It’s an idea that came quite spontaneously.

The photographer and journalist asked me to pose for a photo near the beach [in Lesbos] and to close my eyes. We had talked about the image of the boy, so I had that on my mind.

You see so many children come off these boats. They are like angels — they are the most vulnerable. You can see the world has put them in extreme, hopeless conditions. There are two worlds — a world of adults and a world of babies, and they are not connected.

That feeling happened in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. When I stood on the earthquake gravel. Under my feet, there were hundreds, thousands of young students [buried beneath] those ‘tofu’ buildings.” Buildings were nicknamed ‘tofu’ structures in Mandarin, for their low quality, shoddy nature.

I was standing there and I could feel my body shaking with the wind — you feel death in the wind. You are taken by some kind of emotions that you can only have when you are there. So for me to be in the same position [as Kurdi], is to suggest our condition can be so far from human concerns in today’s politics.

Wonderfully, this isn’t Ai’s first time referencing the refugees. In fact, he has been documenting them since December, spending a substantial time in Lesbos (the small Greek island) and, for two weeks, he made a daily journey down to the beach at dawn to watch boats bring to shore dozens of refugees. He would capture pictures and post them on Instagram – and its not the first time Ai has used Instagram as a platform for on-going documentation:

I would put all my jackets on and it was so cold — the wind feels like it passes through your body. Then, try to imagine people in the ocean. When the boats come in, those people cannot step out, their legs are frozen, often wet, and many people get carried by volunteers because their legs cannot move.

And Europe is not much of a blanket.

When they get off the boats, men and women have tears in their eyes — they think they have made it. Volunteers come from everywhere and hand them a cup of tea, or a piece of chocolate. This small thing can make a kid happy. But Europe is not much more than a blanket, and a little piece of chocolate.

He says he wishes to travel to Syria, Iraq and other places in the Middle East related to the refugee crisis, but his relationship with China is on a tight rope since he was “accused of tax evasion”, but that’s another story.