Ai Weiwei’s studio plays a role in the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Photograph by Ian Teh / Panos

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lives and works on the northeast edge of Beijing, in a studio complex that he designed for himself, a hive of eccentric creativity that one friend calls “a cross between a monastery and a crime family.” Airy buildings of brick and concrete surround a courtyard planted with grass and bamboo. Ai and his wife, Lu Qing, also an artist, inhabit one side of the yard, and several dozen assistants occupy the other. The place is organized in a spirit of radical openness: visitors roam unhindered, as does a geriatric cocker spaniel named Danny and a tribe of semi-feral cats that occasionally destroy Ai’s architectural models. Ai wanders among the buildings day and night, making it difficult to discern when he is working and when he is not, a distinction that has eroded further in recent years as the line between his art and his life has become indistinguishable.

One morning in March, Ai was alone in his dining room, eating a bowl of noodles at the head of a wooden table long enough for a medieval banquet. Sunlight streamed through a two-story bank of windows. On the wall to his left was a piece he made in 1993 by altering a government poster about the dangers of fireworks in such a way that a large bandaged hand was now flipping the viewer the bird. “My wife hates this one,” he said.

For Ai, however, the gesture resonates on the level of cosmology. The Museum of Modern Art owns a series of photographs of the Eiffel Tower, the White House, Tiananmen Square, and other places featuring his extended middle finger in the blurry foreground—a profane travel album, of sorts, which he titled “Study of Perspective.” In the Times, Holland Cotter wrote that the pictures “give a sense of the versatility of an artist whose role has been the stimulating, mold-breaking one of scholar-clown.”

At the age of fifty-three, Ai has a capacious belly, close-cropped hair, a meaty, expressive face, and a black-and-white beard that stretches to his chest. The full picture is imposing, until he reveals a sly and whimsical sense of humor. “His beard is his makeup,” his brother, Ai Dan, told me.

In his first two decades as an artist, Ai Weiwei (pronounced “Eye Way-way”) produced an eclectic, if erratic, stream of work: between gambling and trading antiques, he created installations, photographs, furniture, paintings, books, and films—the record of “a fitfully brilliant conceptualist,” as Peter Schjeldahl put it in this magazine. But in the past few years Ai’s unrelenting audacity and imagination have thrust him into a far more prominent role, as China’s leading innovator of provocation. This year, Ai will have fifteen group shows and five solo shows, including, in October, a coveted commission to fill the cathedral-like Turbine Hall, at Britain’s Tate Modern. In announcing the commission, the Tate’s director, Vicente Todolí, said that Ai’s installations rank “among the most socially engaged works of art being made today.”

At times, Ai can seem congenitally incapable of coöperation. He served as an artistic consultant to Herzog & De Meuron, the Swiss firm that designed China’s National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics, in Beijing. But, before the Games began, he disowned the event as a “fake smile” concealing China’s problems. When he is followed by plainclothes state security agents—as happens now and then—he likes to call the cops on them, setting off a Marx Brothers muddle of overlapping police agencies: “an absurdist novel gone bad,” as he puts it.

Recently, Ai was asked to create a piece that could fill the prominent site in Copenhagen usually occupied by Edvard Eriksen’s statue of the Little Mermaid, which was being loaned to Shanghai. Instead of replacing it with a statue, Ai decided to install a live closed-circuit video of the mermaid in her temporary home in China. The Danes thought the oversized surveillance camera that he designed was unattractive. “That’s our real life,” he said. “Everybody is under some kind of surveillance camera. It’s not beautiful.”

A few days before we talked, he had thrown his support behind a group of lesser-known Chinese artists who were protesting plans to demolish their studios in the name of development. Ai’s place was unaffected, but the artists had approached him for advice. He told them, “If you protest and fail to publish anything about it, you might as well have protested inside your own house.” Ai and the other artists staged a march down Chang’an Avenue, in the center of Beijing—an immensely symbolic gesture, because of the street’s proximity to Tiananmen Square. Police blocked them peacefully after a few hundred yards, but their bravado drew attention far beyond the art world. Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent legal activist, told me, “For twenty years, I have thought that protesting on Chang’an Avenue was absolutely off limits. He did it. And what could they do about it?”

Because of his overlapping identities as activist and artist, Ai has come to occupy a peculiar category of his own: a bankable global art star who runs the distinct risk of going to jail. “There are people who say that he is doing some kind of performance art,” Chen Danqing, a Chinese painter and social critic, told me. “But I think he long ago surpassed that definition. He is doing something more interesting, more ambiguous.” Chen added, “He wants to see how far an individual’s power can go.”

Ai Weiwei, whose father, Ai Qing, was among China’s foremost literary figures, occupies an awkward niche in the world of Chinese contemporary art: he has never been invited to hold a major exhibition in his own country, and he has tepid relations with his peers. “Galleries and magazines send him things, and he doesn’t even open them,” Zhao Zhao, a younger artist who works as one of Ai’s assistants, said. Chinese art has ballooned in value in recent years—driven by speculators and a generation of new Chinese tycoons—but Ai has remained largely on the fringes, and his work sells at prices that have never matched the heights of his reputation: a pair of giant ceramic basins of freshwater pearls sold for two hundred and nineteen thousand dollars at Sotheby’s last spring, and a three-legged wooden table, bent in the center so that one leg rests high against the wall, sold for a hundred and fifty-three thousand at Christie’s in February. Rather than sign on with a major dealer, who could assure him higher prices, he sells directly to collectors or through small galleries. “I don’t like the system,” he told me.

Ai spends much of his time on the road; he owns an apartment in Manhattan, in Chelsea. But when he is in China his orbit revolves tightly around his studio complex, which has acquired a role in the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of Andy Warhol’s Factory, as a magnet for creative people and patrons. As Philip Tinari, the editor of Leap, a Chinese art magazine, put it, “The ritual pilgrimage to the House of Ai” has become a “required stop on every foreign art-world itinerary.”

Ai and his wife have no children. He has an infant son from an extramarital relationship with a woman who worked on one of his films. They live nearby. He never intended to be a father. “She said, ‘Yes, I want to have the baby,’ ” he told me. “ I said, ‘I don’t normally think I should have a baby, but if you insist, of course, it’s your right, and I will bear the full responsibility as a father.’ ” Ai, who sees his son every day, is enjoying being wrong about fatherhood. “So-called human intelligence—we shouldn’t overestimate it,” he said. “When an accident happens, that can be nice.”