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. Its triple-height vaulted cellars, which Ai, a self-taught architect, renovated himself after leaving his native China in 2015, are now pristine and well-lit, but when he first visited the long-abandoned subterranean space, it was “completely dark,” he says, “like an underworld.” In that way, it recalls the underground home where the artist lived for five years as a child, a place he calls “the black hole”: a bare shelter on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert in the remote Xinjiang region, one of the sites where Ai’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, was exiled following China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s. In that half-buried home, Ai first encountered the authoritarianism and censorship that he has now spent four decades resisting, ridiculing and at times enduring again, as a defender of human rights and self-proclaimed political “troublemaker.” Today, he travels frequently, stopping in Berlin; Cambridge, England, where his sixteen-year-old son, Lao, his only child, attends school; and Montemor-o-Novo, a town in the countryside ofsouthern Portugal whose sunny climate reminds him of his childhood in the desert. That approximately 20-acre property hosts a few assistants, as well as many cats, dogs, birds and fish and a reconstruction of his wooden Shanghai studio that was demolished by local authorities in 2011. Ai is used to constant movement, and to the possibility of displacement. “The concept of a home has never been truly established for me,” he says.