Ai Weiwei makes an appearance at PEN America

NEW YORK

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident who believes it his job to be “incorrect,” was hard at work on the night of Jan 23 during an appearance at The Town Hall in Manhattan.

“I really like to make trouble,” Ai said during a 50-minute conversation-sparring match with author-interviewer Mira Jacob, during which he was as likely to question the question as he was to answer it. The event was presented by PEN America, part of the literary and free expression organization's PEN Out Loud series.

Ai was in New York to discuss his new book, the graphic memoir “Zodiac,” structured around the animals of the Chinese zodiac, with additional references to cats. The zodiac has wide appeal with the public, he said, and it also serves as a useful substitute for asking someone their age; you instead ask for one's sign.

“No one would be offended by that,” he said.

Ai began the night in a thoughtful, self-deprecating mood, joking about when he adopted 40 cats, a luxury forbidden during his childhood, and wondered if one especially attentive cat wasn’t an agent for “the Chinese secret police.” Cats impress him because they barge into rooms without shutting the door behind them, a quality shared by his son, he noted.

“Zodiac” was published this week by Ten Speed Press and features illustrations by Gianluca Costantini. The book was not initiated by him, Ai said, and he was to let others do most of the work.

“My art is about losing control,” he said, a theme echoed in “Zodiac.”

He is a visual artist so renowned that he was asked to design Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics, but so much a critic of the Chinese Communist Party that he was jailed three years later for unspecified crimes and has since lived in Portugal, Germany and Britain.