Ai Weiwei's Largest U.S. Retrospective to Land in 2025

Ai Weiwei b. 1957, China Follow +

Ai Weiwei, the renowned artist and vocal government critic, will open his first U.S. retrospective in a decade at Seattle Art Museum next year.

Organised by Foong Ping, curator of Chinese art at the museum, Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei will take place from 12 March to 7 September 2025.

It will cover the artist’s production over four decades through more than 100 works.

At the time of his last U.S. retrospective at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. in 2012, Ai was confined to China, stripped of his passport and under house arrest, following his 81-day detainment by the Chinese military police in 2011.

The artist relocated to Portugal in 2023, building a studio near Lisbon. It is modelled after his former studio in Shanghai, which was demolished by authorities the year of his arrest.

Born in 1957, Ai grew up under Mao. He was among the first generation of Chinese artists to study overseas. In 1981, he moved to New York, where he studied with Sean Scully and became acquainted with the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

Returning to China in 1993, Ai became dispirited at the country’s lack of progress, the presiding censorship, and active government destruction of Chinese art and architecture.

‘From my perspective, every human is a product of their unique personal journey. We hold the potential to transcend and elevate it to align with our comprehension of life, aesthetics, and ethics,’ Ai told Ocula Magazine.

His critiques of authoritarian governments have ranged from smashing a Han dynasty urn to investigating the Chinese government’s involvement in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and raising the middle finger to institutional power, from The White House to Tiananmen Square.

Iconic works on view in Seattle will include the Sunflower Seeds that filled Tate Modern‘s Turbine Hall in 2010, with more than 100 million sunflower seeds handcrafted by Chinese artisans, the artist’s zodiac heads meditating on the relationship between China and the West, and sculptures that have yet to be exhibited in the U.S. —[O]

Main image: Ai Weiwei. Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio. Photo: Gao Yuan.