Exiled artist Ai Weiwei on Beijing Games

Ai Weiwei is one of China's most famous artists, and many regard him as one of the world's greatest living ones. Working with the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, he helped design the Bird's Nest Stadium, the centerpiece of Beijing's 2008 Summer Olympics.

The stadium in northern Beijing, instantly recognizable for its weave of curving steel beams, will also host the opening ceremony for Beijing's Winter Olympics on Feb. 4.
In the design phase, Ai hoped the stadium's latticework form and the presence of the Olympics would symbolize China's new openness. He was disappointed. He has repeatedly described the stadium and the 2008 Olympics as a ``fake smile'' that China presented to the world.

Ai expects the Winter Games to offer more of the same.
Even before his fame landed him the design job, Ai had been an unrelenting critic of the Chinese Communist Party. He was jailed in 2011 in China for unspecified crimes and is now an outspoken dissident who lives in exile in Portugal. He has also lived in exile in Germany _ he still maintains a studio there _ and in Britain.

His art _ ranging from sculpture to architecture to photography, video and the written word _ is almost always provocative, and he's scathing about censorship and the absence of civil liberties in his native country.

His memoir _ ``1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows'' _ was published last year and details the overlap of his life and career with that of his father Ai Qing, a famous poet who was sent into internal exile in 1957, the year Ai Weiwei was born.