Studios are often seen as quiet sanctuaries, places where artists retreat to think and create in solitude. For Ai Weiwei, however, a studio is never just a workspace. Each one is a declaration, shaped by necessity, charged with urgency and alive with intention. Over the years, the Chinese artist has conceived and reconfigured these spaces not simply to support his multifaceted practice but to challenge constraints: political, personal and spatial. More than sites of making, his studios have often stood out as acts of resistance, vessels for expression and blueprints for a life lived in defiance of silence.

The exhibition Five Working Spaces, curated by Berlin-based urban planner and advisor Eduard Kögel, recently concluded at the Aedes Architecture Forum. Rather than presenting a conventional architectural exhibition, it explored the artist’s studios as deeply human, mutable environments; as much about memory, power and movement as about spatial and tactile influences. Through models, sketches, photographs and the artist’s own texts, the show offered an unusually intimate look at the spaces where his art and his fight took shape.

Unafraid to confront the forces of nationalism, exclusion and state control, Weiwei is one of the most influential and uncompromising voices in contemporary culture. He has built a practice that moves fluidly between art, architecture, film and activism. At the heart of his work is a deep commitment to human rights and the freedom to speak, create and dissent. Drawing from both Chinese craftsmanship and contemporary global culture, his works are as politically charged as they are personal. Whether examining censorship, displacement or individual agency, the artist repeatedly forces a reckoning with the systems that shape and often suppress our lives.

A peek into Weiwei's studios, scattered across China, Germany and Portugal, revealed not just his adaptability but his insistence on autonomy. As both the designer and the client, the artist had rare control over how these spaces were built or rebuilt, and through their evolving forms, he told a story of exile and return, experimentation and endurance. Here’s how each studio unfolded: as place, process and provocation.

A small gesture, a big shift: Longzhuashu, Beijing

Before the numbered studios came Weiwei’s first workspace in Longzhuashu, on the southern edge of Beijing in China. It was here that he began working with historical Chinese furniture, dismantling and reassembling it using centuries-old joinery techniques. The space, originally a bare concrete courtyard, manifested into a studio through a single deliberate act of planting Danish grass— a minor gesture by the artist that dramatically softened the brutal surroundings. Longzhuashu set the tone for Weiwei’s approach: of working with what is available, and making just enough change to draw a new meaning.

Building as performance: Caochangdi, Beijing

In 1999, Weiwei designed and constructed his first self-directed studio in Beijing’s Caochangdi district. Built within 100 days as a kind of performance with local craftsmen, the space marks a pivotal moment in his practice. It wasn’t just a foray into architecture; it signalled a new way of working, where art, building and community became inseparable.

The brick and concrete compound quickly became more than a studio. It was a cultural meeting point and a site for ambitious installations, many of which addressed state control and collective memory. The studio gained wider visibility when it was featured in the 2001 TU MU – Young Architecture from China exhibition at Aedes, which marked Weiwei’s first trip to Germany. For over a decade, Caochangdi remained a cornerstone of his practice until his eventual move abroad.

The industrial shell: Zuoyou (Left/Right), Beijing

Just a short distance away from his Caochangdi compound, Weiwei began using an old industrial hall in 2006. Known as the Zuoyou Studio, which means ‘Left/Right’, the space was left largely untouched, functioning almost like a readymade. Originally built using East German blueprints, it possessed the raw, utilitarian scale that suited the artist’s expanding artistic and architectural ambitions. The studio served as both a workspace and a platform for extensive production, experimentation and collaboration.

Zuoyou was where Weiwei's Fairytale project for Documenta 12 in Kassel took shape; a massive endeavour involving the transport of 1,001 Chinese citizens to Germany. In the years that followed, dozens of assistants worked here on large-scale installations, even after the contemporary artist relocated to Berlin. Then, in 2018, the studio was abruptly demolished by authorities without warning, along with many of the artworks stored inside. It was a sobering reminder of how fragile even the most productive artistic environments could be in a hostile political climate.

A sculptural ghost: Malu, Shanghai

Built between 2008 and 2010 in Jiading, a suburb of Shanghai, the Malu Studio was commissioned by local officials. But unlike Weiwei’s earlier studios, this one was sculptural in concept. The artist rotated the gable roofs by 30 degrees from the base grid, giving the building an unexpected twist; creating architecture as a three-dimensional art piece.

But before a single artwork could be made there, the studio was ordered for demolition. The same officials who had welcomed Weiwei turned against the project, citing technicalities around building permits. As with the Zuoyou Studio, Weiwei salvaged the loss. He collected debris from the demolition and used it to create Souvenir from Shanghai, a work that resisted erasure and reclaimed the narrative from those in power. Malu became the studio that existed more powerfully in the absence than in use.

Memory beneath the surface: Berlin

Weiwei’s move to Berlin in 2015 coincided with the establishment of his fourth major studio, located in the vaulted underground of the former Pfefferberg brewery. Initially developed around 2010, this was his first studio outside China and a stark contrast to previous spaces. It was subterranean, intimate and profuse with memory. The cellar space reminded Weiwei of his early years in exile with his father, poet Ai Qing, in the deserts of Xinjiang, where they lived underground. Yet in this Berlin studio, he carved out light. A small courtyard, subtly inserted, brought ventilation and sky into the heart of the space. From here, projects were conceived and coordinated, still often executed by his team in Beijing. It was a logistical nerve centre, but also a reflective one, where past and present quietly converged.

A return to craft: Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal 

The last and most recent of Weiwei’s studios stood in Montemor-o-Novo, a rural town near Lisbon. Completed in 2024, it was a culmination of many of the themes he had explored for decades: memory, displacement, architecture and craft. Structurally, it echoed the demolished Malu Studio, but this time it was built entirely of wood.

Measuring 54x54 metres, the building used 100 columns and a rotated roof truss; a nod to Malu’s distinctive geometry. Traditional mortise-and-tenon joints held everything together without nails or screws. It was a feat of craftsmanship and a statement of continuity, a reminder that old techniques could still carry cultural knowledge into the present.

As Kögel notes in the exhibition’s introduction, these were “not about architecture in the narrower sense, but about spaces of possibility that stimulate the imagination”. He shared that the concept of the exhibition was rooted in an artist questioning architecture through artistic means and attempting to translate that inquiry into space. Whether appropriated, demolished or meticulously constructed, Weiwei’s studios stood as records of a life lived in motion; from Beijing to Berlin, from destruction to reconstruction.

The exhibition offered visitors not just a tour of five buildings but a journey through ideas. Weiwei’s studios were temporary shelters for enduring questions about power, place, making and meaning. In showing us where art is made, Five Working Spaces revealed just how inseparable creation is from the context in which it unfolds.