A year and a half ago, Ai was giving interviews about his new life in Britain; before that it was Germany, the country that offered him safe harbour when he finally left China in 2015, after years of hounding by the authorities and a spell in detention.
His son is still there, but in the meantime, “I found a piece of land near Lisbon, so I’m kind of settled there, but that’s only for the past year”.
A star of the Chinese art scene from the mid-90s on, Ai became a household name in the west after he helped conceive the “bird’s nest” stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, before rejecting its use as “culture for the purpose of propaganda” and refusing to attend the opening ceremony.
You’d expect an artist as globally famous as him to do a lot of international travel, of course.
You mean, once you’ve left your homeland, you can make a home wherever you like? The word doesn’t sit well with him.
Later, he was a friend and an intellectual sparring partner of the Communist party leader Mao Zedong, before dramatically falling from grace in a purge of so-called “rightist” intellectuals.
What jumps out from those passages is the sheer cruelty of Mao’s system of ideological enforcement, and the abject conditions Ai experienced as a child.
They’re all above you, but you feel safe.” He goes further: “I think it is so positive, to be poor, and to have an empty life as a child.
Perhaps this is the legacy of his childhood: when you’ve already been rejected in the most extreme way, there’s little to fear from people’s opinions of you.
“You know, without your interview, I wouldn’t know what to do today.
At other points he has strayed into something resembling journalism, attempting to document the names of children killed in the Sichuan earthquake when the authorities failed to record them.
Ambition was a dirty word: “If the doors and windows are shut, you don’t have a view.” But even after he escaped to New York in his early 20s, he drifted, enrolling at Parsons School of Design but flunking his final exams by simply writing his name at the top and nothing else.
His wanderings also took him to the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, where one day he picked up The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, a book of the artist’s deadpan observations on fame, love and work.
He understood free expression, media and communication, he was taking selfies all the time, recording people all the time.” Does he feel they have a lot in common as artists? “We are both sincere and insincere at the same time.
I find myself trying to reshape it for him: is it that they have a more complicated relationship with society? “They are complicated, and that complication gives them insecurity, because they’re different.
Back to Warhol: what would he have made of the internet? Would he have enjoyed memes and social media? Ai thinks no, he probably wouldn’t – what he liked about selfies and live streams was that he was the only one doing it.
I think that only belongs to the past.” So what is his solution? “We have to go back to humanism.” What does that mean, though? “Respect for individuals’ lives, property and development,” he says, throwing me slightly by mentioning property, which suggests at least some sympathy with capitalism.
The freedom to say it as he sees it is perhaps the only real guiding principle of Ai’s eclectic career, and provides another link back to his father, who wrote Mao a long letter about the need to preserve artists’ ability to speak the truth, whatever the circumstances.
It’s a quest that explains his restlessness and dizzying productivity, which, even during the pandemic, gave rise to more shows, more public art, 10,000 printed face masks, the Wuhan film and, of course, the book.