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
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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.
Monday, October 20, 2025 
