Ai Weiwei - Concepts of a Chinese Artist
In Chinese, Weiwei means something like "double negative" – a name that can have double or even triple meanings. Of himself, Ai Weiwei says he is always a critic, but always a collaborator. Ai Weiwei takes a socio-political stand through his art. "Remembering", a work to be displayed on the façade of the House of German Art and made up of 9000 specially made backpacks, commemorates the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province. Many school buildings collapsed - because of shoddy construction, Ai Weiwei maintains. He's demanding an investigation and compensation for the families of the victims.
During the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei saw his father, the famous poet Ai Qing, branded a "rightist". The entire family was sent into internal exile in Xinjiang, where they lived throughout the period of the most extreme persecutions under Mao Zedong's rule. In 1981, Ai Weiwei lived in exile in New York City, a time that influences his work even today.
Ai Weiwei is a master of contradiction. He transforms old beams from a temple into wooden roadmaps, or he smashes urns thousands of years old on stone plates. As an architect, he served as a consultant to the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron on the construction of the new Beijing National Stadium. Yet he boycotted the Olympic Games to avoid being instrumentalized by the Chinese government. At the very latest since Ai Weiwei brought 1001 Chinese to the quinquennial Documenta modern art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, for his project entitled "Fairytale", he has been one of China's internationally best-known artist.
Ai Weiwei is having a 380-square-meter woolen rug woven in Hebei Province especially for the House of German Art. The rug faithfully renders the museum's 969 stone floor tiles. This "soft ground" is meant as a kind of muffler and serves as Ai Weiwei's response to the building's Third Reich origins.
DW-TV observed Ai Weiwei as he prepared for his solo exhibition in the House of German Art. We also look in on Ai Weiwei in his Beijing studios, accompany him to the Art Basel in Miami Beach, Florida, and watch him set up the exhibition in Munich.
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