Ai Wei Wei--Living Art (艾未未--活生生的藝術)

Ai Wei Wei, born in Beijing China in 1957, is a fearless artist. To him, art is about life. In a sense, art is his life. He can turn practically anything he encounters in his life into art: he does everything including painting, architectural and other forms of art designing, photography, documentary film making, pottery, metal sculptures, conceptual art, installation art and works on all kinds of materials, curating etc .and God knows what he'll do next. He is open to life's challenges and the hazards of fate. He trusts in his own instincts. He believes in what he does. His mind is always working, so is his imagination and above all, his heart. Perhaps, A Danto is right when he says that after Duchamp, Andy Warhol etc, the boundaries of what is art and what is not has been forever broken and art has regained its "freedom" and the vista in front of it has become as "open" as  Life, as open as man's imagination. In being so fiercely individual, he exemplifies in a sense, every human being in this world whose mind, whose heart and whose body is not yet numbed by all the forces working ceaselessly to "turn" him into what a particular society wishes to mold him into. He resists all such forces. He is Sisyphus. He is a true man, not just an artist. Perhaps he is an artist because he is first of all a man, a man true to himself.



According to the Wikipedia, Ai Weiwei's father was Chinese poet Ai Qing, denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957, the year he was born and the following year, his family  was sent to a labour camp in Beidahuang, Heilongjiang and three years later, exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang, where they lived for 16 years, returning to Beijing only in 1976, after Deng Xiaopeng regained power. Two years later, i.e. 1978, Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy to study animation and founded the early avant garde art group the "Stars", together with Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, Huang Rui, Li Shuang, Zhong Acheng and Qu Leilei. Although the group disbanded in 1983, Ai continued to join in regular Stars group shows including  The Stars: Ten Years, 1989 (Hanart Gallery, Hong Kong and Taipei), and a retrospective exhibition in Beijing in 2007:Origin Point (Today Art Museum, Beijing). He went to America in 1981, stayed there for 12 years, mostly in New York and briefly attended courses at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League of New York but dropped out to make a living out of drawing street portraits and working odd jobs. During this period, he was exposed to and became influenced by the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns and started creating conceptual art by altering readymade objects.

Ai returned to China in 1993, after his father became ill. He helped establish the experimental artists' Beijing East Village and published a series of three books about this new generation of artists: Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995), and Gray Cover Book (1997). Ai is the Artistic Director of China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW), which he co-founded in 1997, a company in Beijng which concentrates on experimental art  helps artists to display their works in exhibitions both inside and outside China. In 1999, he moved to Caochangdi, in northeast Beijing and built his own studio house – his first architectural project. This got him interested in architecture and he founded the architecture studio FAKE Design, in 2003 and took part in the design of the famous  "Bird Nest" Stadium at the Beijing Olympics.

In 2011, Ai became a co-director and curator of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, and co-curator of the exhibition Shanshui at The Museum of Art Lucerne and in the same year , he spoke at TED (conference), served in the jury for A Logo for Human Rights, became a guest lecturer at Oslo School of Architecture and Design and was named an honorary member of the Berlin University of the Arts.

In May this year, he exhibited a "Map of China" built with cans of Chinese baby milk powder in orange and blue in Sheung Wan, presumably as  a protest against the use of  prohibited materials in the production of milk powder for the consumption of Chinese infants.   

More details about him can be found in the following excellent video from Utube which I really  like to share about this very remarkable specimen of humanity.