Ai Weiwei on free speech and the fragility of civilisation: ‘Democracy is a failed joke’ – Independent

7 February 2025

The seizing of Ai Weiwei at Beijing airport by Chinese police on 3 April 2011 must count as the most famous arrest of any artist ever. While the ostensible charge was tax evasion, Ai’s provocative “citizens’ investigations” into state corruption had already earned him local notoriety and a near-fatal beating by police in 2009. But the 83 days of solitary confinement without trial that were to become a global news story, turning Ai into one of the world’s best-known artists, were yet to come. Yet the artist’s reaction as he sat alone in a cell, a black mask over his head as he awaited his fate, wasn’t what you might expect.

“It felt a little bit ironic,” Ai tells me as we sit talking in the Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge. “Because what they were doing to me was exactly what happened to my father 80 years before.”

Only someone who has seen the wheel of historical fortune turn at least once could view such utterly dire circumstances as “ironic” or maintain such an unflappable tone when describing them. Ai’s father, the leading Chinese modernist poet Ai Qing, was arrested and imprisoned as a “leftist” by China’s Nationalist authorities on his return from studies in Paris in 1932, and later persecuted as a “rightist” during the Communist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. From the age of 10 to 15, Ai lived in an unventilated bunker in a village in the remote Xinjiang province, where his father was forced to clean the communal toilets every day as part of his “political re-education”.

“He must have had a lot of good memories of encountering great people and ideas in Paris and elsewhere. But he put that behind him, because when you have no hope, you have to forget, or you will [try to take your own life] – which he tried several times.”

All this, and the story of his father’s rehabilitation after the death of Mao Tse Tung in 1976, is described with a gently smiling matter-of-factness that belies Ai’s formidable energy as an artist. He works across a mind-boggling range of forms, from bronze sculpture to internet blogging, films and architecture, and is ready to take a swipe at anything that offends his moral sensibilities. These days, that is as likely to be “fast-paced, globalised capitalism” and the contradictions of the self-satisfied West as state repression in China.

Read more of Ai Weiwei's interview with Mark Hudson for Independent here.