Artist, architect, designer, photographer, curator, writer, editor, activist — Ai Weiwei is many things. This multiplicity of means all serve a united end that centers on the existential question: What does human freedom mean in China today?
"According to What?" a major solo exhibition that opened at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum on July 25, presents 26 of Ai's works, most made over the past decade. All present different ways of approaching this question — works of art that are alternately wry, provocative, haunting, beautiful and always deeply political.
Ai's political consciousness was "unavoidable." Born in 1957, the son of the then-persecuted, now-revered Chinese poet Ai Qing, Ai's childhood was spent in the remote Western provinces, where his family had been banished to during the Cultural Revolution as "enemies of the people." His first political decision was to become an artist.