Category: Artist
Nationality: Chinese
Last Year: 47
It’s not every artist who’s taken seriously enough to get beaten up by the police for asking too many questions, but then Ai Weiwei is not every artist. The fifty-two-year-old Chinese art star is also one of his country’s leading activists and dissidents. Having spent much of 2009 compiling a list of all the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008, Ai was assaulted by police in August while trying to testify in defence of another activist. He needed emergency surgery a month later for a brain haemorrhage, while preparing for a big show at the HDK in Munich. Never one for the easy way out, Ai shows that art isn’t all empty glitz and celebrity.