This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.

The title of Seattle Art Museum’s Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei has Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot as its inspiration. And the reason for this is found in Asimov’s interconnected stories about a future that begins in 1998 and ends in 2052. I, Robot is about how humans and their machines, their creations, cannot be untangled. We are them, they are us—like it or not.

This conception was revolutionary for its time in the late 1940s. Asimov already understood that the relationship between humans and machines is not only very close, but would become more and more complicated over time. Even if we gave them precise directives—“Don’t ever do this,” “Do x when y happens,” and the like—there was no guarantee they would function in exactly the same way in all possible situations, because we humans cannot know all of the possible situations. This is what imposes limits to the theory of mechanism, which imagines if all the factors are known, a precise picture of the future will be obtained. Life and its evolutionary processes make nonsense of this fantasy.

And so when Ai recently asked DeepSeek—a new and market-changing (in the creative destruction sense) Chinese AI app that directly rivals ChatGPT and is open source—“Who is Ai Weiwei?” it said: “I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.”

The robot wasn’t neutral, or anything close to Leibniz’s characteristica universalis, a mechanistic dream of pure intellectual function and knowledge exchange. DeepSeek made it clear that it was all too human. It was too much like us. Its limits were our limits; its potentia is ours also. But as the curator of the SAM exhibit, Foong Ping, points out, Ai’s work often complicates the relationship between the real and the artificial, the authentic and the inauthentic, fantasy and history (both personal and cultural). For him, there is no “fixed thing,” and even “identity is not a fixed thing.” The ancient is as unstable as the new. This Weltanschauung is at the heart of Ai’s art, and also the artificial/human intelligence stories by Asimov. The complicated companion has arrived. We live in the worlds of I, Robot.

Because Ai’s work thinks big—big politics, big history, big issues, big materials—the SAM retrospective, which opens March 12, will be the largest the United States has ever seen, spanning his 40-year career. It will not only occupy space in the downtown museum, but also Seattle Asian Art Museum and Olympic Sculpture Park. SAM will display what I call his bling-bling jewelry collection, along with Ai classics like Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a collection of images of Ai dropping and destroying, in 1995, a 2,000-year-old ceremonial urn from the Han period. The Asian Art Museum will have his largest Lego piece to date, Water Lilies, which is a larger-than-life interpretation of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies #1.” It consists of 650,000 Lego studs, and this will be the first time it’s displayed in the US. The Sculpture Park will have his popular Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads sculptures, which are reproductions of the twelve bronze animal heads that ornamented an 18th-century imperial garden in Beijing.

In Water Lilies, we have the meeting point of several elements that appear to be unrelated. One is the Lego itself. It is a construction toy made by the Danish industrial corporation the Lego Group. Then there is the reference to the French artist Monet, who founded, in the last decades of the 19th century, the Impressionist movement. But where is the Chinese in all of this? It’s actually found in a strange opening, a considerable hole found on the right side of the 50-foot-long work. This, according to the Smithsonian, “is a door to an underground dugout [that the Ai] family lived in” during an exile imposed by Mao Zedong’s party. The door is personal and historical. The work’s materials are industrial and popular. And the image references European high art. This is how Ai remixes our globalized culture.

“Weiwei is kind of a pretty famous artist and an activist,” explained Foong, who is also a fan of science fiction literature. “And I thought, Gosh, there aren’t that many people on this Earth who can so beautifully illuminate all three of our museums ... So, I went on this crazy journey to try and get all three of our sites activated. That took a long time. And it stretched our team to the maximum.”

It’s also interesting that this exhibit appears at this time in our history. Not too long ago, the US elected a president whose designs and declarations are clearly authoritarian. He even assumed control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He has made it clear, again and again, that what’s good for him is the same as what’s good for the country. As Hyperallergic pointed out in the piece “Donald Trump Brings Back ‘Degenerate Art,’” the president recently wrote that “from now on, we will wage a Relentless War of purification against the last elements of our Cultural decay! Make American Art Beautiful Again!” This kind of language cannot be distinguished from that of the Mao Zedong party that banished the poet Ai Qing during the Cultural Revolution, or of the present Socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics party that arrested Ai, imprisoned him, almost killed him, and finally forced him into exile in 2015 for “economic crimes.” (He currently lives in Portugal.)

What can we learn from this? China, the dominant capitalist power of our day, and the world’s largest producer of robots, has not moved toward the US’s democratic system, but we are certainly moving toward China’s authoritarian one. Will American AI robots begin erasing the histories of our artists? This kind of speculation is not far-fetched. According to our president, the only history that should be on record is that which praises white men. Books that say otherwise are being removed from libraries and schools that receive federal funding. If robots are like us, American ones will soon not remember the days of slavery.

And this brings me to a final point about Ai. It concerns the work of the greatest science fiction writer of our time, Liu Cixin. (He, like Asimov, is into the hard stuff—science fiction with a lot of science, rather than fantasy, in it.) The opening of Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy has striking similarities with Ai’s childhood in Northern China. Ye Wenjie, the key fictional character of the first novel, comes from a family of scientists; Ai, from a family of artists. Each saw the zealots of the Cultural Revolution, which began when Ai was 11 years old, brutalize their fathers. And this experience left a lasting mark on their lives. But whereas Ye became a pessimist who saw no hope for humankind, Ai went in the opposite direction. He is a humanist. A big-machine-learning humanist.

Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei will be on display at Seattle Art Museum March 12–September 7.