But first, why is Chinese government afraid of this artist?
This story begins now.
subtitle by @stevenliuyi
Who's afraid of Ai Weiwei?
To find him, you have to take a long ride to be outskirts of Beijing.
That's what I've been doing for the last few years.
As a freelance journalist and filmmaker,
I've been spending time with one of the most intriguing people in China.
His name is Ai Weiwei.
In recent years, he's emerged as China's first global art star,
with museums all accoss the world showcasing his monumental sculpture,
provocative photography, and board installations.
This year it was sunflower seeds.
One hundred million of them,
all made from porcelain, each one painted by hand,
filling the gaint Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern Museum.
A spectacle that reminded sun of Weiwei's artistic hero.
CHEN DANQING: In one of my article, I describe him as
"Beijing Andy Warhol."
Freedom is part of his nature.
He never fears anything.
He says whatever he wants.
Both artist and provocateur, there is no one in today's China
generating quite this kind of attention.
EVAN OSNOS: He's probably the most documented
Chinese public figure alive.
I mean there's never really been somebody in China
who has this combination of qualities.
Ten years ago, Ai Weiwei settled in this village outside Beijing.
Transforming it with galleries and studio spaces
that he designed himself.
When I first began visiting him,
I discovered that whatever his latest project,
Ai Weiwei was always obsessively documenting his daily life.
A few years back, he began posting it all online.
I showed up on his blog over 40 times.
I also found Weiwei the artist had been communist provocative
with his keyboard
to typing out a daily diatribe
against local corruption and government abuses.
HUNG HUANG: Weiwei's Internet has created probably
the biggest following he's ever had in his life.
I think he had people who are waiters, waitresses,
he has a lot of just average Chinese who are following him
because he was speaking their mind, he was speaking up for them.
AI WEIWEI: My political involvement is real personal,
if you don'ts speak out, you don't clear your mind, then who are you?
OSNOS: In some cases they call him "Ai Shen" online,
you know, "Holy Ai" or "Ai God".
You know, It's a very dangerous description in China.
Ai Weiwei's activism took a major public turn
as China prepare to host 2008 Olympics.
Weiwei has worked for the Swiss architecture firm
to design the signature building of the Game's
- the Bird's Nest Stadium.
But as the Game's approached, he [unclear],
calling the Olympics a "fake smile"
that China was putting on for the rest of the world.
OSNOS: The Olympis was presented to him and presented to the world
as an act of integration and openness,
they were being turned into a moment of celebration
of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party,
and he didn't want to be a part of that.
Ai Weiwei refused to attend the opening ceremony.
CHEN: Typical Chinese critis are mild in their words.
They never directly speak out against
the Communist Party of the government.
The would never directly curse this society.
But Ai Weiwei is different.
He will scold them.
He uses the most aggressive words
to point out society's dark side.
The government stayed carelessly quiet about Ai Weiwei.
So he continued to presue his art and activism.
Then one day, he wanted to tell me about his next big project.
AI: I have a story, I don't know if you're interested.
He said the new project would be a response to this,
the earthquake that devastated in Sichuan Province in May, 2008.
Some 70 thousand people were killed,
when poorly built government buildings and schools collapsed.
When he toward wreckage for himself,
(AI) Where is Yingxiu?
he was outraged at the lack of government responsibility.
Weiwei's eye was especically drown to the death of the school children,
whose name the government refused to release.
AI: This is absolutely crazy.
Come on, those people have names, you know.
So we checked every office possible,
none of them would give us single name of who's that.
Weiwei put out a call to action on his blog.
I think there was overwhelming response.
He gave cameras to volunteers to film in Sichuan,
as they begin what he called a "citizen investigation"
into the earthquake death.
VOLUNTEER: How many casualties were there?
CHILDREN: About 94.
Volunteers, young and old,
began haunting local officials for the children's names.
VOLUNTEER: How many at Xuankou Middle School?
OFFICIAL: 43 dead at Xuankou.
VOLUNTEER: 43?
VOLUNTEER: How many names do we have now?
