Manifesto Without Borders

Ai Weiwei: Bridging Cultures Through Art and Activism—A Life Transformed by Displacement, Advocacy, and a Vision for Humanitarian Communication

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei is famous around the world. He builds bridges through art and has been fighting to create, maintain and grow passageways for communication almost all his life. From single objects like Coca Cola Vase to structures like Forever Bicycles to installations like Sunflower Seeds, Ai Weiwei’s art is displayed publicly in numerous countries; renowned museums are desperate to get their hands on his artifacts. But who is the person behind the international label “Ai Weiwei,” and what drives his restless creative mind? 

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957 to Chinese poet and government critic Ai Quing and grew up in Manchuria and Xinjiang, where his father was exiled, before later relocating to the United States. In 2011—now back in China—he was prevented from leaving the country and imprisoned for 81 days.

Shaped by these early experiences, Ai Weiwei began to feel like an outsider at an early age. It is this existential feeling of displacement that Ai Weiwei transforms into the universal through art. Hardly any other work highlights his sensitivity towards the topic more than his film Human Flow, which was shown worldwide and is the result of large-scale research on refugee movements across the globe. His philosophical reflections in this book directly relate to his time in Berlin, in the autumn of 2015, those weeks when everything changed in Germany. Watching Berlin's transformation spurred Ai Weiwei to venture out and visit refugee camps all over the world. 

In “Manifesto without Borders”, his memories become a confessio far beyond l´art pour l´art and the technocratic truisms of politicians. With its urgent, sometimes disconcerting but always listening approach, the book offers an alternative: a plea for peaceful communication, a kind and humanitarian act—a deep commitment to advocacy in our current times.