Ai Weiwei Reflects on 40 Years of Rebellion With His First U.S. Retrospective in 10 Years

“I’m like a shattered mirror,” the artist Ai Weiwei tells W one morning in a cozy corner of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where he’s mounting his first U.S. retrospective in over a decade. “A mirror can see a perfect image, but once you shatter it, the pieces reflect reality, with all its cracks.”

This mission statement is on full display with Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, which will be on view through September 7. The exhibition features 130 works spanning 40 years of the 67-year-old artist’s provocative, humorous, and at times devastating artistic practice. “Either you do all of Ai Weiwei or nothing at all,” the show’s curator, Foong Ping, said. Foong, who typically focuses on ancient rather than contemporary Chinese art, was interested in putting Ai’s works into the context of the current historical moment, which “calls for such an artist.”

“We watch Ai’s commitment to watching those in power and are reminded of our own agency for collective resistance,” Foong added.

Right away, that sense of irreverent resistance greets visitors, whom Foong notes are “immediately flipped off by the show.” Divided into three chapters roughly outlining his career, Ai, Rebel opens with the neon piece F.U.C.K. (2000), a nod to Ai’s penchant for wordplay, as the sign also refers to his FAKE Design Studio in Beijing (but can be pronounced like the English expletive when said in Mandarin). This section, “Introducing the Rebel,” features many of Ai’s early works that take direct aim at authoritarianism, government, and empire in general—like the eight photographs from his Study of Perspective (1995-2011) series, which show him giving the middle finger to historically significant places like the White House and Tiananmen Square. It also features works from Ai’s early career, including the now-iconic (and once highly controversial) triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), plus 25 black-and-white photographs taken when a young Ai lived in New York City in the 1980s, where he was among the first generation of Chinese students to study abroad following the end of the Cultural Revolution.

“Introducing the Rebel” also includes a poem by Ai’s father, the famous poet Ai Qing. Art, like poetry, “uses a limited language to explain complex elements or situations,” Ai notes. Ai’s family was sent to a labor camp and exiled for nearly two decades due to Ai Qing’s work and influence; they returned home to Beijing in 1976 following Mao Zedong’s death. The impact of this formative experience is evident in nearly every work by Ai, who would go on to become a dissident himself, thanks to his artistic challenges of state power and surveillance.

“I spent about 40 years under a clear authoritarian state, and I’m maybe one of the first people to announce the West has become a new [type of] authoritarianism, which is capital or corporate,” Ai tells W. “There’s huge money accumulating in a few people’s hands. This is no different from the authoritarianism we normally see in other countries.” But, the artist adds, “history always moves like a river. There’s a rock or a mountain that changes our course, but the water has to keep moving under pressure. Hopefully, during this moment of history, we can still protect freedom of speech, which is essential for a healthy society. Art is that freedom of expression.”

The second chapter of Ai, Rebel, “Material Disruptions,” focuses on the artist’s unconventional use of emotionally evocative or historically significant materials like marble, Qing Dynastry-era pottery, and everyday objects like bicycles, furniture, and shoes. Works like Mao (Facing Forward)—among the last oil paintings he ever made in 1986—and the Chinese army raincoat repurposed for Safe Sex (1988) show him grappling with his native country’s legacy while living away from it for the first time.

“Material Disruptions” contains several of Ai’s most famous works, and the effect of their inclusion is a reminder of just how long and significant his career has been. It’s delightful to turn a corner and come across a portion of Sunflower Seeds (2010), for instance—the piece for which he enlisted artisans to handcraft millions of porcelain sunflower seeds in reference to both Mao-era propaganda and the power of the individual within the collective.

The final section, “Watching Ai Watching Power,” introduces the artist’s turn from pure creative to true activist once he began leveraging the power of public works, collective community action, and the Internet. Most famous, perhaps, is Ai’s investigation of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 100,000 people, many of whom were schoolchildren. Ai and a group of concerned citizens painstakingly collected the names of many of those children, resulting in the sobering Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation (2008-2011), which starkly and frankly captures the enormity of the catastrophe.

Two other pieces in this area of the show, Snake Ceiling (2008) and 81 (2013), refer to Ai’s investigation and the fallout that led to his imprisonment. In any other context, Snake Ceiling, comprised of dozens of small backpacks, could be a visually arresting tribute to the Year of the Snake—not the tens of thousands of students who died in the earthquake. Visitors can walk through 81, a life-size recreation of the padded cell Ai was held in for as many days following his efforts to expose the corruption behind the shoddy, so-called “tofu-dreg” school construction that caused the deaths. (After his arrest, Ai collaborated with this magazine on a cover shoot referencing his detention.)

But the exhibition extends beyond SAM; a bronze rendition of Ai’s zodiac head sculptures will be on view at Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park beginning May 17, and a giant sculptural reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s water lilies, made in Ai’s current favorite medium of Lego bricks, will be at the Seattle Asian Art Museum later this month.

New SAM director and CEO Scott Stulen, who had great success in his last role turning the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma into a community fixture, says having Ai Weiwei’s works spread across three places in Seattle offers even more opportunity for people to engage with his message. “This could not be a more timely and urgent exhibition,” he said.

For Ai, who currently lives in Portugal but has several studios around the world, the moment is a quietly triumphant one. “After so many years of effort in the art world,” he says, “I still appreciate not being forgotten.”