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Ai Weiwei, one of the most adored and influential - some might say, most
dangerous - artists of our time, is our guest on the third
English-language episode of “Alles gesagt?” (“Nuff Said?“), ZEIT’s
never-ending podcast.
Ai Weiwei is not only an artist, he’s also an architect (he helped
design the National Stadium in Beijing) and a filmmaker (he directed the
Oscar-nominated documentary "Human Flow”). He is also well-known as a
political activist for his fight for democracy and freedom of speech in
his home country and for his criticism of the Chinese government for its
censorship. The hosts of “Alles gesagt?“, Jochen Wegner and Christoph
Amend, met with Ai Weiwei in his Berlin studio this August.
Ai Weiwei was born 1957 in Beijing as a son of author Ai Qing, a highly
esteemed poet under Mao in the early 1950s. Ai grew up in re-education
camps with his family after his father fell from grace with the Mao
regime and was banned in 1961. (He was rehabilitated in 1976, two years
after Mao’s death).
In 1978, Ai Weiwei started studying animation at the film academy in
Beijing before moving to New York in the 1980s. He lived in the U.S.
until the early 90s, returning to Beijing in 1993 due to the illness of
his father and becoming established as an artist in his home country. He
had a major international breakthrough with his work “Fairytale,"
displayed at documenta 12 in 2007, a piece which brought 1,001 Chinese
people to Kassel.
Ai Weiwei has been arrested several times for his political activism. In
2011, he spent 81 days in solitary confinement, an event which was
accompanied by a wave of international protest. His passport wasn't
returned to him until 2015, at which time he left China for Germany,
living in Berlin between 2015 and 2019, where he held a guest
professorship at Berlin University of the Arts. In 2019, he decided to
move to Cambridge with his family, criticizing Germany for its
intolerance and racism, but he still runs his studio in Berlin.
In this episode, Ai Weiwei talks about his Chinese roots, his adventures
in the United States, and his experience with living in Germany. He
explains his love for blackjack and criticizes the global art market.
For the first time, our infinite podcast did not come to an end. Ai
Weiwei is the first guest who did not choose a Schlusswort (final word)
to signify the end of our conversation, and simply left. So we are still
recording.
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