Ai Weiwei took a selfie with a far-right German politician, and defended the act after criticism mounted.

Alice Weidel, a member of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in German parliament, went up to Ai at a restaurant in Berlin, identified herself as a government figure, and asked if she could take a selfie. Ai agreed, and Weidel posted the resulting snapshot to Twitter last week, with a caption reading, “#AiWeiwei is in the capital!!!! I almost did not dare ask him for a selfie ;-).” Immediately, fans began to ask why Ai, who is a vocal activist on behalf of refugees around the world, publicly appeared with a politician who has called immigrants “illiterate.” Weidel’s AfD party is fiercely right wing, and other members have called a Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” and deemed work in Documenta 14 that calls for more open borders “ideologically polarizing, deformed art.”