Ai Weiwei on returning to China, censorship and AI

Ai Weiwei describes the arithmetic he did before his first visit to China in over a decade. Before boarding a flight with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, he thought back to his time in detention when captors told him he would spend the next 13 years in custody on bogus charges.

He ended up spending several months in captivity; his son Lao is now 17 and Ai says he decided to roll the dice: “I’m Chinese. I have a Chinese passport. I’m entitled to go back and see my mum.” The trip went smoothly: he was interviewed at the airport and released after a couple of hours, and the country’s sights and sounds felt soothing — “like a phone call suddenly reconnecting” and “a piece of jade broken that you can put back together.” In London to discuss his new book, On Censorship, Ai recalled growing up in labour camps after his father’s exile, being detained for 81 days in a 170 sq ft windowless prison in 2011, and later having his passport returned in 2015; he now divides his time between Lisbon, Berlin and Cambridge.

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