Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing, China) is a seminal figure in contemporary art who works across multiple disciplines including painting, photography, film, installation, architecture, public art, curatorial work, and publishing. The son of prominent poet Ai Qing and writer Gao Ying, Ai's early life was shaped by political exile during the Cultural Revolution, during which his family was forcibly relocated to northwestern China. In the mid-1970s, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, he returned to Beijing and in 1978 enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy's animation department. He also participated in China's first avant-garde art collective, positioning himself at the forefront of the emerging experimental art movement in his country.

In 1981, Ai Weiwei relocated to New York City, where he encountered the work of influential Western artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. These formative experiences significantly informed his conceptual approach and critical engagement with sociopolitical themes. Upon his return to Beijing in 1993, Ai played a foundational role in the development of the Caochangdi Art District, an important hub for contemporary art in eastern Beijing. His architectural collaborations include a notable partnership with Herzog & de Meuron in designing structures for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, most famously the "Bird's Nest" national stadium.

Throughout his career in China, Ai emerged as an outspoken critic of governmental censorship, surveillance, and human rights abuses, frequently confronting state authority through both his artistic production and digital activism. In 2015, facing continued state pressure, he relocated to Germany and has since been based in Europe, currently residing in Portugal. His recent work has increasingly addressed global humanitarian issues, particularly migration, displacement, and refugee rights.

A pioneering figure in the integration of digital platforms into contemporary art discourse, Ai has made extensive use of blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram as tools of public engagement, political critique, and artistic expression. His practice situates him at the intersection of art, activism, and transnational cultural dialogue.

<Crystal Cube> is a series comprising eight glass sculptures, each rendered either as a perfect one-meter cube or in a slightly irregular cuboid form. The series continues Ai Weiwei’s long-standing Cube investigations, which synthesize elements of traditional Chinese aesthetics with a rigorous engagement in materiality, spatial volume, and architectural form. While the cubic meter functions as a universally recognized unit within global systems of measurement and commerce, Ai recontextualizes this standardized form by infusing it with culturally specific and autobiographical significations.

For instance, the one-meter cubes constructed from ebony, compressed tea leaves, or crystal evoke both historical referents and personal memory. These works resonate with the legacy of Tony Smith’s Die (1962), a seminal Minimalist steel cube that draws upon Leonardo da Vinci’s articulation of Vitruvian human proportions. However, in Ai’s reinterpretation, the emphasis shifts from pure formalism to an investigation of material essence. Unlike the austere, industrial materials associated with Minimalism, Ai’s use of ebony alludes to Qing Dynasty heirlooms—small trunks once owned by his father—while the massive, one-ton tea leaf cubes reference the Chinese tradition of compressing and aging tea in solid blocks.

The crystal works within the series are particularly notable for their technical and conceptual complexity. Produced through complex, labor-intensive handcrafting, these cubes challenge the capabilities of even China’s largest crystal manufacturers, whose production typically focuses on smaller-scale glassware. The realization of these monumental crystal forms required years of experimentation and repeated failure. Ultimately, the resulting Crystal Cube embodies both the structural tensions inherent in large-scale glass and the organic surface irregularities that emerge from the artisanal process. As such, the series exemplifies Ai Weiwei’s enduring preoccupation with the intersection of form, history, identity, and material intelligence.