Ai Weiwei Biography

As an architect, he served as a consultant to the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron on the construction of the new Beijing National Stadium.

• Ai Weiwei was concerned with the Chinese culture as a whole and the fact that people were not properly learning about it or preserving it.

• By dropping a priceless artifact, Ai was essentially asking if the Chinese people really care about their own history, by taking something valuable and reducing it to shards.

• Ai Weiwei is a master of contradiction. He transforms old beams from a temple into wooden roadmaps, or he smashes urns thousands of years old on stone plates.