Then more volunteers posted the names online.
VOLUNTEER: 4546.
OSNOS: The act of organizing people into a community in China
is in itself a very risky thing to do,
and he has dedicated himself to doing excatly that.
That puts him into a very small community of people.
In the end, Weiwei's team published more than five thousand names,
including the names of almost all the students.
The project drew international attention.
It also promote the government's Internent sensors
who are now paying more attention to Weiwei's blog.
AI: Maybe 20, 30 articles had been taken down
by Internet police or by different authorities.
I don't know what can they do than shut down my blog?
It was excatly the gorvenment did in May, 2009
as the anniversary of the earthquake approached.
And then they did something else.
INSERK YANG: So this is one of the cameras.
I think it probably looks at our entry, at the main door.
Inserk Yang, Weiwei's long-time artist assistant,
shows me the new surveillance cameras.
YANG: Over there, the corner's another camera.
Weiwei quickly turned his own camera back on the government,
getting the photos out on his twitter feed,
and incorporating the caremas into his artworks.
YANG: It's basiclly his life.
And he didn't make big difference between
art and architecture and political activities, you know,
it's just whether it interests him or it doesn't.
AI: Here, they're watching me.
And then there is the surveillance van periodically parked outside his home.
ALISON KLAYMAN: Is he sleeping in there?
AI: Yeah, ... whole night.
OSNOS: He didn't in anyway abide by the implicit rules of that relationship,
which is that you're supposed to pretend that
you don't know you're being followed and
they're supposed to pretend they are not following you.
AI: Everyboy said China changed a lot,
to me it doesn't change in certain sense and
that's what I've valued most, you know,
such as freedom of speech, and, you know,
the liberation of the mind, and, you know, ... never change.
Weiwei didn't give up his earthquake project.
In the summer of 2009, he had back to Sichuan Province
to support a local earthquake activist
who'd be jailed by the government.
Weiwei spread the word and mass of his followers
made the trip to Sichuan to attend the man's trial.
They gathered at a hotel the night before
Weiwei is going to show up in court.
That's when local officials found out.
Weiwei's friend, the rock musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou,
was in the room next door.
ZUOXIAO ZUZHOU: At about 3 o'clock, we heard
bang, bang, bang, bang.
AI: Who is there?
POLICE: Police.
AI: What police?
POLICE: From the local station.
AI: Why are local cops knocking on doors at this hour?
ZUOXIAO: He turned on a small audio recorder.
He knew that something big was going to happen.
AI: You're hitting me?
You brought all these cops to beat me?
POLICE: Don't speak without evidence.
AI: How did my clothes get torn?
POLICE: You did it yourself.
Weiwei had been hit in the head by the police,
but they blamed him for his own injures.
AI: I tore my own clothes and beat myself?
POLICE: Right.
In the hotel elevator, surounded by police,
Weiwei snaped this photo, then he tweeted it
to his online followers who got around the world.
CHEN: Everyone was curious why this guy could be
critical, but nothing bad happened to him.
So logically he was finally beatn up by the police.
That's what everyone was worried about.
Or expecting ... one day it's going to happen.
Then It happened.
A month later, Weiwei opened a major new exhibition in Munich.
It was his biggest sole show yet, featuring many signature works.
But just before the opening, Weiwei began complaining of a headache.
He was rushed to the hospital.
In emergency surgery, doctors found bleeding in his brain,
presumably from the beating in the hotel room.
ZUOXIAO: For Ai Weiwei, an artist who is more famous
than Andy Warhol was in his lifetime,
he doesn't need to do these kinds of things.
These things are actually very dangerous.
In his hospital recovery room,
Weiwei sent a message to the police back in China
then he uploaded the photos for his followers.
AI: Some photos right moment completely change the history.
To tell the truth, no matter big truth or small truth
is always a ... should be justified.
The show in Munich went on.
It was capped by a gaint installation
covering the museum's facade with children's backpacks
just like the one Weiwei has seen in Sichuan.
The backpacks spelled out a sentence talked to him
by the mother of an earthquake victim.
