Ai Weiwei

I was born in 1957 in Beijing, exiled as a child, and returned to a country that shaped and suffocated me. My father was a poet who painted with words. I paint with broken urns, with demolished homes, with the names of children lost in earthquakes. I do not raise my voice—my presence speaks. My art is not for galleries. It is for the rubble, for the record, for the remembered.