Ai Weiwei Biography
Ai Weiwei (艾未未; Beijing, 28 August 1957) is a Chinese artist, designer, activist, architect and director. He is the son of the poet Ai Qing. He graduated from the Film Academy, and then subsequently dedicated himself to painting. In the Seventies he co-founded the artistic group Stars ("stars" in Italian). In September 1980 the Beijing authorities allowed the Stars collective to set up an exhibition at the China Art Gallery in Beijing: it was the first exhibition of contemporary art in a Chinese museum; the exhibition attracted numerous visitors. In 1993 he returned to China to be close to his ill father. He collaborated in the founding of Beijing's East Village, a community of avant-garde artists. In 1997 he was co-founder and artistic director of the Archive of Chinese Arts (CAAW). In 1981 he moved to the United States. He gets married in New York where he carries out most of his artistic activity. He attended two prestigious design schools, Parsons The New School For Design and the Art Students League. In March 1988 his works were exhibited at the Ethan Cohen Gallery, an exhibition that was his first and only solo exhibition in New York. A famous work from this period is a tribute to Marcel Duchamp, an artist loved by Ai Weiwei: Profile of Duchamp. Sunflower seeds. It involves the transformation of a hanger into the artist's profile, inside which sunflower seeds are placed, a fundamental food for the Chinese people. In 1999 he began to deal with architecture and founded his studio in the northern suburbs of Beijing, in Caochangdi. In 2003 he founded another studio, «FAKE Design». Also in this year he created another famous work, Map of China: a puzzle sculpture made up of wood that had been part of the temples of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), destroyed by the regime. He works on various projects with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. Together they won the competition for the design of the National Stadium in Beijing and the pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2008 the Shanghai authorities invited him to build a studio in Malu town, to make the area an area for artists. Also in 2008 an earthquake in Sichuan caused around seventy thousand victims; many students die under the rubble of schools. Ai Weiwei accuses the Chinese government of using poor quality materials to build these buildings and publishes the names of the five thousand dead children on his blog.
