Episode Details

Before he was a global symbol of dissent, Ai Weiwei was a professional card player working Atlantic City blackjack tables in the late 1980s. This episode follows how that analytical, risk-taking mindset carried over into a lifetime of confronting authority. We begin with his birth in Beijing in 1957, the denunciation of his father, a revered poet, and 16 years of family exile in Xinjiang living in dugouts, before his 1981 move to New York, dropping out of Parsons, drawing street portraits, and absorbing the ready-made ideas of Duchamp and Warhol.

Returning to China in 1993, he turned to blogging and then to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where his citizen investigation crowdsourced 5,385 names of children killed in poorly built schools. We cover the police beating that led to emergency brain surgery in Germany, the demolition of his Shanghai studio and the river crab feast that mocked official calls for harmony, his 81 days in secret detention in 2011, and the tax fine used to reframe him as a criminal. The conversation then turns to the works that translated that pressure into objects, from the 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds to a marble surveillance camera, and to his later years in Europe criticizing Western institutions with equal force.

• How the anti-rightist purges shaped his belief that individual fate is tied to political winds
• The Tofu Dreg schools and building a parallel civic infrastructure to count the dead
• Why authoritarian states use zoning and tax law instead of political charges
• Fourteen thousand refugee life jackets on a Berlin concert hall and the pivot to global displacement
• His argument that Western self-censorship mirrors the environment he fled