provider. As he became more confident writing about art and architecture, he also began writing about human rights, liberty and the need for openness in government. The evasiveness of the authorities after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people, turned him into a political campaigner.

He has made a number of artworks related to the earthquake. But it was Mr Ai's internet crusade to compile a list of the students killed in the disaster—the result of the shoddy “tofu” construction of school buildings—that most angered the Chinese government. In May 2009, shortly after the artist published a list of several thousand student casualties, the authorities closed down his blog. Since then his name has been banned from the Chinese media and even expunged from local search engines. Many believe this activity motivated his eventual arrest.

Today Mr Ai is back in his studio, surrounded by assistants and at least a dozen cats. Though he has not been formally charged with anything, his design company has been fined $2.4m for tax evasion. He has repeatedly asked for a public trial, knowing that he is unlikely to get one. Mr Ai has to check in with the police every Monday morning for further “re-education” and is not allowed to travel beyond the Beijing city limits.

His captors have not given their version of what happened during his interrogation, but by his account it was “two-thirds harassment, one-third brainwashing”. The artwork that most obsessed them was “Study of Perspective—Tiananmen”, a photograph of the eponymous square, from a 1995 series in which the artist raises his middle finger in front of different landmarks around the world. Again and again, his interrogators demanded to know what it meant. “So I would talk about the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci and classic examinations of perspective,” says Mr Ai. When they pointed out that giving the finger is known everywhere as an insult, Mr Ai explained that Italians, among others, use a different gesture. When they asked about the connotations of Tiananmen, he replied, “Feudalism.” (The gate at the north end of Tiananmen Square was originally built by a Ming-dynasty emperor.)

Another work that preoccupied Mr Ai's inquisitors was “Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals”. It explores ideas about authenticity, national and international culture, taste and value. The large-scale bronze sculpture of 12 animal heads is a re-creation of pieces designed by European Jesuit missionaries for the emperor's summer palace in the 1700s. The palace was looted by French and British troops during the second opium war in 1860 and the animal heads removed. When two of them were put up for auction at Christie's Yves Saint Laurent sale in February 2009, they aroused the ire of Chinese nationalists. Mr Ai thought the outcry was misplaced because the heads are not Chinese and have “no artistic value”. The controversy inspired him to make his own version.

On what Mr Ai describes as the most absurd day of his imprisonment, the police first accused him of fraud over the zodiac animals, pointing out that he made something for which he was not the original designer. Then they implied that he had been recruited by the CIA when he lived in New York in the 1980s and that his art was a front through which foreign operatives paid him for his “anti-China” activities. Although distressed at the time, the artist now sees these moments as potential scenes in a tragicomic play about art, power and the state.

Curiously, the police never appeared terribly concerned about a work in which he depicts himself destroying Chinese treasures. “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” (pictured) is a self-portrait from 1995 in which Mr Ai seems to reject the doctrinaire Han version of history, and effectively announces his shift in identity, from antique dealer to artist. Nor did they focus on an epic work that could be regarded as subversive. In 2007 Mr Ai created a performance titled “Fairytale” in which 1,001 Chinese people who had never been to Europe wandered around the small town of Kassel, Germany, during its influential Documenta contemporary-art exhibition. Mr Ai wanted to change their lives. Having spent over a decade abroad, he understands that travel expands the mind.

Although Mr Ai's captors quizzed him about the money that went into producing his landmark work, “Sunflower Seeds”, they did not grill him about its significance. First shown carpeting the Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern in autumn 2010, the installation is made up of 100m tiny handmade porcelain sculptures that look so much like seeds that visitors to the show were often tempted to bite them. They were produced by 1,600 (mostly female) workers living in the ancient porcelain-producing town of Jingdezhen. A pun on the word “china”, the 100-tonne work is also a representation of the nation, with each ceramic seed standing in for 13 people. When the artist was a child, Mao Zedong was often depicted as the sun and his followers were rendered as sunflowers. Mr Ai is keen that his works should not be read in just one way. “I don't want to force people to think something political,” he says. “That is not so interesting.”

Artists often resist being pinned down about their thinking and their working methods, but Mr Ai is surprisingly candid. He speaks openly about Chinese politics and the ideas behind his artwork, and he can be refreshingly critical about some of his early pieces, describing them as “too obvious”. Many people regard Mr Ai as a brave idealist, which makes the authorities nervous. The Chinese government, for its part, has given Mr Ai very little indication of his fate. His passport may be returned to him after June 22nd, the first anniversary of his release from detention. If it is, he does not know whether he will be allowed to leave China, or if he does whether he will be allowed to return.

The Wei ahead

So what does the future hold for the artist? Mr Ai has several projects on the go. In October the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, will open the first American museum survey of the artist's work. One piece Mr Ai is making for the exhibition is an installation of 1,000 porcelain river crabs. The Chinese word for “river crab”, hexie, spoken with different tones, is the same as the word for “harmony”, a term often used in government propaganda.

Mr Ai says he is committed to staying in China, but he is also keen to create a European base in the cellar of the Berlin studio of his friend Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist. His aspiration is that the space, which Mr Ai describes as a bunker with no light that has survived two world wars, will be renovated into something that functions as both a studio and an artwork. The location appeals to him for “strange, personal reasons”, he says. He had lived in an earthen pit as a child after his father was banished to Xinjiang. Enduring hardship, whether in dirt holes or dark interrogation rooms, is in the artist's blood. So is making art.

“The art always wins,” Mr Ai says. “Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.” Mr Ai's legacy as a human-rights activist remains uncertain, but his sculptures and photographs are lasting memorials to his wit and courage.