Installation view, Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei Public Tours
Through August 2025: Saturdays and Sundays from 1:15-2:15pm & Thursdays from 2:30-3:30pm
These 60-minute guided tours of Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei explores how Ai Weiwei’s art disrupts authority through scale, materiality, repetition, and humor. Take a close look at artworks made across 40 years of Ai’s career and learn how his artistic and activist practices have evolved. A SAM docent will guide participants in understanding Ai’s absurd juxtapositions, thoughtful material choices, and biting commentary.
Any visitor with a timed entry ticket who has entered Ai, Rebel can join the tour. Tours meet inside the exhibition’s entry.
To learn more, click here.
Current Exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum
Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio, photo: Gao Yuan
Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei
March 12 – September 7, 2025
Seattle Art Museum
Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei is the first US retrospective in over a decade of globally renowned Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. With over 130 works created over the course of four decades, this exhibition is the largest-ever exhibition in the US and offers visitors the opportunity to engage in the conceptual artist’s wide-ranging and thought-provoking body of work. Through performance, photography, sculpture, and immersive installations, Ai critically examines themes of history, power, human rights, and cultural identity.
Organized by the Seattle Art Museum and curated by Foong Ping, SAM’s Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art, this career-spanning exhibition highlights Ai as a provocateur and identifies his key strategies for disrupting artistic canons and challenging political authoritarianism.
To learn more about this exhibit and all related programs, click here.
Current Exhibitions at Seattle Asian Art Museum
Water Lilies, 2022, Ai Weiwei, Chinese, b. 1957, LEGO bricks, 105 1/2 x 602 3/4 in., Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and neugerriemschneider, Berlin, © Ai Weiwei, photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza.
Ai Weiwei: Water Lilies
March 19, 2025 – March 15, 2026
Seattle Asian Art Museum
At nearly 50 feet in length and made from 650,000 LEGO blocks, Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies (2022) is the artist’s largest and most ambitious LEGO work to date. This reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s iconic triptych from the Museum of Modern Art in New York offers an equally immersive experience, merging the lush beauty of Monet’s water lilies with Ai’s personal history.
Visitors can experience this work—displayed in one long panel on a single wall—up close in the immersive space of an intimate gallery at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. This is the first time this work has been shown in the US; it debuted in 2023 in Berlin at the Neugerriemschneider Gallery.
To learn more, click here.
Boundless: Stories of Asian Art
February 8, 2020 – Ongoing
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Asia can be defined in many ways, geographically, culturally, and historically. As the world’s largest and most populated continent, Asia is not uniform or fixed: its boundaries shift, its people and cultures are diverse, and its histories are complex. After a transformative renovation, the Seattle Asian Art Museum—one of only a few Asian art museums in the United States—reopens with a presentation that embraces this complexity. You will not find galleries labeled by geography. Instead, works from different cultures and from ancient to contemporary times come together to tell stories about Asia in a non-linear narrative.
The galleries are organized around 12 themes central to Asia’s arts and societies such as worship and celebration, visual arts and literature, and clothing and identity. The south galleries feature art inspired by spiritual life and the north galleries show art inspired by material life. Some objects relate to both the spiritual and material realms and are a testament to art’s layered meanings.
Each artwork tells its own story of when, where, how, and why it was made. But when seemingly disparate artworks are displayed together, meaningful connections and questions emerge. Explore our renowned collection and discover ideas across time and across Asia.
To learn more, click here.
