i moved into his parents’ courtyard, and artists often dropped by to hear about the New York scene. One day in 1994, the visitors included Lu Qing, a soft-spoken artist born in Shenyang, who was seven years younger than Ai. That year, she appeared in one of Ai’s most widely recognized works: a black-and-white photograph in which she is standing amid tourists in Tiananmen Square, lifting her skirt to reveal her legs and underwear. (The timing—June, 1994—was a nod to the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen demonstrations.) Ai never planned on marriage—“the final resting place of the wretch,” as he put it to his brother—but, after he and Lu Qing had been together for three years, Lu Qing wanted a commitment. “So I said, ‘O.K., let’s get married,’ ” Ai recalled. “For me, it’s just a promise. I mean, what is marriage, right?” On a trip to New York, they gathered some friends as witnesses. “We went to New York City Hall and registered there.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=5