2026-01-29
In December 2025, Ai Weiwei shared photos from his trip to China on Instagram. Among other things, we could see photos of the artist with his son and mother.
What is so special about this? Since 2015, Ai Weiwei had been living in self-exile, which he decided to do after four years of house arrest imposed by the Chinese government.
In 2011, the artist was detained by Chinese authorities and arrested for almost three months. The charges against him related to financial crimes. Ai Weiwei has repeatedly described this experience as a hostage-like situation – according to his account, he could not even scratch his head without the guards' permission.
After this experience and the end of his house arrest in 2015, the artist left China. For the next ten years, he lived abroad, although he was not officially banned from entering the country.
This was not the first case of exile in his family's history. As Barnaby Martin, author of "Hanging Man", a book about the arrest, notes, Ai Weiwei's father, the poet Ai Qing, was acquainted with Mao Zedong in the 1940s and 1950s, and the family once belonged to the so-called “red aristocracy,” the first generation of the Chinese People's Republic's party elite.
However, as a result of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s, the entire family was sent to a labor camp in the Gobi Desert.
Ai Weiwei is widely known today as a dissident artist, which is why his return to China received widespread media coverage, even though he himself did not particularly publicize it.
His artistic practice bears the hallmarks of conceptualism and neo-Dadaism. As he himself emphasized, Marcel Duchamp has always been his master.
He gained international fame with his work “Sunflower Seeds,” presented at the Tate Modern in London in 2010. As part of this project, the artist filled the exhibition space with over 100 million hand-painted porcelain seeds, which referred to Mao's propaganda rhetoric, in which the Leader was the sun and the citizens were sunflower seeds.