Ai Weiwei on free speech and the fragility of civilisation: ‘Democracy is a failed joke’

Mark Hudson talks to China’s most provocative exile about his new exhibition, the triple standards of the West, the crisis of AI and the certainty of nuclear war

Ai is ‘still a frustrated person trying to work out what the world can really mean’ (Getty)

The seizing of Ai Weiwei at Beijing airport by Chinese police on 3 April 2011 must count as the most famous arrest of any artist ever. While the ostensible charge was tax evasion, Ai’s provocative “citizens’ investigations” into state corruption had already earned him local notoriety and a near-fatal beating by police in 2009. But the 83 days of solitary confinement without trial that were to become a global news story, turning Ai into one of the world’s best-known artists, were yet to come. Yet the artist’s reaction as he sat alone in a cell, a black mask over his head as he awaited his fate, wasn’t what you might expect.

“It felt a little bit ironic,” Ai tells me as we sit talking in the Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge. “Because what they were doing to me was exactly what happened to my father 80 years before.”

Only someone who has seen the wheel of historical fortune turn at least once could view such utterly dire circumstances as “ironic” or maintain such an unflappable tone when describing them. Ai’s father, the leading Chinese modernist poet Ai Qing, was arrested and imprisoned as a “leftist” by China’s Nationalist authorities on his return from studies in Paris in 1932, and later persecuted as a “rightist” during the Communist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. From the age of 10 to 15, Ai lived in an unventilated bunker in a village in the remote Xinjiang province, where his father was forced to clean the communal toilets every day as part of his “political re-education”.

‘What the Chinese police were doing to me was exactly what happened to my father 80 years before’ (Getty)

“He must have had a lot of good memories of encountering great people and ideas in Paris and elsewhere. But he put that behind him, because when you have no hope, you have to forget, or you will [try to take your own life] – which he tried several times.”

All this, and the story of his father’s rehabilitation after the death of Mao Tse Tung in 1976, is described with a gently smiling matter-of-factness that belies Ai’s formidable energy as an artist. He works across a mind-boggling range of forms, from bronze sculpture to internet blogging, films and architecture, and is ready to take a swipe at anything that offends his moral sensibilities. These days, that is as likely to be “fast-paced, globalised capitalism” and the contradictions of the self-satisfied West as state repression in China.

Given those formative experiences of lived history, and the long view they’ve given him on human affairs, it’s hardly surprising that the material fabric of history should have become the essential subject of Ai’s art, viewed through vast accumulations of material objects, from mass-produced children’s backpacks to entire historic buildings. Most moving perhaps was Straight, a numbing meditation on loss, comprising 96 tonnes of rusting steel salvaged from schools in which thousands of children were killed in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. And most notorious was Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, in which Ai was photographed dropping a 2,000-year-old vessel, to “question the value and power we bestow on certain cultural objects”.

Ai Weiwei’s ‘Straight’ was made with the remnants of buildings damaged in an earthquake, weighing in at 96 tonnes (Ai Weiwei)

His forthcoming exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery gives pride of place to the bluntest expletive in the English language, spelled out across four Second World War military stretchers using thousands of vintage buttons purchased from a defunct factory in Croydon in 2019.

“Really?” says Ai, with a look of mild perplexity, his glass of water paused halfway to his lips, when I express surprise at his readiness with the f-word. But it’s there as clear as daylight in the show’s most prominent work, F.U.C.K..

Ai laughs as though everything is suddenly crystal clear.

“F.U.C.K. is quite different from fuck.”

Yet isn’t the word used pretty straight in the titles of other works: Go Fuck Yourself and Fuck ’Em All?

Go Fuck Yourself ( 2024), from Ai Weiwei’s new exhibition (© Ai Weiwei Studio, courtesy Lisson Gallery)

“We have a lot of this kind of language right now. There’s a polarisation and a disdain in modern dialogue.”

More than usual?

“I think so. The word is used so often to reflect so many meanings – surprise, happiness, anger, or in a completely senseless way – it’s become abstract. So it’s a perfect readymade.”

That’s an interesting choice of word. Equating his use of the most provocative syllable in the English language with the anti-art gestures of early 20th century modernists such as Marcel Duchamp, who famously exhibited a “readymade” urinal as a work of art, shows that Ai has lost none of his readiness to provoke. And it’s an indication that he’s none too happy with the state of the world, as I discover within minutes of my arrival.

“We’ve never been so deeply challenged by information and technology, with the comfort and protection of globalised capitalism on the one hand, and unthinkable horrors on the other,” he says. “There’s the hidden crisis of racism, wars in Europe and the Middle East. The power of our rationality in this so-called civilised world is so fragile it doesn’t protect anybody, and democracy is a failed joke.”

And which democracies is he thinking of? Not here surely.

“Here!”

This remark takes on an uncomfortable resonance a few days later when a poll suggests that half of Britain’s Generation Z has given up on democracy and would prefer to be ruled by a dictator. Is this the tragic punchline to the failed joke?

I wanted to meet Ai in Cambridge because it seemed such an unlikely place to encounter a global art player of his stature, let alone find him living. While Ai seems to deliberately eschew the snooty gloss that galleries seem to cultivate in artists these days, he could live absolutely anywhere, and these days do pretty much anything he wants. So why would he choose somewhere as small and, for all its mighty academic credentials, as parochial and Middle England-ish as Cambridge?

