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Ai Weiwei is probably the most famous artist in the world. He has transcended the world of museums and galleries, and exerts a newsworthiness that no other artist competes with. Yet while most know that in 2011 the outspoken artist was arrested and held without charge in Beijing for 81 days, his exact whereabouts and welfare unknown, and that he has until recently been unable to leave his Chinese homeland, many would struggle to be able to conjure an image of his work, aside from the 2010 installation of ceramic sunflower seeds which filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

That is set to change later this month, when the Royal Academy will open an exhibition looking back at 30 years of Ai’s work. It is the most anticipated art show of the year, with the buzz around it reaching deafening levels after it emerged that the 58-year-old artist himself would be overseeing the finishing touches to the show when he arrives in London next week. The circumstances of his arrival are controversial. His passport was confiscated by the Chinese government after his arrest, and was only returned to him this July. Then, Theresa May was forced to intervene and apologise after Ai was granted a 20 day visa, rather than the usual six months, on the basis that he had failed to disclose a criminal conviction, although he has never been charged. The public outcry saw the decision swifty rectified.

Though he could never have anticipated his global significance, Ai seemed destined to be both a great polemicist and a visionary creator. His father was the poet Ai Qing, who died in 1996 aged 86, “one of China’s great 20th-century poets”, says Hans-Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Galleries, who has worked with Ai on numerous projects. When Ai was a child and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution took hold, his father was accused of being a “rightist” and sent to labour camps, before living in exile in the north-western Xinjiang region for 16 years. “He grew up with this context of his father being one of the great, great intellectuals of the 20th century in China, one of the great modern poets, and yet at the same time being forbidden to write, forbidden even to read,” Obrist says. Ai’s work was infused by his father’s spirit, Obrist suggests: “Poetry was always in the mix. It’s not only an activism which is political but there was always also a very poetic side.”

When Mao died in 1976 Ai’s family returned to Beijing, and Ai was soon after involved with the Stars group, one of the earliest avant-garde underground art movements of the modern era. “He was very young at that time” says Karen Smith, the British director of OCAT Xi’an contemporary art centre, who has lived in China for more than 20 years. “He was part of the group but he wasn’t really a spokesman or activist.”

Perhaps more formative than his involvement with Stars were the years Ai spent in New York between 1983 and 1993, at a time when contemporary art was booming. Among the hippest galleries was the SoHo space of Mary Boone, who is now Ai’s New York dealer. Speaking over the phone from New York, she notes that Ai is regularly compared to the pale overlord of that Eighties scene, Andy Warhol. Clearly Ai was interested in Warhol, she says. “He even had that funny picture he took of himself, I think at MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art], in front of a Warhol portrait, mimicking Andy’s hand gestures.” She adds: “I think that might be part of our mutual attraction, or his attraction to me — that I knew Andy.”

For the artist Michael Craig-Martin, Ai’s New York years are key to his current global appeal. “He is so intensely Chinese,” he says, and yet “the real miracle of it is, and I am sure it’s partly to do with the fact that he spent so much time in America, that his work is able to speak entirely transnationally. That’s absolutely crucial, because there are lots of very good artists whose work never actually leaves their home country.”

When he returned to China in the mid-Nineties, Smith, who had just arrived in Beijing as a curator, remembers that he was quite slow to produce art. Instead, he began to attract attention through his architecture — an “unusual building” for his father’s memorial, a fountain for a big residential project in Bejing commissioned by Zhang Xin, one of the richest women in China. He was also making exquisite but modest deconstructions of Chinese furniture pieces “which, to be honest, at that time didn’t feel very contemporary”, Smith says. “But he broke out of that when he started smashing Han dynasty pots — that gesture was what started to distinguish him.”

