Description

The artist and activist Ai Weiwei is famous worldwide. Through his art, he builds bridges and has spent his life fighting to create, maintain, and expand axes of communication. Ai Weiwei's works are found in the public spaces of countless countries, with renowned museums vying for his artifacts. But who is the person behind the international label "Ai Weiwei," and what motivates his restless creativity? Born in 1957 as the son of the Chinese poet and regime critic Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei grew up in Northeast China and Xinjiang due to his father's forced exile, later living in the USA. In 2011, he was was secretly detained for 81 days and hindered from leaving China. Shaped by painful experiences along the way, Ai Weiwei early on felt like a stranger. This existential sense of alienation, however, transforms through his art into something universal. It is no coincidence that his philosophical reflections in the book specifically recall the autumn of 2015, the turning point in Germany. Ai Weiwei experienced those weeks in Berlin before deciding to visit refugee camps around the globe. His memories are captured in this book, his "Manifesto Without Borders," serving as a confession beyond l'art pour l'art and the technocratic language of politicians: in an urgent, sometimes unsettling, but always attentive manner, this book conveys what that could mean: an appeal for peaceful communication, an act of friendly humanity, a deep commitment to our time.