The power of our rationality in this so-called civilised world is so fragile it doesn’t protect anybody

Having based himself in Berlin after his definitive departure from China in 2015, he declared that Germany was “not an open society” and moved to Cambridge in 2019. He is now settled in Portugal, where he is building a large studio complex, but with a son still at school in Cambridge, he maintains his base here and still makes regular visits. He has chosen to meet in the neutral territory of the Heong Gallery, a contemporary art space, funded by Hong Kong financier Alwyn Heong, within the stately portals of Downing College, which happens to be closed today. I suppose he must just like this quaint fenland city.

“I like it. It’s a place where there’s still a focus on science, rational thinking and liberal ideas. But taking a larger perspective, how much is it detached from other realities? Here, of course, you have the guarantees – family, society, resources – to build these generations of people who become the professional class and the elite. And that also has a potential danger.”

And what’s that?

“Ignoring or refusing to recognise that human societies develop in different ways, some of which may be slower paced. And when AI is fully developed, it will make connections in seconds that it takes a professor a lifetime to achieve. So 80 per cent of our current education will be of questionable value.”

Ai Weiwei: ‘80 per cent of our current education will be of questionable value’ (Getty)

You don’t have to spend long listening to Ai’s overarching pronouncements to realise that each relates to some highly specific material circumstance. His theme today is the hypocrisies of the application of the principles of free speech and human rights in the West’s “so-called democracies”.

“You cannot talk about human rights in Russia or China and then apply different rights in the Middle East,” he says. “You’re just using too many double or triple standards. The West has totally lost the moral high ground.”

Ai is clearly referring to the furore surrounding his autumn 2023 exhibition at the Lisson, which was “postponed indefinitely” by the London gallery following a tweet in which Ai claimed that the “sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been at times transferred to the Arab world” and that America’s $3bn annual subsidy to Israeli defence means the two countries have a “shared destiny”.

While the brief tweet, written in response to a question from one of his social media followers, wasn’t saying anything that millions haven’t thought and said over the intervening period, it was posted only five weeks after Hamas’s incursion into Israel, when feelings across the board were at their most intense. There was a danger, his gallery felt, that this casual comment might capsize his career. Three further exhibitions in New York, Paris and Berlin were also “effectively cancelled”, as Ai put it at the time. While he conceded that the gallery was “acting to protect him”, the incident clearly stuck in the craw, and seems to have coloured his entire experience of living and working in the West.

“The problem is not about whether the content of the statement was right or wrong, but do we have the right to speak even when we are saying things that are wrong? If a society says, you cannot say wrong things, I would say that is an authoritarian society. Because that’s a Nazi idea, that you want to be absolutely right and the only right and right above all.”

Ai’s forthcoming London exhibition will be a modified version of that postponed show, with the “fuck” works accompanied by his recreations of great modern paintings in Lego, including Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, the artist’s last painting before he died by suicide, with the ominous crows in the original accompanied by sinister drones. The pixellated quality created by the tiny toy bricks represents for Ai the interface of the two-dimensional plane of the painting, and the digital plane in which we increasingly spend our lives.

Ai Weiwei’s Wheat Field with Crows (2024) (© Ai Weiwei Studio, c ourtesy Lisson Gallery)

The show, Ai Weiwei: A New Chatpter, is preceded by a press release that I read with some dismay on the train from London. It’s larded with airy truisms that felt painfully specious, even by the vexed standards of contemporary art press releases, with their endless parroting of current buzz phrases. So I was to a degree reassured to learn that the document was written “at the artist’s request” by the generative AI ChatGPT4, hence the show’s title.

But what was he hoping to achieve by framing his work in a way that invites ridicule? Was it a kind of satire on the way art is packaged, or a prankster-ish gesture, throwing it out there to see what would happen?

“You felt uncomfortable when you read it. But don’t we already feel uncomfortable in so many situations, when we walk into a supermarket and see all these packaged foods that don’t taste like the things they’re supposed to be,” he responds. “Our receiving systems are being manipulated in the pursuit of profit. We tell ourselves it’s different with art and literature, but these things still have to be received through galleries, art fairs, newspapers and magazines.”

Ai Weiwei at an anti-censorship rotest supporting Julian Assange (PA)

But I’m still trying to pin down Ai’s approach to AI itself, which ranges from the apparently celebratory (his massive video installation 81 Questions to AI in Piccadilly Circus) to the frankly dismissive.

“The rise of AI is one of the greatest crises we face today. What AI can accomplish is similar to mathematics or geometry – a method of calculation that can achieve a level of precision beyond human capability. Yet precision and computational ability have no direct connection to art. The very essence of art lies in its inability to be replicated or predicted. This unpredictability and uniqueness are fundamental human qualities rooted in individual expression.”

One of the most talked about works in the exhibition looks set to be a life-size Lego rendering of Gauguin’s symbolist masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, to which AI has added the nuclear mushroom cloud from Hiroshima rising above the luxuriant tropical foliage.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (2023) (© Ai Weiwei Studio, courtesy Lisson Gallery)

“That’s something that’s still hanging over our heads,” says Ai. “Definitely, we are going to use it. The US used it 70 years ago when there was very little justification, with the war already over, so why not again?”

And in the bottom left corner of the painting the features of an elderly woman have been modified into those of a grey-bearded man, representing Ai himself in the role of an “aboriginal man”.

“That’s me”, he says, “showing that I’m still a frustrated person trying to work out what the world can really mean.”

Ai Weiwei: A New Chatpter is open at the Lisson Gallery in London from 7 February–15 March 2025