Today Ai Weiwei enjoys a reputation far beyond the art world.

While his social, performance-based interventions and appropriated object-based artworks have secured his place as one of the world’s leading conceptual artists, Ai is equally known as a social media phenomenon, a political activist, and an outspoken champion of free expression in his native China, where he earned an 81 day solitary confinement police detention in 2011.

Ai is also known for his work in architecture and was the artistic consultant on Herzog & de Meuron’s Beijing National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest.

Ai Weiwei reflects on his life and work through the Chinese art of papercutting in this signed limited-edition portfolio. Meticulously cut in large-format, colored fine-art paper, each of the eight pieces represents a decisive moment within the artist’s oeuvre — from his time in New York in the ’80s, his exploration of Chinese crafts in Beijing in the ’90s, to the political activism of his recent work — offering a beautiful, personal retrospective in a unique format.