“I’m like a shattered mirror,” the artist Ai Weiwei tells W one morning in a cozy corner of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), ...

By Zoey Poll For part of the year, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei works in a cavernous 30,000-square-foot studio on the underground levels of a former 19th-century brewery in Berlin.

You might expect a world-famous artist like Ai Weiwei — who has poked critically at value systems and institutions for decades with his provocative, interrogating art — to be more bombastic.

Ai Weiwei, the contemporary artist, documentarian and activist, is having a retrospective exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.

You might expect a world-famous artist like Ai Weiwei — who has poked critically at value systems and institutions for ...