With more than three decades of a career as an artist, curator, architect and political activist, Ai Weiwei is, without a doubt, the emperor of the artistic avant-garde movements of the XXI century, just like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol in the XX century. His permanent and international presence in museums, biennials, and art galleries, as well as his hectic political activism, which in 2011 led him to be imprisoned in a Chinese jail, places him in the role of the most famous artist in the world.

Through an aesthetic and political gesture of the reinterpretation of the past in the present, Weiwei’s direct, bold, shocking, playful, and subversive art intertwines chinese traditions with western modernity. Ai Weiwei connects ancient stories and historical scenarios with political realities, aesthetics, and materials of the present.

His work creates a fascinating hybrid between China and the Western World by intervening in time with diverse materials. For example, the ceramics from the million seeds produced by 1600 women in the city of Jingdezhen that compose Sunflower Seeds (2010), the metal bars rescued from the schools of the province of Sichuan that collapsed in the earthquake of 2008 and make up part of his work Straight (2008- 2012) and the wood from the nearly 6000 stools gathered from towns of northern China that make the installation Stools (2013).