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.

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

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.”

Ai walked across the studio’s snow-streaked courtyard to the office, where half a dozen young Chinese and foreign assistants were busy at computers. Several were working on what Ai calls his “Citizens’ Investigation” of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, an attempt to document how and why so many children died in poorly constructed schools. Eighty pieces of paper were plastered to one of the office walls—a spreadsheet containing thousands of names and birthdates. Each day, Ai’s office posts to Twitter a list of the students who were born on that day and died in the earthquake. “Today, there are seventeen,” Ai said. “The most of any day yet.”

He slumped into a chair in front of a computer and began to type. Since he discovered Twitter, last spring, he has become one of China’s most active users, with about thirty-six thousand followers. Twitter is blocked in China by the authorities, but it can be reached by signing on through a third-party server overseas, a simple technical step that has enabled Twitter to become a popular tool of communication in China. Ai usually spends at least eight hours a day on Twitter, and I asked him how that had affected the time he devotes to his art. “I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art,” he said. “Those other works might be collectible—something you can hang on the wall—but that’s just a conventional perspective. We shouldn’t do things a certain way just because Rembrandt did it that way. If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.”

Unsurprisingly, Ai has come under greater government scrutiny of late. He wrote a popular blog for four years, until last spring, when censors blocked it. A few months later, he discovered that his Gmail accounts had been hacked and the settings altered to forward his messages to an unfamiliar address. Ai says that his bank has received official inquiries to review his finances, and, last June, a pair of surveillance cameras appeared on utility poles outside his front gate, focussed on the traffic going in and out—notwithstanding the redundancy of monitoring somebody who already broadcasts the minutiae of his life. When he tries to make DVDs of his documentaries, duplicating services worry that they will be punished for associating with him. “Not even the porno producers will do it,” Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a rock musician who works on Ai’s media productions, told me.

Ai stood up from the keyboard and announced that it was time to go to the courthouse. Over the past year, his office has sent more than a hundred and fifty letters to government agencies seeking information about earthquake victims and construction problems, under the Freedom of Government Information Law. He has yet to receive a substantive response. Today, he was going to file suit against the Ministry of Civil Affairs, for not responding to his requests. He slid into the passenger seat of a small black sedan, with a driver and a woman named Liu Yanping, who oversees the letter-writing campaign. “According to the policy, they have to respond within fifteen working days,” she said, clutching a sheaf of papers on her lap. I asked Liu if she was a lawyer and she laughed. “For a long time, I was at home raising my child,” she said. “On his blog, Ai Weiwei asked for volunteers, so I wrote him an e-mail. The work looked interesting, and I was curious.” It’s now her full-time job. (Last summer, after she publicized the trial of Tan Zuoren, an earthquake activist, she spent two days in police custody in Sichuan, for “disturbing the social order.”)

We reached the Second Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing, a tall stone-gray tower, with a grand arched entry and a modest office at the back, on the ground floor, for processing new cases. We passed through a metal detector, where two young men in guards’ uniforms were engrossed in a comic book. There was a line of bank-teller-style windows, and, at the one closest to us, a tiny old woman in a pink padded jacket was bellowing into a rectangular opening in the glass. “How could the other side win without any evidence?” she shouted. “Did they bribe the head of the court?” On the opposite side of the glass, two women in uniform were listening with resigned expressions suggesting that she had been at it for a while.

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Ai and Liu lined up in front of window No. 1 and, when it was their turn, slid the papers through the opening to a middle-aged man in a tan blazer. He looked glassy-eyed and exhausted. He read the papers carefully and identified a problem: “You say that you need the Ministry of Civil Affairs to make this information public, but why are you taking an interest in this?”

Ai leaned over to speak into the opening in the window. “Actually, according to the policy,” he said, “everyone has a right to ask for this information—not that you have to agree.” After some back and forth, Ai and Liu consented to write out a description of their goals, and they found seats in a waiting area full of people holding similar sheaves of paper. “They don’t want to accept this,” Ai said, “because, once it is in the legal pipeline, they have to make some kind of judgment.” By the time Ai and Liu reached the window again, an hour had passed. Now they learned that they were using the wrong color ink. Written materials had to be in black, and they had used blue. They sat down again to rewrite them. They got in line again.

“Kafka’s castle,” Ai said to nobody in particular. Two hours stretched into three, and I asked him why he was bothering with this if he did not expect a response. “I want to prove that the system is not working,” he said. “You can’t simply say that the system is not working. You have to work through it.” Twenty minutes before closing time, the man behind the glass finally accepted the filing, and Ai and Liu, satisfied, turned to leave. The old woman was still yelling.

