Chinese-born Honorary Academician Ai Weiwei is renowned for being a vocal activist and commentator on human rights. His work explores social and political issues as well as his experience of having been detained for 81 days by the Chinese authorities in 2011. Making site-specific public installations, often on a vast scale, as well as photographs, sculpture, poetry and film, Ai Weiwei often borrows traditional Chinese art forms, reinventing them to make his impactful and sometimes shocking work.  

Ai Weiwei has been making porcelain works since 1977, continuing the historical tradition of storytelling through pottery which was popular in ancient Greece and during the Yuan and Ming dynasties in China. This set of four vases is painted with images of the Syrian civil war and the journeys of refugees in a characteristically Chinese palette. The artist says that he ‘was inspired by photographs and film footage taken in refugee camps, as well as images from traditional Greek and Chinese mythology, European history and contemporary events’. Although elements of the decorative detailing on the surface are reminiscent of traditional vases, the artist’s figures, wearing life-jackets, hooded sweatshirts and driving tanks, place the works firmly in the troubling context of contemporary conflict and displacement of peoples.

Ai Weiwei has exhibited his work all over the world. In 2010 at Tate Modern, London, he displayed 100 million handmade and painted porcelain sunflower seeds. Recent exhibitions include Evidence at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Ai Weiwei: According to What? at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock UK, and @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz in San Francisco. A major exhibition of his work, ‘Ai Weiwei’, a retrospective exhibition, was presented by the Royal Academy in 2015.He was elected an Honorary Academician in 2011 and in the same year was Time Magazine ‘Person of the Year’. He lives and works in Cambridge.