08 ISSUE VIII
OCTOBER 2025
OCTOBER 2025
Accidental Theorist: ai weiwei
What would an Ai Weiwei theory of international affairs look like?
By Sean Jacobs
In April 2025, the Chinese artist Ai Wewei was asked by a New York Times reporter: “Do you consider yourself first an artist, a social critic or a political activist?” His answer: “I like to have labels. To be an ‘artist’ will not offend me. I prefer to be a critic or some kind of historical thinker or social activist.”
Ai Weiwei, “Illumination” (2019). Lego bricks on baseplates, mounted on four aluminum panels, 120 3/4 x 151 1/8 inches. (Photo courtesy of Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum).
For nearly forty years, Weiwei — born in 1957, the son of a poet who was sent to a labor camp during Mao’s Cultural Revolution — has become known for making art that confronts the Chinese government. After studying film in Beijing in the late 1970s and later studying art and design in the United States, including a brief time at Parsons School of Design, Weiwei returned to China in 1993 and soon began creating politically outspoken work.
Much of his art reworks traditional Chinese objects to connect the country’s past with its present, marked by mass production, consumerism, and rapid modernization. In one piece, he painted the Coca-Cola logo on an ancient urn (“Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo,” 1994); in another, he covered 3,000-year-old vases with bright industrial paint (“Colored Vases,” 2007–2010). His work has tackled many issues — from government corruption and the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan school collapse, to censorship, propaganda, and the impact of capitalism on Chinese culture.
At times, this came at great personal cost: while in custody in 2009, Weiwei was arrested and sustained an injury at the hands of Chinese police that required emergency brain surgery in Germany. In 2015, after the government returned his passport, he left China for further notice, first relocating to Germany, then to the UK, and settling in Portugal.
Weiwei has been widely celebrated in the West for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2011, ARTREVIEW named him the most powerful artist in the world. But not everyone has been convinced. In 2013, at the height of his fame, a critic in THE NEW REPUBLIC called him a “wonderful dissident [but] terrible artist.” Progressive critics have also questioned the political clarity of his work, arguing that it lacks a clear vision for China's future; ambiguous enough to be read as both a critique of, and a celebration (“high bourgeois kitsch”) of, global capitalism, and that he is unrealistic about the pace of change to more openness in China.
As Weiwei spent more time outside China, he increasingly turned his attention to the contradictions and failures of the global political order and Euro-American power. In his “Study of Perspective” photographs (between 1995 and 2003), he extended his signature gesture — raising his middle finger — toward Western landmarks such as the White House, the German Reichstag, the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa, and even, later (2014), creating an app that allowed users to insert the gesture into their own images. His night-vision-style “Last U.S. Soldier Leaving Afghanistan” (2022), composed of Lego pieces, offered a biting critique of the transient nature of American imperialism and its military machinery.
Unsurprisingly, the same Western journalists and institutions that had eagerly embraced his critiques of China were far less receptive when he began exposing their own hypocrisies — from positions on Palestine to censorship practices (he is a vocal supporter of Julian Assange), and xenophobic policies.
In 2024, Ai Weiwei told AL JAZEERA ENGLISH that while filming HUMAN FLOW, his film about the refugee crisis, in 2016, he traveled to Gaza after finally securing Israeli military permission. There, he witnessed people struggling to survive amid relentless violence, conditions he found almost unimaginable—even after growing up under Chinese authoritarianism. “The suppression and humiliation were beyond my previous imagination … The stark reality of such a confinement in the 21st century left me utterly astonished.”
In that same interview, Weiwei, who rejects Chinese nationalism while traveling with a Chinese passport, added that his fluid national identity grants him freedom from taking sides and allows independent judgment. However, it also hinders communication due to the gap between individual experience and collective social norms.
So, after all that, how to imagine Ai Weiwei as an international relations theorist? Most likely, he’d propose resisting state power at all costs, emphasize activism and media as tools of dissent, and challenge the idea that human rights belong only to the West. He would likely distrust state-centered views of global politics, especially China’s claim to speak for the “Third World” or “Global South.” Above all, he would see cultural and symbolic acts of resistance as vital to global political change.
Sean Jacobs is a professor and director of the Graduate Program in International affairs at The New School.