Artist-provocateur Ai Weiwei became world-famous mocking Chinese icons – dynastic artifacts, Tiananmen Square, Beijing's Olympics – and has spent time in detention for his artistic expressions. One symbol of Chinese power he hasn't pilloried is Xi Jinping, the country's pre-eminent leader.
Mr. Ai, who is publishing a memoir on Tuesday, says his mission is to call out governments and institutions when freedoms are threatened.
"China is a much bigger matter than an individual like Xi Jinping," he says. In Mr. Ai's view, attributing trends in China to the president alone ignores "much deeper and more profound reasons," like entrenched nationalism.
Why pay attention to Mr. Ai? "Art-world star" goes only so far to characterize the global influence of China's most outspoken showman, a 64-year-old who revels in making authorities squirm by sticking his cannonball-shaped head where he's not invited. In between sold-out museum exhibits from Lisbon to Seoul that burst with wry commentary on human rights, like giant representations of refugee boats, he sprays a dizzying volume of political and artistic messages to his more than 600,000 followers on Instagram and 360,000 on Twitter.
"He has an incredible empathy, and I think that segues very well with the consciousness we're experiencing," says New York gallerist Mary Boone, who for years represented Mr. Ai. "He's more than the art world. He's a bigger voice than that," she adds.
Mr. Ai attributes his fame to a universal desire to challenge authority. "I speak out about what's in my mind, and I speak out very loudly," he says.
Mr. Ai's memoir, "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows," which is being translated into 18 languages and published in over 20 countries, though not China, traces around a century of ups and downs – and mostly downs – in his family's relationship with Chinese authorities.
China's authoritarianism, he argues, is at odds with freedom by rejecting honest accounts of history and the policies necessary to develop a healthy society. "Although China grows more powerful, its moral decay simply spreads anxiety and uncertainty in the world," he writes.
Speaking by telephone from the Portuguese town of Montemor-o-Novo where he rode out much of the pandemic finishing the book, editing documentary films and remotely managing his studio in China, Mr. Ai said the book is for his 12-year-old son, Ai Lao. The boy deserves an explanation for the tumult in his short life, Mr. Ai says.
The artist fled China for Europe in 2015 after repeated run-ins with authorities, including an 81-day stint in detention followed by four years of house arrest. Though he remains a Chinese citizen and worries about his aging mother in Beijing, Mr. Ai said returning home now would be risky. If he goes to China, he says, "I don't think I can come out."
Mr. Ai may be China's most famous living artist, but all traces of his work vanished from public view there years ago. Chinese authorities have said his legal problems stemmed from his business practices, not his activism or art.
"Ai Weiwei, the so-called 'artist' you mentioned, is under investigation for suspected economic crimes, including making false accounts and deliberately destroying accounting vouchers," the spokesperson office of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in response to questions about the book. "What I want to emphasize is that gaining attention by criticizing the Chinese government and concocting false lies is despicable."  In his book, Mr. Ai calls the charges "cooked up." 
Prison runs through Mr. Ai's memoir, which opens with a poem his father wrote in 1932 during a six-year sentence for "leftist" activities alleged to have threatened the republic, then run by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. When Mr. Ai was nearly 10 and the Communists were in charge, he tagged along when his father was banished to a remote province for producing "rightist" poetry and assigned to scrub latrines, the two of them living five years in a lice-infested hovel.
Fast forward to 2011, when Mr. Ai himself disappeared into a secretive Chinese detention system. It followed a string of encounters with law enforcement and provocations by Mr. Ai, such as uploading to the internet an audio recording of police storming into his hotel room and a photo of himself in police custody wearing a torn shirt, actions he described in the interview as his "ruthlessly making trouble" – and as "so much fun."
His activism marked an escalation of early art pranks, like smashing a Han dynasty urn. He criticized the 2008 Olympics and memorialized the earthquake deaths the same year of schoolchildren in a display of 9,000 backpacks, all the while pushing boundaries on China's internet.
Mr. Ai has depicted his Kafkaesque detention in artwork and expands on it in the book: Two guards moved in sync with Mr. Ai at all times inside the tiny lockup, including pacing alongside him as he went back and forth on the six floor tiles available for exercise. "What one would take for granted outside had here become absurd," he writes.
His disappearance only boosted Mr. Ai's global fame. For a time, he might have been the world's most prominent political prisoner.