The Making of Ai Weiwei

A new coffee-table book traces the artist’s humble beginnings in China, the exiles and travel bans he endured, and the radical works he created along the way By Carolina de Armas “Everything is art. Everything is politics.” That’s Ai Weiwei, summarizing both his life and his work. The Chinese contemporary artist is the son of a so-called enemy of the state. His father, Ai Qing, was a poet who was also a member of the Communist Party, and yet he was exiled to a labor camp in “Little Siberia” in 1958, after defending colleagues accused of “anti-party sentiment.”A vocal critic of authoritarianism, government corruption, and human-rights abuses, as well as a staunch defender of freedom of speech, Weiwei has never had difficulty getting his points across. His most revered installations were blunt in their messaging. In 1995, his photographic series READ ON