Ai Weiwei always sensed that he was born into the wrong family—or, at least, an inauspicious one. His father, Ai Qing, who trained as a painter, moved to Paris in 1929, at the age of nineteen, to study. There he discovered the realism of Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev, who, as he later put it, “pulled away the curtain on the realities of society for me.” His greatest influence, however, was the Belgian modernist poet Émile Verhaeren, whose descriptions of the squalid underside of European cities focussed Ai Qing’s attention on corruption and injustice in his homeland. He returned to China in 1932, but his involvement in leftist circles drew the suspicion of the Nationalist Party and he was imprisoned. Unable to paint in jail, he dedicated himself to poetry and, after his release, joined the Communist Party, where he earned a reputation for clear, accessible verse imbued with the spirit of the revolution. He was especially impressed with Chairman Mao, for whom he wrote a poem of praise that began, “Wherever Mao Zedong appears / thunderous applause erupts.” In 1956, when he was forty-six, he married for a third time, and the following year his wife, Gao Ying, a young staff member of the writers’ association, had a son.

At the time, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, one of Mao’s purges of intellectuals, was gathering force, and Ai Qing’s devotion to the Party was called into question. He had written a fable, “The Gardener’s Dream,’’ that highlighted the need to permit a broader range of creative opinions. In it, a gardener who cultivates only Chinese roses realizes that he is “causing discontent among all the other types of flowers.” A fellow-poet, Feng Zhi, attacked Ai Qing, saying that he had fallen “into the quagmire of reactionary formalism.”

Ai Qing was stripped of his titles and ejected from the writers’ association. At night, he would bang his head against the wall and demand, “Do you think I am against the Party?” Meanwhile, Gao Ying recalled in a memoir, “Ai Qing and I,” published in 2007, she and her husband had to name their infant son. The father simply opened the dictionary and dropped his finger onto a character: 威, pronounced “wei,” which means “power.” The irony was too great, given the circumstances, so he altered the tone slightly to make it into a different “wei,” 未, which means “not yet.” Their son thus became “Not yet, not yet.”

The family was sent to Manchuria and then to the remote western region of Xinjiang, where Ai Qing was assigned the job of cleaning public toilets, thirteen a day. For extra food, the family collected the severed hooves of sheep discarded by butchers, and piglets that had frozen to death. When the Cultural Revolution began, things worsened. Ai Qing’s tormentors poured ink on his face, and children threw stones at him. He and his family were sent to an area known as Little Siberia, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, where they had to live in an underground cavern that had been used as a birthing place for farm animals. They were there for five years.

Ai Weiwei prefers not to talk about his father. He seems to know that the narrative is ripe for manipulation into a cliché, and their relationship was remote. His deepest impressions were of watching his father clean the toilets. “That period in his life was the absolute bottom, the most painful,” Ai Weiwei said. “He attempted suicide several times.”

As a child, Ai Weiwei distracted himself by working with his hands, making ice skates and gunpowder. He had a weakness for mischief and playground politics that led his father to nickname him Cao Cao, after a famously cunning ancient Chinese statesman. Ai’s parents could not shield their sons from what Ai Dan called “the pressure and humiliation and hopelessness.” Speaking of his brother, he said, “He was a sensitive, fragile child, so he saw and heard more than other people.”

Ai Dan, who is five years younger than Weiwei, lives simply, in a courtyard-house that he shares with their mother. He is a writer, though I sensed the weight of Ai Qing’s legacy: Ai Dan hasn’t finished a piece of writing in years. “The Chinese language is too complicated,” he said, with a weak smile. Ai Dan told me that their father never gave up his faith in the Party, and I asked how he had rationalized his suffering. “He believed that those at fault were a few and that those who suffered were many,” he replied. “Intellectuals like him believed that their fate was no different from the fate of the nation.”

By the time Ai Qing and his family were allowed to return to Beijing, in 1976, many readers had assumed that he was dead. He resumed writing, and he never lost his instinct for resistance. When student demonstrators filled Tiananmen Square in 1989, Ai Qing, then seventy-nine and in a wheelchair, asked to be pushed out to the square. With other intellectuals, he signed a statement declaring, “Freedom, democracy, and the rule of law are not things that will someday simply be granted to the people from above. All truth-seeking freedom-loving people must strive to achieve what the constitution promises.” He died in 1996.