From Archinect.com, an interview with artist Ai Weiwei:
Ai Weiwei (Beijing) is an artist, curator, and architectural designer who has been working in China and the United States since the late 1970’s. An original member of “Stars,” a group of artists working in Beijing in the late 1970’s during the first years of reform, Ai attended film school with directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. He then traveled to the United States where he made conceptual art focused on the alteration of readymade objects and situations. In the early 1990’s Ai returned to China to edit a series of three books on the art a new generation of artists, based in Beijing’s Eastern Art Village: “Black Paper,” “White Paper,” and “Gray Paper.” Since that time he has produced work which focuses on China’s cultural history, centralized political system, and the contradictions of modernity. His work has shown across Europe, North America, and China. [Full text]
