Early on within the new documentary Ai Weiwei’s Turandot, the artist introduces himself to the gathered forged on the Rome Opera Home. He explains why he, a visible artist, determined to tackle directing a basic Italian opera—Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, the story of a merciless Chinese language princess as imagined by Western storytellers.
“Thirty-three years in the past, I used to be working as an additional in Zeffirelli’s Metropolitan Turandot,” he says, referring to the theatre director Franco Zeffirelli’s enterprise at New York’s Metropolitan Opera within the Nineteen Eighties. (The Met Opera is at present staging a revival of the Zeffirelli Turandot, till 6 June 2026.) Ai had been really helpful for a small function by the manufacturing’s choreographer, Chiang Ching. On the time, Ai was a poor younger artist dwelling in Manhattan and he wanted the cash.
Quick ahead three many years. In 2018, as an internationally well-known artist—identified for his assist without cost speech and defiance of authoritarian rule—Ai was invited to direct Turandot on the Rome Opera. (Rome Opera has a protracted historical past of commissioning visible artists to stage its performances, from Pablo Picasso to Alexander Calder and William Kentridge.)
It was a once-in-a-lifetime alternative for Ai to reshape an Orientalist fantasy into a piece reflecting each his personal aesthetics and up to date politics, a mixture that has at all times been his forte. Ai was an uncommon selection, since he doesn’t work in theatre and even says within the movie: “I don’t care about opera. I don’t take heed to music after I work.” However Rome Opera’s basic director on the time, Carlo Fuortes, needed a brand new tackle Turandot.
Nonetheless from Ai Weiwei’s Turandot (2025)
“It’s the imaginative and prescient of an Italian mental, Giacomo Puccini, of a distant nation,” Fuortes says within the movie. “Clearly, it was a easy sketch imaginative and prescient that the West had of the East. So I considered which artist might actually embody the brand new relationship between Western and Jap worlds.”
Manufacturing started in February 2020, and Maxim Derevianko, a Rome-based director and cinematographer, began taking pictures footage behind the scenes in preparation for a documentary.
“My Turandot goes to be completely different,” Ai says as he begins rehearsals. He later provides: “I love to do what I’m not good at—I like hassle.”
Ai employed Chiang to reprise her function as choreographer. Solid and crew gathered on the opera home. Then the Covid-19 pandemic introduced the world to a halt. Work stopped instantly, the opera home shuttered, and shock and dismay took maintain.
Two years later, the workforce was in a position to relaunch the mission. Derevianko was again to interview the principals, together with Ai, Chiang, the conductor Oksana Lyniv and the costume designer Anna Biagiotti. Within the movie, Derevianko intersperses conferences and interviews with rehearsals and scenes from the ultimate manufacturing—the latter usually executed in a dreamlike sluggish movement, accompanied by Puccini’s lush music.
Nonetheless from Ai Weiwei’s Turandot (2025)
The documentary unfolds on three interlocking ranges: the story of this manufacturing that just about by no means was, the story of Ai’s rise to fame and reflections on the significance of artwork. It’s particularly fascinating to see how Ai manages to weave his signature visible motifs into the manufacturing.
The set is impressed by his 2006 sculpture Map of China. Right here, it turns into a map of the world with the continents at completely different heights. (Ai was pondering of the lots as exiles and migrants huddled on the decrease ranges.) In the meantime, the hats of the the Aristocracy replicate completely different animals within the Chinese language zodiac, echoing Ai’s use of the symbols in his set up Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010) in addition to his 2024 ebook Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir. A few of Ai’s drawings and pictures are reproduced on costumes and props—together with the well-known hand giving the center finger.
For Ai, the connection between artwork and politics is obvious and ever current. “All the things is artwork. All the things is politics,” he says within the movie.
Ai grew up together with his exiled father, the poet Ai Qing, in desolate Xinjiang. His father had been denounced throughout Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist marketing campaign of the late Fifties, and the expertise of exile and being silenced formed the longer term artist’s being.
“Freedom of speech, in fact—it comes with Ai Weiwei, proper?” Derevianko tells The Artwork Newspaper. “If you speak about him, you’ll face that matter. What I had in thoughts because the starting is the which means of artwork. Why do we’d like artwork, and what is the place of artwork on this society proper now?”
Watch the trailer for Ai Weiwei’s Turandot:
Ai Weiwei’s Turandot just lately had an Academy Award-qualifying run in Los Angeles. It’ll display screen on the Windsor Worldwide Movie Pageant, Canada, on 29 October, and on the Beirut Artwork Movie Pageant, Lebanon, on 7 November.
