Ai Weiwei interview: Everyday objects that reveal the truth

One of Ai’s most famous pieces, a series of photographs titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn(1995), depicts the artist seemingly destroying a 2,000-year-old artefact. The images solidified Ai as the prolific iconoclast we know today. “As part of humanity, artists construct and deconstruct to create new definitions, constantly scrutinising and evaluating our value system and the possibilities of our existence,” Ai tells  BBC Culture. “This is how I always approach problems, by standing on the opposite side of the issue, or even the opposite side of myself. I believe this measure is the most trustworthy one.”

How have your personal experiences informed your work? 

To put it simply, everything I have done in the past, what I am doing now, and what I will do in the future is all directed towards one question: “who am I?” It’s common knowledge that our understanding of ourselves is closely tied to our life experiences, memories, and how we respond to everyday situations. This can be a struggle since our self-perception is not something that can be easily detached from reality and memories.

It was rather late when I fully realised this. For over 50 years before 2011, I was very confused. On 3 April 2011, I was secretly detained. It was a very important moment for me because this experience forced me to re-evaluate my situation, where I came from, and who I truly was. After 81 days in secret detention, I was surprisingly released. It was then that I realised I needed to understand what happened in the past, why my father, a poet, was exiled, and how my time with him had influenced me.