“I’m like a shattered mirror,” the artist Ai Weiwei tells W one morning in a cozy corner of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where he’s mounting his first U.S. retrospective in over a decade.

By Zoey Poll For part of the year, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei works in a cavernous 30,000-square-foot studio on the underground levels of a former 19th-century brewery in Berlin.

You might expect a world-famous artist like Ai Weiwei — who has poked critically at value systems and institutions for decades with his provocative, interrogating art — to be more bombastic.

This spring, it’s Paris calling. The French capital’s recent art history is the subject of two monumental surveys—one at the Centre Pompidou, the other at the Singaporean National Gallery of Art—that ...

16.5 x 16.5 x 16.5 in. (41.9 x 41.9 x 41.9 cm.) London, Tate, The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds, exh. cat., 2010-2011, p. 63, no. 47 (another unique ...

49.75 x 66.25 in. (126.4 x 168.3 cm.) ...