‘They are so scared’: how a late-night tweet made Ai Weiwei understand the West

When Ai Weiwei was a child, he helped his father to burn all his art books. Having studied painting in Paris, Ai Qing had been condemned as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution and the family had been exiled to the remote province of Xinjiang.

“Those books were considered anti-revolution, so I tore them up page by page and threw them in the flames – those pages, that paper made so well, some handmade papers and very hard to tear, printed so nicely, the colours beautiful,” Ai remembers. “Renaissance paintings with gold leaf, all the Impressionists – Monet, Degas, Manet, Seurat – I know all those names because I burned them.”

Ai Qing was by then a poet. He couldn’t get art materials in Xinjiang, but he could write. He also told stories of his life in Paris in the 1920s, but his son wasn’t interested. “I was 10. I don’t care,” Ai says. “I only know the winter is so cold, the summer is so hot, we don’t have enough food, we don’t have water or light.” They lived in a dugout; their only light source was a kerosene lamp.

“You burn the oil and it’s black. In the morning, my nose is black. These were very poor conditions. When I saw Manet’s lady standing in a bar, flowers pinned to her chest, so beautiful, I tried to imagine this other world. But I never thought I would be an artist because artists were cursed.”

His path to becoming, in fact, one of the world’s best-known and most celebrated artists – if that is what he is, which remains an open question as far as he is concerned – was determined largely by chance. Nineteen years after his trial and exile, Ai Qing was rehabilitated and elevated as a leading representative of Chinese literature. Ai Weiwei went briefly to film school in Beijing, then to the United States. In New York, he dropped out of study and lived through odd jobs. At night, he walked the city “alone, like a wolf”. Meanwhile, he painted in a succession of different styles, educating himself.

“I did the whole of art history. I’m like a soldier training for battle. I never lost my confidence; I was convinced I could do anything. My problem is that I never want to do anything!”