Ai Weiwei: According to What?
*Starred Review* Ai Weiwei is China’s most internationally famous artist because of his design work on the “bird’s nest” stadium built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his political activism, and his arrests, detention, and beating at the hands of Chinese officials. Published in conjunction with the first North American exhibition of his work, which will travel across the U.S. this year and most of the next, this superb volume of commentary and colorplates presents an enlightening and moving overview of Ai’s diverse, strongly conceptual, and socially conscious body of work. Ai’s sensibility is rooted in his subsistence childhood, the result of his father, a famous poet, being denounced as anti-Communist and the family exiled to northwestern China. Ai lived in the U.S. from 1981 to 1993, then returned to Beijing and built his now-iconic studio. His photographs, video, performance art, architecture, and sculptural installations using materials ranging from antique furniture to mass-manufactured porcelain sunflower seeds are collaborative, communal, and profoundly resonant in their concerns, posing urgent questions about the meaning of one life among many, and our responsibilities to others. This striking and important volume reflects the bright beacon of Ai’sglobally influential and inspiring courage, compassion, intelligence, creativity, and ongoing political struggle for freedom of expression and respect for life. --Donna Seaman