Ai Weiwei at SAM: Passion, playfulness, and protest on parade

By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

Ai Weiwei (Photo credit: Elizabeth Russell)

He’s the most famous, and most controversial, Chinese artist of his era. He’s been imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese government, finally forced into exile. 

But he’s also revitalized Chinese art with his constant currents of passion, humor, and surprise. So it isn’t terribly surprising that Ai Weiwei—conceptual artist, videomaker, and activist—should be honored by the Seattle Art Museum (SAM).

The “Ai, Rebel” exhibit marks the first time, in SAM’s 92-year history, that the museum showcased one artist on all three of its campuses: the main campus in downtown Seattle, the Seattle Asian Art Museum at Volunteer Park, and the Olympic Sculpture Park at the Central Waterfront.

Dr. Ping Foong, SAM’s curator of Chinese art since 2016, explained that an Ai Weiwei exhibit had been “my hope from the very beginning, even though the specifics only unfolded by mid-year in 2024. 

“Engaging all three locations thematically has been discussed before, but to show one artist is significantly more ambitious.”

She traveled to Berlin to meet with the artist for the first time, in the summer of 2024, “bringing my PowerPoints and maps to show him my exhibition concept for the three sites. It was important to me that my approach rang true to him.”

The exhibit comes at a time when recent political developments form disconcerting parallels to Ai Weiwei’s struggles with the Chinese government. The Trump administration, already committed to the wide-scale detention of immigrants to the U.S., is opening more detention camps in Texas, to facilitate this more aggressive policy—even as the camps draw increasing criticism for poor conditions and oversight. 

Trump’s also vastly increased raids by the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), targeting migrant families. Free speech seems imperiled, as ICE targets foreign students who engage in protest, most notably at New York state’s Columbia University. Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident of the U.S. and a leader of pro-Palestinian protests, was arrested by ICE and scheduled for deportation. When news emerged that Khalil was a legal resident of the U,S,, ICE pivoted to claiming they had the right to revoke his green card. Khalil remains under detainment in a Louisiana detention center, separated from his pregnant wife, and still not charged with any crime.

The SAM campus installation includes Ai Weiwei’s recreation of the jail cell he inhabited for 81 days after the Chinese authorities detained him on charges of economic crimes. It’s a fairly spacious cell—something the writers going through it at the press preview, noted to themselves with a few chuckles. 

But the recreation doesn’t include the long stretches Ai Weiwei spent handcuffed to a chair. Guards watched him around the clock, and interrogated him for long stretches, paying no mind to his long history of medical issues, including diabetes, hypertension, and a 2009 cerebral hemorrhage suffered after a police beating.

Ai Weiwei was left wondering if he’d ever see the outside world, or his loved ones, again. Beware, the cell seems to warn. This man’s fate could be somebody else’s fate, anytime, anywhere.

The approaches to the three different SAM sites vary strategically. Explained Dr. Foong, “My curatorial concept is to have a historical presentation downtown—a retrospective—and offer different but complementary experiences at our other sites. The Seattle Asian Art Museum show is experiential, an immersive setting for a large LEGO work, and the Olympic Sculpture Park presentation offers engaging public art that everyone can experience.”

More specifically, the downtown SAM houses some of the artist’s most famous and controversial works, from the photo triptych “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” from 1995, to “Snake Ceiling”—a huge snake assembled from 857 cloth backpacks, to bicycles and stools assembled together in bold new patterns which emphasize the artistic value of everyday objects, but negate the everyday uses they were meant for.

Photo credit: Elizabeth Russell

Photo credit: Elizabeth Russell

Photo credit: Elizabeth Russell

At the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the focus is on “Water Lilies” from 2022. The original “Water Lilies” image—from Claude Monet, the world-famous impressionist who worked from the 19th to early 20th century—gets reworked into a LEGO picture. 

Ai Weiwei’s worked with LEGO many times, including some pieces shown elsewhere in the exhibit, but the reimagined “Water Lilies” is his largest work in that medium to date. It spans almost 50 feet, and required the meticulous assemblage of 650,000 plastic LEGO blocks.

For the Olympic Sculpture Park, the artist and Dr. Foong picked “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads,” a grouping of 12 sculptures, one for each sign in the Chinese zodiac cycle. The sculptures, standing 10 feet tall and weighing over 1,500 pounds each, mark Ai Weiwei’s resurrection of zodiac sculptures which originally graced a Qing dynasty imperial fountain.

Dr. Foong mentioned that putting the whole exhibit together required “muscles” from the SAM staff, and while some of these “muscles” were mental and logistical, others were quite literally physical.

“In one respect, I meant muscles, literally! Many pieces are huge, and many very, very heavy. The entire show required great physicality to meet the challenge of putting it all up in time. We also developed institutional muscles in terms of pulling off an ambitious, three-site exhibition across all of our departments, that brought together the entire museum.”

“Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei” runs through Sept. 7, 2025, at the Seattle Art Museum main campus, Seattle Asian Art Museum, and Olympic Sculpture Park. For tickets, hours, and more information, visit https://seattleartmuseum.org/whats-on/exhibitions/ai-weiwei.