(1957 - )
Ai Weiwei was born in China and shortly after his birth in 1957 moved with his family to a series of remote locales where the communist regime exiled his father, a poet. His family returned to Beijing in 1976 and Weiwei enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978. He became part of an influential collective of avant garde artists known as the ‘Stars’ (XIngxing). He moved to the US in 1981 studying at Parsons School of Design (now the New School) in New York. He has had major solo exhibitions internationally in a number of institutions including most recently at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands; Design Museum, London (both 2023); Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2022); Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK (2022); and Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2021). Architectural collaborations include the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Stadium, with Herzog and de Meuron. Among numerous awards and honours, he won the lifetime achievement award from the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2008 and was made Honorary Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2011. His human rights work has been recognised through the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2012 and Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2015.