Ai Weiwei was born during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1950s. He inherited much of his political knowledge from his father who was a poet called Ai Quig. Ai Quig was later exiled with his family to re-education camps on the edge of a desert in 1958 for questioning government authority. After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese citizens were again allowed to travel outside their borders in the 1970s. When he was young, the place Ai Weiwei dreamed of going was New York. He went to New York and was exposed to its Western influences, freedom, and freedom of expression (Springford, 2011). Using photography, Weiwei recorded and documented everything that inspired him. Weiwei visited galleries and art museums which exposed him to the world of conceptual art, influenced by Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. Ai Weiwei admired how artists could simply proclaim what was art and what was not, how Duchamp questioned art, and when something becomes art (Springford, 2011). Ai Weiwei returned to China in 1993 to care for his ill father, and found himself drawn to his responsibility as an artist, to take on the task of awakening his country through his art and expounding his thoughts on corrupt and controlling nature of the Chinese government (Philipson, 2012). Ai Weiwei has always been an outspoken artist. During his artistic creation, Weiwei has used a form of activism in his art, with political ideologies that exist thanks to the Chinese government. It also uses the sense of memory, the past and the history of the country. Most of his art involves the public and their view of government. Weiwei solicits public engagement as a manifestation of protest in his works (Harris & Zucker, 2009). When ...... middle of paper ...... Jingdezhen mall, the seeds were made and hand-painted by local Chinese artisans in their workshops. Ai Weiwei employed these artisans to create these seeds from the finest porcelain from Jingdezhen, which once supplied porcelain to the Chinese imperial court. The work uses porcelain to symbolize one of China's most prized exports. The seeds create a landscape about 4 inches deep and can crunch underfoot, similar to a pebble beach. The seeds could symbolize the multitude of China's population, the element of mass production, and the irony that each seed is made by hand. Sunflower seeds may symbolize the memory of poverty in China, the result of changes during the Cultural Revolution. This creates a sense of personal identity from the notion of using 100 billion individual, individually crafted seeds (Redzisz, 2011).