Ai Weiwei, 64, must qualify by now as a grand old man of contemporary art except that as a sculptor, photographer and documentary film-maker, he is characterised by unflagging energy and youthful playfulness. As a child, he lived in a dugout in China’s “Little Siberia” where his poet father, Ai Qing, had been banished, condemned as a “rightist”. In 2011, he was “disappeared” for 81 days in a Chinese jail and then spent four years under house arrest. In 2015, he left China and has since lived in Berlin, Cambridge and Portugal. His latest show at Kettle’s Yard, The Liberty of Doubt, exhibits Chinese antiquities – bought in 2020 at a Cambridge auction sale – alongside his own work.
You seem always to have been interested in what constitutes a fake and even once described yourself as simultaneously “sincere and insincere”?
I talk about fakes all the time. My architecture company in China is called Fake. People joke and say: the only real company, producing real stuff, in China is “Fake”. I thought maybe I’d do a show about authenticity. I’ve been a collector of Chinese antiquities for 30 years, I used to look for them in thousands of shops in China. I enjoyed it because every piece is a mystery. The Cambridge auction happened when I was driving to Portugal. I told my partner to use her garage to store the works – they arrived badly wrapped in newspaper. I realised that many were not authentic but they were not badly made. They were super-good – perfect – except that they did not have the patina of 500 years ago. Then I showed them to friends, one of whom, a retired top US dealer, said: “Weiwei, it is all fake.” Another friend who sells antiques in China said: “Not only is this fake, I even know who made it.” And I thought: this is interesting.