Ai has repeatedly explored traditional Chinese crafts in his work. “He has gone back to remote rural areas and tried to dig out the craftsmen who have skills that are, in many other places, now lost,” Smith says. These time-honoured skills are renowned for their precision, something that Ai himself adheres to, she explains. “He had a solo exhibition recently in Beijing, where they reconstructed an old temple that they reclaimed the wood from, and I happened to go to see him there on the last day they were installing. He was extremely upset because the pieces weren’t perfectly placed and it didn’t quite match the vision he’d had in terms of it being installed — he’s a real perfectionist in the way he works.”

He is also a great polymath, notes Obrist. “It’s something we can see more and more, as many artists emerging with the internet,” he says. “They’re poets, they’re architects, they’re visual artists – and these boundaries become very fluid.”

Among the many strings to Ai’s bow is his prolific use of blogging and tweeting as a vehicle for both art and activism. “He’s comfortable with social media. He’s engaged with virtually every aspect of cultural expression” says Craig-Martin.

An example of his activism is his response to the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, which killed around 70,000 people. Among them were many children crushed beneath inadequately built school buildings, a tragedy met with a lack of transparency by the Chinese authorities.

Ai set about finding out the names of all the children — more than 5,000 — who died, and created and published a list. He also made several artworks in response. “I see him as an artist who personally engages,” Craig-Martin says. “He implicates himself in the things he does. He isn’t just standing outside saying ‘look at this, this is terrible’ or ‘this is good’, or whatever. He is the person who gets arrested — he’s not just talking about people who get arrested. He is the person who gets harassed. He goes and speaks to the people who are the victims of the earthquake. He takes on this thing and he personalises it and that’s what artists should do.”

His response to the earthquake was among the things which prompted his arrest in 2011, many suspect. Howard Brenton penned the acclaimed play The Arrest of Ai Weiwei for Hampstead Theatre in 2013, and is particularly impressed by the way the artist “tries to drive a straight line through a very bent world. And with such vigour and attack.” The play is based on the transcript of a long interview Ai gave a few days after he came out of prison, with the arts journalist Barnaby Martin. It tells an intriguing tale, of the murky reasons for his incarceration, the psychological, if not physical, torture he endured but also the power struggle in the Chinese government that led to his arrest. But it is also about Ai’s charm and power. “They had to move him because he’d turned the guards, really, and set a much stronger guy on him, who also began to crack — it was a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome, he was able to work on them.” Brenton explains.

The play is “about his treatment by the Chinese state, it’s about an attack on freedom of expression,” he says, “but I came to think he is a very great artist. And several things really got to me about it — it’s rich, it’s complex, and it has a democratic instinct. So much conceptual art is just egocentric in the West, it’s all about me, me, me. But with Ai Weiwei it’s all about us, us, us.”

London is not Ai’s first European stop after his four-year incarceration – he has been in Berlin where his partner Wang Fen and their son Ai Lao have lived for the past year (though he remains married to Lu Qing, also an artist). There is a sense that his presence in Europe brings a full-stop to a turbulent few years, making the RA’s show a timely moment to reflect on his artistic achievements.

Karen Smith finds Ai most remarkable for the way “he has been able to transcend the rather claustrophobic boundaries of the art world to be able to talk to ordinary people, and for ordinary people to feel that they could understand what was being said — he’d managed to open doors to the art world.” She recalls that when, finally, Ai was fined for tax evasion in 2012, “people from all over China were donating sums of money that then almost paid his fine for him. These were people from incredibly diverse areas of China — he might be receiving one yuan from them or 10 yuan but it was an extraordinary example of how far his ideas had penetrated.”

This reflect Ai’s “incredible moral authority”, Craig-Martin suggests. “He is possibly the world’s most important political activist artist, and at the same time his work is phenomenally visual. He knows exactly how to use the visual world, to use found objects, materials, the things around us, the things that are key to what he wants to say. And he does it in a way that makes beautiful and fascinating visual objects.”

When the Royal Academy opens its doors this month, many Londoners will have the first chance to see for themselves if he is right.

Ai Weiwei is at the Royal Academy from 19 September

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