An interview with China’s most famous living artist, conducted by Laura Fitch, The Review’s Senior Editor for China.

Arguably China’s most famous contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei is known for speaking his mind – a trait that has won him a slew of followers, admirers, detractors and critics. It has also most recently landed him in hospital in Germany for brain surgery following a brutal beating by police in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in August of this year. The artist had traveled to the city to give evidence in the case of human rights activist Tan Zuoren, on trial for subversion of state power.

After the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, Ai Weiwei grew frustrated with the government’s cover-up of the shoddy construction of schools throughout the region that caused the deaths of thousands of children who were crushed as the buildings collapsed. It’s subsequent refusal to list the names or numbers of the dead enraged him, and he began his own list, dubbing it the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project. To date he has collected over 5,000 names and posted them online. Tan Zuoren was his fellow investigator.

Son of the famous poet Ai Qing, who was branded a rightist and banished to the country’s remote Western provinces during the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei’s works have been exhibited worldwide, but rarely in his home country. When Beijing’s art scene was booming throughout the 2000s he was smack in the middle of it, the only Ai Weiwei pieces to be seen in the capital were a handful of works that accompanied group exhibitions.

This past September marked his first solo show in the former underground art area-turned-commercial-tourist-trap that is the 798 Art Zone, World Map. But in China it’s not his art that gets him the most attention, it’s his voice.