Simon Schama Meets Ai Weiwei

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Simon Schama Meets

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Simon Schama speaks to three of the world's most influential artists and activists.

Simon Schama speaks to three influential artists and activists, who share the motivations behind their art and activism and their perspectives on the state of the world today.

While making Simon Schama’s History of Now, Simon met several of the most influential contemporary artists working in the world today. In this series of extended interviews, Simon meets Ai Weiwei, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Margaret Atwood, to uncover the personal motivations behind their work and activism, their sense of why art matters, and their unique perspectives on the state of the world today.

Series 1

BBC Four

Simon Schama

Ai Weiwei

Nicolas Kent

Charlotte Sacher

Hugo Macgregor

Simon Schama Meets: Series 1: Ai Weiwei

BBC Four - Simon Schama Meets, Series 1, Ai Weiwei

Simon Schama meets celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Simon Schama meets celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who speaks candidly about his life and work, and his determination to preserve truth and memory.

Ai Weiwei is arguably the world’s most famous dissident artist, celebrated for his prolific and profound output of sculpture, installation, architecture, photography and film-making, which is never afraid to take on systems of power and oppression.   

What is less well known, however, is his extraordinary backstory. His father was distinguished poet Ai Qing, who was a key cultural figure during the Communist rise to power but was one of over half a million intellectuals who fell afoul of the state during the Cultural Revolution. He lost everything and was exiled alongside his young son to ‘Little Siberia’ in northernmost China. For the first 20 years of his life, Ai Weiwei’s experience of his father was not as a writer but as an ‘enemy of the state’. Ai Weiwei tells Simon the harrowing story of his childhood, and his memories of his father’s stoicism in the face of decades of persecution. He reflects on the lessons he took from his father, above all that ‘freedom of expression is the foundation for humanity.’

Ai Weiwei also describes his own journey towards becoming a dissident artist and a voice for the downtrodden, and how he – like his father – continuously pays a heavy price for speaking truth to power. Ai Weiwei has carried this sense of duty with him throughout his career and recalls how he took on the Chinese state in the early days of the internet and social media, and the life-threatening consequences he faced, including 81 days in state detention, an experience he recounts in chilling detail.

In the years since, he has continued to use his work and notoriety to stand up for the oppressed in the face of authoritarianism, and he speaks candidly to Simon about the vital role that truth and the preservation of memory can have in the battle for democratic freedom all over the world. Ai Weiwei reflects powerfully on the need to ‘fight’ for ‘all those values’ that are ‘meaningful for life itself’.

Simon Schama Meets: Series 1

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Simon Schama speaks to three of the world's most influential contemporary artists and activists: Ai Weiwei, Margaret Atwood and Nadya Tolokonnikova. In these conversations, Simon will uncover the personal motivations behind their art and activism, their sense of why art matters, and their unique perspectives on the state of the world today.

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