For part of the year, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei works in a cavernous 30,000-square-foot studio on the underground levels of a former 19th-century brewery in Berlin. Its triple-height vaulted cellars, which Ai, a self-taught architect, renovated himself after leaving his native China in 2015, are now pristine and well-lit, but when he first visited the long-abandoned subterranean space, it was “completely dark,” he says, “like an underworld.” In that way, it recalls the underground home where the artist lived for five years as a child, a place he calls “the black hole”: a bare shelter on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert in the remote Xinjiang region, one of the sites where Ai’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, was exiled following China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in the […]
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