Ai Weiwei 'Sunflower Seed' Print Available

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Sunflower Seed
Medium: Children's Toy Bricks on Baseplate
Size: 38 x 38 cm
Edition: 100
Price: £6,000

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, architect and activist whose work fuses monumental aesthetics with unflinching political critique. Born in Beijing in 1957, he grew up in exile after his poet father Ai Qing was condemned during the Anti-Rightist Movement; cleaning public toilets and living in a dug-out earthen room gave him an early lesson in state power and personal resilience.

Trained at the Beijing Film Academy, he co-founded the avant-garde group Stars in 1979 and later moved to New York, soaking up pop art and conceptual strategies. Returning to China in 1993, he began using everyday materials to question authority: Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) photographs the artist shattering a 2,000-year-old ceremonial vessel to indict Mao’s destruction of heritage; Sunflower Seeds (2010) fills Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with 100 million hand-painted porcelain seeds, exposing collective labour and the illusion of uniformity.

Architecture plays a key role. His design for Beijing’s 2008 Olympic “Bird’s Nest” stadium was meant to symbolise openness, yet he later denounced the Games as propaganda and produced documentaries exposing the hidden toll of rapid urban development. After investigating the 2008 Sichuan earthquake he created Remembering (2009), a wall of 9,000 children’s backpacks spelling “She lived happily for seven years,” a memorial to pupils who died in shoddy school buildings.

In 2011 he was detained for 81 days without charge, an experience that deepened his focus on surveillance, exile and refugee crises. Works such as Trace (2014) array 1.2 million LEGO portraits of political prisoners on the floor, while Roots (2019) casts endangered Brazilian tree roots in rust-coloured iron to evoke displacement and deforestation. Now based in Portugal, Ai continues to produce films, installations and social-media provocations, insisting that “all art is political” and that freedom of expression is the basic right required for humanity to defend itself.