Ai Weiwei

Today Ai Weiwei enjoys a reputation far beyond the art world. He is known world-wide as a champion for the right to free expression who battles the repressive forces in his native China -- which earned him an 81-day detention by the Chinese police in 2011. To understand his position, which comes from a deep repect for cultural traditions as much as from iconoclastic tendencies of Western modernism, one needs to know the whole story behind his work. This book was made in close collaboration with Ai to trace the tale of his life and art, starting from his role in the first blossoming of a Chinese avant-garde in the late 1970s... Ai's own voice likewise carries this book in statements drawn from interviews conducted for the occasion, and he has contributed to the design with traditional paper cuts and by wrapping the edition in silk cloth. So here is the complete package - both the art and the activism on 700 copiously illustrated pages. Limited edition of 1,000 copies.