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For part of the year, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei works in a cavernous 30,000-square-foot studio on the underground levels of a former 19th-century brewery in Berlin. Its triple-height vaulted cellars, which Ai, a self-taught architect, renovated himself after leaving his native China in 2015, are now pristine and well-lit, but when he first visited the long-abandoned subterranean space, it was “completely dark,” he says, “like an underworld.” In that way, it recalls the underground home where the artist lived for five years as a child, a place he calls “the black hole”: a bare shelter on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert in the remote Xinjiang region, one of the sites where Ai’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, was exiled following China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s.
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On a recent visit to his Berlin studio, I followed Ai, 67, down a narrow staircase into an austere, windowless alcove. Its concrete floor was scattered with twisted steel rods from the installation work “Rebar,” which Ai made in China between 2008 and 2012, sourcing the metal from school buildings flattened by the devastating Sichuan earthquake. “Rebar” and similar works made in response to the earthquake critique the government’s corrupt construction regulations and lack of transparency in the tragedy’s aftermath.
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Accumulation — the head-spinning accrual of hundreds, thousands or millions of identical objects — is fundamental to Ai’s interventions, which often comment on both collective action and consumer culture. Sometimes he finds items that speak directly to a predetermined theme or event, as with his headline-making installation of discarded refugee life jackets affixed to the facade of Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 2016.
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My hobby is playing in the casino. It’s not easy to survive because the casinos are designed to rob you. I like the game blackjack, which is almost impossible. I sit at the table, any table near the door, and I just start to play.
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What’s the last thing that made you cry? The last time I remember crying was when I was detained [by Chinese authorities in 2011]. The interrogator told me, “With your crime, you have to be sentenced to over 10 years. When you come out, your son will never recognize you.”
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I keep buying Legos because I keep making work with them. One work can consist of 600,000 pieces, [like my 2022 reconstruction] of Monet’s “Water Lilies.” We have millions of Legos. That’s out of necessity.
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There’s only one thing I bulk buy out of personal interest — jade. It’s very, very rare and expensive. I have a few thousand pieces of ancient Chinese jade. Any extra money I can spend, I spend on jade. I want to destroy the money from this stupid art I’m making. I don’t think I deserve to sell any of my artworks. So I use the money to protect these works from earlier civilizations.
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Very soon, I’ll pass away. My family doesn’t need the jade collection. Maybe nobody needs it. That’s the sad thing about it. Only a few people care. I don’t know where to put it. Maybe I should cast it into a huge concrete block, buried underground.
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My worst habit is that I’m too clean. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink alcohol.
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I love Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” [a sculptural piece between two panes of glass, officially titled “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-23)]. The beauty of it is that everyone who looks at it will see something different because it’s transparent. It took him about eight years to make. And then the glass cracked. People said, “Oh my God, it’s cracked!” But he loved the cracks.
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I consider my life as one work. And I don’t regret it because I have to finish the work before I regret. Though very soon, I will finish this work.
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