Is Ai Weiwei a figure of the past?

When discussing Chinese contemporary art, it is almost impossible to bypass Ai Weiwei. For years, he has represented more than an individual artistic practice. He embodied a recognisable path for Chinese artists seeking global visibility: openly challenging authority, confronting institutions through personal gestures and becoming a powerful symbol of “free expression” under the international media spotlight. His sharp, highly visible presence shaped the imagination of a generation, offering what seemed to be a workable model for how Chinese artists could enter the global stage.

Invisible conditions, unnamed expressions

For many young creators, this posture functioned as an early template. It suggested that if one were bold enough, loud enough and willing to confront power directly, art could transcend borders and gain international recognition. Questions of identity, censorship and human rights were often explored through this lens of visible resistance.

Many artists located their creative direction within this framework. Over time, however, it became clear that this model of “being seen” was shaped by very specific historical conditions.

Recent public discussions surrounding Ai’s remarks about returning to China see his mum have reignited debate. Since leaving China in 2015 after years of state surveillance, detention and restrictions on his work, Ai has lived largely in exile. He relocated to Germany, spending several years in Berlin while continuing his politically engaged practice with themes like bordered lives and censorship. He later moved to the UK and then Portugal. His earlier conflicts with Chinese authorities — including the demolition of his Shanghai studio and his 81-day detention in 2011 — remain defining moments of his public image. Any suggestion of reconciliation or return is therefore politically sensitive, provoking wider questions about artistic autonomy and state power.

To some extent, the debate is not merely about political stance but about a shift in context. When an artist long situated within an international field of vision is placed back into a local context, the symbolic meanings he carries inevitably begin to shift.

Chinese identity often becomes particularly legible abroad. Within international contexts, transnational background, linguistic experience and hybrid upbringing are frequently regarded as valuable cultural assets. Recognition extends beyond simple nationality. What becomes visible are the subtleties of personal experience: how one understands power, perceives order and navigates different expressive systems. Such complexity belongs to the individual rather than to a fixed national identity.

Back in an Asian context, however, this “visibility” begins to fade — particularly from the perspective of the returnee. Familiar discourses and social surroundings smooth over differences, while the conveniences of daily life gradually replace the tensions once produced by cultural distance. What was previously perceived abroad as a “unique experience” becomes absorbed into the ordinary fabric of everyday life: something that no longer requires explanation, yet is still easily misunderstood. In this context, individuality is often re-situated within a broader collective framework, where the feeling of being “one among many” can overshadow the sense of singular identity once heightened by displacement abroad.

It is a form of positional bias: certain identities seem significant only when one is elsewhere. Perhaps for Ai today, this shift is more telling than any explicit political stance. To me, his comment “China is okay” does not signal a change in judgement, but reflects the exhaustion of sustaining a confrontational posture. When one is no longer intensely projected upon, expression naturally recedes into the rhythms of everyday life. Yet expectations of recognisable resistance remain — and when that posture softens, the symbolic clarity he once embodied begins to loosen.

The commodification of ‘Orientality’

Western museums and academia have long stabilised a canon of “Chinese contemporary art”: Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Huan — names that recur like pre-approved answers. This is not a coincidence but an institutional preference. What global art systems favour are narratives that are legible, classifiable and easy to absorb. Individual genius is secondary; what matters is whether artists collectively embody recognisable themes — political dissent, ideological trauma, cultural memory. Repetition turns artistic practice into a “wave”, and once named, that wave becomes history.

Edward Said exposed the deeper logic decades ago. The “Orient”, he argued, is not a place but a Western invention — a cultural screen for projection. The East is made visible only through frameworks that confirm Western authority. Identity becomes an interface: something to be translated, curated and consumed.

Early Chinese contemporary artists functioned precisely as such interfaces. Their works rendered China understandable within Western vocabularies of resistance and difference. “Orientality” became an efficient passport into global circulation. But efficiency breeds standardisation. Over time, what was once urgent turned familiar, and what once felt politically sharp became aesthetically predictable. The issue is no longer misreading, but over-recognition.

Yet history was never that simple. During the Reform era, Western political ideals were not passively received but actively imagined. That generation navigated an in-between space — both resisting and admiring, both local narrators and students of global modernity. Distance created room for projection, and projection fuelled creative energy. A partially understood West became a productive myth.

Today, that myth is losing traction. “Orientality” no longer guarantees attention. The old East-West script is wearing thin as artists operate within dispersed, transnational realities. Cultural identity can no longer rely on familiar symbols or political shorthand. Visibility is harder to secure; difference is harder to package.

The misalignment of radical posture

He confronted forms of power that were visible and nameable: censorship with clear agents, institutions with identifiable authority, and political boundaries that could be openly challenged. Resistance operated through direct confrontation, and symbolic gestures carried tangible weight.

Today, power rarely presents itself in such legible ways. Control diffuses through algorithms, platform governance, capitalist infrastructures and institutional inertia. These systems do not announce themselves as oppression, yet quietly reorganise perception, behaviour, and access to visibility. They are difficult to point at, harder to dramatise, and rarely confrontable through spectacle.

Under these conditions, overt resistance risks appearing staged. What once felt dangerous now feels anticipated. Radical gestures are readily absorbed into exhibitions, academic discourse and media circulation. They are preserved, discussed, historicised — but no longer disruptive to the structures shaping everyday experience.

Ai’s era allowed for identifiable adversaries and clear symbolic defiance. The present is defined instead by dispersed mechanisms of control that operate structurally rather than visibly. When power becomes invisible, repetition loses its force. Narratives of resistance depend on something recognisable to oppose. Without a visible structure, even defiance struggles to find its target.

From ‘China as a problem’ to the condition of the ‘international subject’

Today’s artistic practices no longer rush to be “understood by the West”, nor do they rely on national identity, political stance or grand narratives to prove themselves. They are inward, fragmented and often difficult to translate; in global contexts, they may even seem “invisible”.

Without a common external enemy, new questions arise: how does one depict oneself? How can one navigate a transnational existence without being reduced to a singular “Chineseness”? How can multiple identities within oneself reconcile?

Today’s transnational Chinese inhabit overlapping communities — immigrants, international students, queer, situationists, creators. Identity is no longer anchored to a single nation; it is a continuous negotiation among multiple positionalities. Ai’s generation faced the dilemma of “being Chinese” within Western art spaces. Today’s transnational artists confront a more diffuse challenge: the instability of the “international subject”, the ongoing shake of value systems, and a more solitary personal exploration.

Even Western art institutions, once treated as coordinates, are losing absolute authority, becoming objects of reflection and critique. Grand narratives are receding; individual experience has become the new focus. Quiet expressions do not signal retreat — they form the texture of a new reality.

Yet this shift carries an unavoidable sense of loss: a diminished sense of belonging. When the “West” no longer serves as a clear reference, when “Chineseness” cannot fully contain personal complexity, and when globalisation’s promised mobility reveals structural limits, we are suspended in multiple overlapping contexts: no longer looking up to any centre, yet not having established a spiritual coordinate of our own generation. Belonging emerges in scattered, temporary connections — a residency, a relationship, a fleeting encounter with language, a brief recognition offered by a city. Real, but insufficient as a foundation.

Perhaps it is misguided to ask whether Ai is a figure of the past. His Chinese identity is frequently assumed to be a shared marker, when in fact it is intensely personal.

As the commodification of “Orientality” loses force, admiration ceases to ensure comprehension. Visible forms of resistance are replaced by structural invisibility, while unitary national narratives disintegrate into plural transnational states of being.

What we approach may be less a new ideology than an unnamed human condition.

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