To say that “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei,” the artist’s current retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum, is timely would be an understatement. At the preview on March 7, 2025—the same day as Trump’s $400-million funding cuts to Columbia University as “punishment” for student protests against the war on Gaza and the eve of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest—SAM CEO Scott Stulen remarked, “In this moment, we are called to act, speak truth to power, and stand for our beliefs even if that is difficult. You’ll see from this exhibition that resistance can come in many different forms.”
“Ai, Rebel,” which features more than 130 works by the Chinese dissident artist and activist, is accompanied by two additional presentations in the city. The Seattle Asian Art Museum is hosting Water Lilies (2022), Ai’s most ambitious LEGO work to date, and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) (2010), his collection of 12 monumental animal heads representing the Chinese zodiac, is installed at the Olympic Sculpture Park. Seattle—with its mix of art and activism and long history of engagement with Asian art—is the ideal place to take in Ai’s provocative, playful, and powerful work in these strange and dangerous times.
Hadani Ditmars: You once said, “Freedom, for me, is not a fixed condition but a constant struggle. I think it’s very important for artists to focus on freedom of expression, a value essential for any creative endeavor.” Is this statement truer now than ever?
Ai Weiwei: I was born with the idea of expressing yourself clearly and acting on what you think. You may know that my father was imprisoned deep in a black hole for five years. Because the West has enjoyed 80 years of peacetime since World War II, people today often forget that the reality was completely different before. We have always had these struggles—the same essential patterns at play.
HD: What do you think about the future of freedom of expression in the U.S.?
AW: I think freedom of expression in America is an illusion. Freedom is never really free—if you think it’s free, you’ve lost the essential meaning of freedom of expression. It means either your expression isn’t relevant, or the authorities aren’t listening to you—they don’t care. It has become an obvious problem now because you have an authoritarian power—and the structure is from highly technically controlled capitalism where all the power comes from a very small group of people, and the rest aren’t accountable. So, of course, freedom of expression has become more than ever a crucial question for society to maintain its values—internally and globally.
HD: Could you tell me about your meeting with Allen Ginsberg in New York City in the 1980s? He was reading poems about your father. What was that like?
AW: Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem about meeting my father. Allen was truly an individual and a poet, very outspoken and kind. He looked at Western culture through the lens of a poet.
HD: What connection do you think there is between art and poetry?
AW: Art is poetry. It’s trying to use a limited common language to extend a complex argument or situation—so, art and poetry do the same thing.
HD: Ginsberg was a symbol of freedom of expression. How has America changed since then?
AW: I think it’s changed in two ways: one, art is not relevant anymore, because it has been destroyed by capitalism and the commodification of education; two, everything has been ruined by this. The treatment of art and culture as profitable products creates a bad environment for self-expression and makes individualism disappear.
HD: Has the U.K. also fallen victim to this? When you spoke out about the carnage in Gaza, your 2023 show at the Lisson Gallery was cancelled, but then it was restaged and shown earlier this year.
AW: Whether it’s in the U.S. or the U.K. or Germany, it’s a general condition. It’s like if the weather changes—everybody will be impacted.
HD: You’ve lived in New York, Berlin, and now Portugal, and you have a studio in Cambridge, U.K. Where do you feel at home? Or is the state of being an artist necessarily one of exile?
AW: I’ve lived in so many places—I could be anywhere in the world. The underlying message is that I don’t belong anywhere and I’m a stranger everywhere. But this is my privilege to not belong anywhere.
HD: Because this informs your work?
AW: Yes, it gives me the strength to be disassociated from common assumptions.
HD: How do you feel about the SAM retrospective? Was it an emotional experience for you, like being reunited with lost children you haven’t seen for a while?
AW: It’s emotional because I tend not to look back. It’s mainly the work of a single collector, Larry Walsh—he visited me 20 times when I was in detention. He selected the works with his point of view as a collector. He has never sold a single piece. Most of the work in the show—70 percent—is from his collection.
HD: But it’s also the story of your life, with photographs of you as a young man in New York, your youthful idealism. Is it like a journey for you?
AW: It’s hard to look back, but it’s clear evidence of where I come from. I would say my work in New York City was very different than after I spent 20 years in China. I never really thought of myself as an artist per se. I did many other things—writing, collecting, architecture—and suddenly I became an artist again. I don’t know if this was fortunate or not. It takes a lot of energy.
I don’t see any particular work that is important. I never changed the basic tone of my work. It’s related to my curiosity and aesthetic, moral, and political and philosophical issues. It’s still the same. I don’t like to look at my work, and I don’t hang any of it in my studios. I often say that I don’t like my work. I only like it before I make it—once it’s made, it’s in the past.
HD: What do you hope that American and international audiences will take away from this retrospective?
AW: Maybe they can taste another fruit that will have another flavor.
HD: Your work on migration—particularly your portrait of yourself as Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian boy who drowned, along with his mother and brother, while crossing the Mediterranean—is very committed. Are we still in that moment from 2015?
AW: I think we’re in a much worse moment. Then, it was just regional conflicts, now it’s a global condition involving Russia and the U.S., the Middle East, Israel, Gaza, and Iran. We’re on the edge of another global war. It’s a crucial time.
HD: And what is the role of the artist in all of this as democracy is eviscerated and wars continue?
AW: Artists should either be defending human beings and cultures, or they should disappear.
HD: What about AI? You have a love-hate relationship with it.
AW: It’s an interesting challenge. It affects most people. In time, it will provide a collective receptacle of knowledge. Right now, it’s very often mediocre in recycling what already exists on a topic. It’s efficient, but it’s dangerous. It stops people from making an effort to gain their own knowledge, and the effort itself is part of the journey if not the conclusion. People believe in efficiency, but they are giving up personal emotion or the difficult searching process. This makes human society dumber and also makes for a lot of people who have nothing to do. This is a threat to humanity.
HD: How has your process changed since the beginning of your career?
AW: It hasn’t really changed. You touch different topics and materials. I’m quite a stubborn person—I kept my Chinese passport.
HD: How do you see the relationship between art and activism in your work?
AW: There is art, politics, and change. Very often those concepts are connected, but in practice they don’t work well—when art is used as political activism to express our opinions or emotions. How to do it, and how to make change? My answer is that I need to remain conscious and be active on important issues. By doing that I will change myself, and individuals can act on their own beliefs; then change will happen. But to try to make a movement—I doubt it will work.
HD: What new adventures lie ahead? Will you do something about Trump?
AW: No, it’s not just one person, it’s the whole system. Trump is just a symptom, not the deep illness.
“Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei” is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through September 7, 2025; Water Lilies, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, through March 15, 2026; Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze), at the Olympic Sculpture Park, through May 17, 2027. Ai’s new public artwork Camouflage, created for the FDR Four Freedoms State Park in New York City, opens September 10, 2025 and will remain on view through December 1, 2025.
