Ai Weiwei 'Self Portrait' Red/Green Release Details

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Self Portrait (Red/Green)
Medium: Framed 5 Color Embroidered Textile
Size: 40 x 40 x 3.7 cm
Edition: UNSURE
Prices: €1,500

*available on Monday January 26th, 2026

Ai Weiwei 'Self Portrait' Blue/Pink Release Details

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Self Portrait (Blue/Pink)
Medium: Framed 5 Color Embroidered Textile
Size: 40 x 40 x 3.7 cm
Edition: UNSURE
Prices: €1,500

*available on Monday January 26th, 2026

Ai Weiwei 'Self Portrait' Purple/Yellow Release Details

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Self Portrait (Purple/Yellow)
Medium: Framed 5 Color Embroidered Textile
Size: 40 x 40 x 3.7 cm
Edition: UNSURE
Prices: €1,500

*available on Monday January 26th, 2026

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.

Ai Weiwei 'Forever Bicycle' (Blue + Silver) Print Release Details

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Forever Bicycle (Blue + Silver)
Medium: Gold Leaf Embellished 3 Color Screen Print
Size: 75 x 75 cm
Edition: 100
Prices: €2,420

*application open until Monday November 17th, 2025

Ai Weiwei 'Forever Bicycle' (Red + Gold) Print Release Details

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Forever Bicycle (Red + Gold)
Medium: Gold Leaf Embellished 3 Color Screen Print
Size: 75 x 75 cm
Edition: 100
Prices: €2,420

*application open until Monday November 17th, 2025

_____________________ 

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, architect and activist born in Beijing in 1957 who uses sculpture, photography, film and social media to challenge authority and champion human rights. The son of poet Ai Qing, he grew up during the Cultural Revolution and later studied at Parsons School of Design in New York, where exposure to conceptual art shaped his belief that ideas carry more weight than objects. His best known works transform traditional materials into pointed political statements: Sunflower Seeds consists of one hundred million porcelain seeds hand painted by artisans in Jingdezhen, inviting viewers to consider mass labour and individuality, while Straight comprises ninety tons of rebar recovered from schools destroyed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the bent metal painstakingly straightened to memorialise young lives lost to corruption.

Architecture is another arena of critique. He helped design Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics, yet later distanced himself from the project, calling the games a propaganda show. His subsequent installations often expose state surveillance: surveillance cameras cast in marble or bronze sit like silent idols, questioning who watches whom in modern society.

Detention in 2011 for eighty one days without charge intensified his global profile. Since regaining his passport he has lived in Portugal and Britain, continuing to produce work that links personal experience to universal themes of freedom and exile. Whether building a fence across New York landmarks or wrapping refugees in thermal blankets on Berlin concert hall steps, he insists that art must engage with the world beyond the gallery. By merging ancient craft with contemporary dissent, he proves creativity can be a powerful form of resistance.

Ai Weiwei 'Swoosh Vases' Release Details

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Swoosh Vase (GOLD, SILVER, RED, BLUE or GREEN) 
Medium: Nickle Plated Alluminum
Size: 9 x 9 x 8 Inches
Edition: TIMED
Prices: $1,550 EACH

*available Thursday August 28th, 2025

Ai Weiwei 'Forest' Print Release Details

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Forest
Medium: Offset Lithograph Print
Size: 21 x 30 cm
Edition: 200
Price: €800

Ai Weiwei 'Circle In Blue' Lottery Open

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Circle In Blue
Medium: 1 Color Woodcut Print
Size: 54.4 x 65 cm
Edition: 100
Price: €1,650

*entry closes Tuesday December 10th, 2024

Ai Weiwei 'Circle In Black' Lottery Open

Artist: Ai Weiwei
Title: Circle In Black
Medium: 1 Color Woodcut Print
Size: 54.4 x 65 cm
Edition: 100
Price: €1,650

*entry closes Tuesday December 10th, 2024