A few days before we talked, he had thrown his support behind a group of lesser-known Chinese artists who were protesting plans to demolish their studios in the name of development. Ai’s place was unaffected, but the artists had approached him for advice. He told them, “If you protest and fail to publish anything about it, you might as well have protested inside your own house.” Ai and the other artists staged a march down Chang’an Avenue, in the center of Beijing—an immensely symbolic gesture, because of the street’s proximity to Tiananmen Square. Police blocked them peacefully after a few hundred yards, but their bravado drew attention far beyond the art world. Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent legal activist, told me, “For twenty years, I have thought that protesting on Chang’an Avenue was absolutely off limits. He did it. And what could they do about it?”

One morning in March, Ai was alone in his dining room, eating a bowl of noodles at the head of a wooden table long enough for a medieval banquet. Sunlight streamed through a two-story bank of windows. On the wall to his left was a piece he made in 1993 by altering a government poster about the dangers of fireworks in such a way that a large bandaged hand was now flipping the viewer the bird. “My wife hates this one,” he said.

At the age of fifty-three, Ai has a capacious belly, close-cropped hair, a meaty, expressive face, and a black-and-white beard that stretches to his chest. The full picture is imposing, until he reveals a sly and whimsical sense of humor. “His beard is his makeup,” his brother, Ai Dan, told me.

For Ai, however, the gesture resonates on the level of cosmology. The Museum of Modern Art owns a series of photographs of the Eiffel Tower, the White House, Tiananmen Square, and other places featuring his extended middle finger in the blurry foreground—a profane travel album, of sorts, which he titled “Study of Perspective.” In the Times, Holland Cotter wrote that the pictures “give a sense of the versatility of an artist whose role has been the stimulating, mold-breaking one of scholar-clown.”

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lives and works on the northeast edge of Beijing, in a studio complex that he designed for himself, a hive of eccentric creativity that one friend calls “a cross between a monastery and a crime family.”