AAi Weiwei talks to me about the decision-making process ahead of his first visit to China in more than a decade. The artist, known worldwide as the most famous critic of the Chinese Communist regime, had to do some complicated arithmetic before deciding to return home.
Before flying off with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, Ai reflected on his time in detention when his captors told him he would spend the next 13 years in detention on trumped-up charges: “They said, ‘When you come out, your son won’t recognize you.’ That was very heavy and really the only moment that touched me.”
Ultimately he had to spend several months in prison. Lao, their son, is now 17 years old. Ai says that Lao doesn’t really need his guidance anymore, so he decides to book their flights and roll the dice. “People said, ‘Are you scared?’ I said, ‘No, why should I be afraid?’ I am Chinese. I have a Chinese passport. I deserve to go back and meet my mother. So I went back.”
Welcome to Ai Weiwei’s life. For most people, returning home doesn’t involve risking whether you’ll ever see close family, but that’s the reality for a 68-year-old whose entire existence has been shaped by authoritarianism and the struggle against it.
His trip to China was good. He was interviewed at the airport and after a few hours he was released into a country whose smells, sights and sounds were pleasant to him. Ai described the journey as follows “A phone call suddenly reconnects“. Today, he is more poetic, and describes it as “a broken piece of jade that you can put back together because it matches so well. Everything is so familiar: the light, the temperature, the people.”
Ai is meeting me at his publisher’s London office to talk about his new book On Censorship, a 90-page polemic on the nature of state control, AI and surveillance. Man definitely knows about these things. Born in Beijing in 1957, he grew up in labor camps in northwest China after the exile of his father, the poet Ai Qing. In 2011, he was detained for 81 days in a 170-square-foot windowless jail because of his activism. Upon his release, he was monitored, interrogated, and threatened by the Chinese state; Then in 2015, his passport was returned and he began life in exile. He currently divides his time between Lisbon, Berlin and Cambridge.
His artworks are as dramatic as his backstory. An army of 1,600 Chinese artisans created the 100-metre hand-painted porcelain “seeds” that were scattered across the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London 16 years ago. He wrapped Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 14,000 fluorescent orange lifejackets worn by refugees; and made a film dedicated to the children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. This direct challenge to the official state narrative made him “China’s most dangerous man”.
His upcoming work at Aviva Studios in Manchester includes 30 Tons of Buttons, which were Rescued from a London factory It was being sold off and smuggled into China to be turned into giant hanging artworks by craftsmen.
The book makes for startling reading, arguing that people in the West misunderstand the nature of censorship. He defines it as “the exercise of power over intellectual space”, both “an essential tool of mental slavery and a fundamental source of political corruption”. It’s not just authoritarian rule, he warns. Liberal societies think that censorship is rare, “but people forget that even on sunny days, shade is inevitable”.
Some arguments are surprising. In a section about the limitations of AI, the artist mentions a selfie taken with the AfD leader Alice Weidel in 2018. He says the AI decided that the photo, which is real, must have been fake because the pair seemed to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the time of the selfie, Weidel, whose grandfather was a Nazi, was considered to be on the more moderate wing of the far-right party, but since becoming leader he has sought “Mass repatriation” of foreigners.Saying that the country’s attention is focused on the Holocaust “crime cult“.
Does AI regret the selfie? He told me that his political demands “may be wrong” on many issues, but he is still “more rational than other political opponents in Germany”. What about his anti-immigrant rhetoric – isn’t it anathema to him? He replies, “Some states don’t even accept one (immigrant) and Germany accepts 1.2 million, which is a very generous decision.” “So if they change the policy and they want to limit it, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
He is also impressed by the fact that Weidel “openly wants Germany to be more independent from American influence”. He adds: “I think these are some of the things we need to do.” Those who know German politics will find this argument surprising because the AfD is seen as the party closest to Trump and almost all parties in the country want more independence from the US. A strong endorsement from someone on the outermost fringes of far-right European politics could have some double effects, and even more surprises.
Ai’s attitude toward China has changed dramatically. Pointing to technological advancements and increased personal freedom, he recently said, the nation is “in an upward phase”. However, the West is struggling to “maintain its logic”, has lost its “moral authority” and “descended into something barely recognizable“.
Although a look across the Atlantic at the US in the era of ICE raids makes his point somewhat, he also means Europe. So are the Chinese regime’s most famous critics now toeing the party line? Pointing to a photo on his iPhone of a desolate place in northwest China, he says, “My relationship with China started even before I could recognize myself as a person. I grew up in this black hole with my father.”
He’s not really angry, but the suggestion that he’s gone soft on the Chinese government has touched a nerve. “I still have a Chinese passport. My mother is still Chinese. So that’s my only connection to China,” he says. “I’m not nostalgic. I’m not a patriot.” What about the claim that the West accepts censorship? Is this their experience in Britain? “I can’t go into details,” he says cryptically. “But I feel the same kind of surveillance, the same kind of censorship in the West.”
When pressed, for example, he told me a story about the Royal Academy in London, an institution that gave him a landmark exhibition in 2015 and made him An honorary member in 2011 After his detention in China. In November 2023, an exhibition of new works to be shown at the Lisson Gallery was removed after he posted a tweet: “The sense of guilt surrounding the persecution of the Jewish people has, at times, been transferred to harass the Arab world.” The tweet was deleted, with the artist telling reporters that his show was “effectively cancelled”.
Subsequently, a vote was held in the RA to determine whether his membership should be revoked due to allegations that the post was anti-Semitic. Ai says, “I don’t intend to be anti-Semitic. My best friends, they’re all Jewish people.” “I made lakhs of tweets on Twitter, but (how is it) that this tweet can create so much trouble? Then he said the process is to let the academicians vote.”
His colleagues supported him and he won the vote. Ai was then asked to write an article about freedom of expression for RA’s magazine, which she wrote, arguing: “Speaking the truth and insisting on one’s own point of view is dangerous and can come with a heavy price. Books may go unpublished, exhibitions may be closed, concerts may be cancelled.”
There was silence after he sent it. Then he says the RA claimed they didn’t have the space to run this thing. For him, it is censorship in the West, which he argues in On Censorship can be “more covert, more deceptive, and more corrosive” than authoritarian rule. “I have many cases like this,” Ai adds. “It happens in Britain and Germany.”
RA disputes this account, claiming that the decision to omit the piece was made by AI before submission. A spokesperson said: “Plurality of voices, tolerance and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and want to protect.”
I wonder how AI feels about the world in 2026. His new book portrays it as a place without shelter for those who value self-expression and freedom of expression. “I think we live in a complex world today, where life is like a broken mirror,” he says. “It reflects reality, but reality can be a broken reality.”
Did his visit to China restore his faith in humanity? There is a pause. “If we lived in the Tang Dynasty, someone like me would go back and write beautiful poetry,” he says, smiling. “But not today. I’ll just take some selfies.”
