For part of the year, the renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei works from an enormous studio – a former brewery in Berlin. Spanning 30,000 square feet, its triple-height vaulted cellars were renovated by Ai himself, a self-taught architect, after he left his native China in 2015. He describes the space, which was once a long-abandoned subterranean area, as an “underworld.”
This underground studio reminds him of his childhood home, which he calls “the black hole.” This bare shelter was located on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert in the Xinjiang region – one of the locations where Ai’s father, the poet Ai Qing, was exiled during China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s. Growing up in “the black hole,” Ai experienced the authoritarianism and censorship he has spent four decades resisting, ridiculing, and at times enduring, as a defender of human rights.
Today, Ai travels frequently between Berlin; Cambridge, England, where his son, Lao, attends school; and Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal. His approximately 20-acre property in Portugal is home to assistants, cats, dogs, birds, fish, and a reconstruction of his Shanghai studio, which was demolished by the Chinese government in 2011. Ai is accustomed to constant movement, and to displacement. He says, “The concept of a home has never been truly established for me.”
Ai was drawn to this once-derelict space as a creative challenge. He states, “I’m more interested in problem-solving than in getting a beautiful studio.”
On a recent visit, Ai, now 67, led me down a narrow staircase into a stark, windowless alcove in his Berlin studio. The concrete floor was scattered with twisted steel rods from “Rebar,” an installation piece Ai created in China between 2008 and 2012. He sourced the metal from school buildings that collapsed in the devastating Sichuan earthquake. “Rebar” and other works created in response to the earthquake criticize the government’s corrupt construction regulations and lack of transparency following the tragedy. This work, along with his prolific online writings, helped establish Ai’s reputation as a prominent dissident artist. As a result, he faced surveillance and government-ordered detention, eventually leading him to leave Beijing for Berlin. He chose the city for its mix of “ruin” and “new life.”
In Ai’s archival room, a large world map used for planning his documentary on refugees, “Human Flow” (2017), leaned against a wall near an overgrown fiddle-leaf fig tree. He also displayed dozens of antique Qing dynasty wooden chairs from his participatory project “Fairytale” (2007). For this project, Ai transported 1,001 volunteers from China to the Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.
