Ai Weiwei

Architecture / 27 Apr 2018

The Serpentine Pavilion: a history in pictures

In anticipation of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion designed by Frida Escobeda, we take a look back at the best builds from over the years – from Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei’s on-site excavation and Frank Gehry’s timber-based construct, right...

Design / 24 Oct 2017

The inaugural Venice Glass Week celebrates the beating heart of the city

Locals say that glass, not blood, runs through the veins of Murano’s highly skilled glassmakers, who are notoriously coy about their trade. From the chemical compositions that make up their unique glass to the blowing techniques that are passed down...

Art / 22 Sep 2016

Ai Weiwei’s ’#SafePassage’ surveys global refugee crises at Foam Amsterdam

Activist-artist Ai Weiwei is known as much for his differences of opinion with the Chinese government as for his art, and says that having left his homeland he feels empathy with the mass of refugees attempting to find a new...

Design / 13 Sep 2016

Game-Changers: we pick our top 20 creative world-rockers

In 20 remarkable years we have come across, written about, examined and exhumed a lot of remarkable people. On the following pages are 20 of them. This, though, is not a simple ranking of power and influence. These are stories...

Design / 13 Sep 2016

From captive to captivator: the RA’s Tim Marlow recalls his adventures with Ai WeiWei

Working with Ai Weiwei was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Partly because we had barely a year to make a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, but mainly because he’s a profound, uncompromising and heroic individual...

Art / 2 Sep 2016

In the clink: Artangel encourages artists and writers to go Wilde at Reading Prison

The charitable arts organisation Artangel is nothing if not ambitious: locations for its site-specific installations have included a Peckham council flat, a shop on Oxford Street and most recently the Houses of Parliament. Now, for Reading’s 2016 Year of Culture...

Art / 24 May 2016

Grand statements: Ai Weiwei unveils new works at Athens’ Cycladic Art Museum

For Ai Weiwei, Instagram has been a friend and an enemy. The pros are that the platform has multiplied his international fame tenfold, turning him into one of the app’s biggest stars and also a defacto real time newswire, documenting...

Art / 23 Feb 2016

Then and now: four decades of Chinese art at ArtisTree, Hong Kong

A new exhibition of Chinese contemporary art at ArtisTree in Hong Kong offers a unique perspective of one of the country’s most extraordinary periods of history, from the end of the Cultural Revolution until 2010. The 80 works on show...

Art / 18 Jan 2016

Ai Weiwei transforms Paris’ Le Bon Marché into a visual playground

For Émile Zola, the emergence of department stores in the latter half of the 19th century Paris conjured up cathedrals of capitalism. For Ai Weiwei some 130 years later, Le Bon Marché has become a playground for exposing original, traditionally...

Art / 15 Dec 2015

Electric Objects commissions a digital art collection for its EO1 frame

For the past six months, Electric Objects — the company that makes the EO1, a three-in-one device that’s a high-definition screen, computer and app made specifically to display digital art — has commissioned over $50,000 of original art. The...

Art / 26 Nov 2015

Art or machinery? L’Art et la Machine opens in Lyon

Since artists are often seeking to interpret quotidian life around them, it should come as no surprise that they would have been drawn to the novelty of machines right from the start of the Industrial Revolution. A new exhibition at...

Watches & Jewellery / 17 Nov 2015

Wearable sculpture: Ai Weiwei’s gold jewellery offering at Elisabetta Cipriani gallery

After three years of trekking back and forth to Ai Weiwei’s studio in Beijing, armed with expensive bottles of Italian red wine, gallerist Elisabetta Cipriani finally persuaded the artist to work with her. It was not easy; at first he...