It read, simply,
"She lived happily on this earth for seven years."
CHEN: He is very brilliant.
He can take his own response and
very naturally turn it into art.
Who else in contemporary art does this?
Later, back home in Beijing,
Weiwei's own mother would deal with the news of his son's beating.
GAO YING(AI'S MOTHER):This is your brain?
AI: Yes.
KLAYMAN: How do you feel when you see
so many articles about your son?
GAO: I feel very proud.
Because he speaks out for the average citizen.
He grew up in the countryside.
Ai weiwei was with us through a long and difficult peroid.
A very bitter time.
When Ai Weiwei was growing up, his father, Ai Qing,
had been branded a class enemy,
and the family was exiled to the western China.
There, Weiwei watched his father,
one of the country's most famous poets,
reduced to clean toilets during the Cultural Revolution.
Weiwei also saw his father maintain his spirit of resistance.
A family now Weiwei's mother worried about his son.
GAO: Every night I can't sleep.
AI: What are you doing there's no need to..
GAO: I'm worried they'll rough you up.
If they want to get me, they will...
we can't control that.
Those people...
HUNG: Most of the other Chinese artists I know have gone on
to having very nice houses, fancy cars,
and I don't think they will do anything to damage their lifestyle.
Weiwei would put his life on the line
for something that he believes it.
After almost a year and half,
Weiwei still wouldn't drop his earthquake campaign.
In April 2010, he went back to confront the police in Sichuan
who had beaten him in his hotel room.
This time he didn't just bring a lawyer,
he brought his personal photographer Zhaozhao, me,
two Chinese filmmakers, a New Yorker reporter,
and several assistants to post live to twitter.
AI: I've come to file a complaint about my injury.
OSNOS: To a reasonable viewer who walked in and didn't know what's going on,
he would haved assumed it was some kind of reality show.
OSNOS: Are you expecting a successful result?
AI: The result, I don't think so.
OSNOS: I asked him why he bothers to go through this process,
he was wasting basically the whole afternoon
on a process that he knew was ultimately doomed.
And he said, "Well, you can'ts just see that system is flawed,
you have to work through the system and
show it in all its detail, that's the only way
you can ultimately make a critique."
Over the course of the afternoon,
he'd been twittering about the fact he was gonna
have dinner that night at a Laoma Tihua restaurant,
which is a place that specializes in a certain type of pig's trotter.
And as soon as we got to the restaurant,
it was this weird sensation where all sudden these people
who had been standing on the sidewalk,
milling around, doing things,
turned out to be people who that came to have dinner with him.
And everyboy there knew that by simply eating dinner there
was an act of defiance.
TWITTER FAN: Teacher Ai?
AI: Yes.
TWITTER FAN: I follow you on Twitter.
AI: Have a seat...
TWITTER FAN: I'm not staying, I just
wanted to catch a glimpse.
Twitter Fan.
AI: Thank you.
[unclear] city police showed up and asked Weiwei
to move the party indoors.
AI: We're almost done eating.
But he outmaneuvered them.
We think your food here in Chengdu is
especially tasty when eaten outside.
We came all the way from Beijing.
Then when the police started filming us,
Weiwei sent his own photographer Zhaozhao to record them.
CHEN: Weiwei has a little hooligan inside of him.
So he knows how to deal with other hooligans.
Because the Communist Party as just hooligans, really.
So you have to turn yourself into a hooligan as well.
Over the months that followed,
there would be more encounters.
Weiwei was briefly put under a home arrest.
And at the end of last year,
he was start trying to leave the country.
Then in January, this happened.
Weiwei's new studio complex in Shanghai was bulldozed by the government.
The studio had taken Weiwei two years to build.
His response was to show the demolition live online.
Then he declared one of his most powerful artworks ever.
KLAYMAN: Do you ever exam yourslef to say
why you are so fearless compare to other people?
AI: I was so fearful, that's not fearless.
I'm more fearful then other people, maybe.
Then I act more brave because I know the danger's really there.
If you don't act, the danger become stronger.