1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: The story of two lives, one nation, and a century of art under tyranny

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The artist first became “a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe” of the Chinese Communist party when he orchestrated the gathering and publication of the names of 4,851 children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Like the author’s brilliant installations and films, the book is an impassioned testament to the enduring powers of art—to challenge the state and the status quo, to affirm essential and inconvenient truths, and to assert the indispensable agency of imagination and will in the face of political repression. I openly declared my opposition to the status quo, reaffirming, through the act of non-cooperation, my responsibility to take a critical stance. Were Ai to have kept this politicking confined to the gallery, the state security services might not have been so determined in their persecution of him. At 19 Ai Qing traveled to France, where exposure to Apollinaire and Breton reshaped his aesthetic sensibility and honed an appreciation for the relationship between art and politics.

Red Guards put banners outside their shack that read, “Expose Ai Qing’s True Counter-Revolutionary Colors! Instead, the artist has increasingly turned to documentary-making to highlight the government’s corruption and censorship, as well as embracing blogging and social media with bravado. It is in the recollections of Weiwei’s teenage years in a region nicknamed “Little Siberia” that the autobiography is at its most vivid and revealing. Of course, it’s obvious that Ai also regards the officer as a pawn, one who, in serving an oppressive regime, has sacrificed his freedom to speak for himself.For almost a decade, they existed in “a square hole dug into the ground, with a crude roof formed of tamarisk branches and rice stalks, sealed with several layers of grassy mud”. But his adversary has only grown stronger, and he has been erased from public life in his homeland while lauded abroad. The first follows Qing, who was born into a well-off family in a village in Jinhua in 1910, developed into a freethinking painter, traveled to Paris in the late 1920s, and later became enmeshed in the impossible politics of revolutionary China. Ai clearly relishes the publicity these confrontations afford him and he makes no huge effort to ingratiate himself with the reader. You’re just a pawn in the game, you know,” a public security officer summarily informs Ai Weiwei, China’s most controversial — and to the Chinese Communist Party, its most dangerous — artist.

Despite his aversion to Tiananmen Square, he found himself going there “again and again, as though drawn by some irresistible force.Once an intimate of Mao Zedong and the nation's most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as "Little Siberia," where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. When the Wenchuan earthquake hit Sichuan Province in 2008, Ai Weiwei attacked the shoddy “bean curd” construction of the collapsed schools and buildings in which thousands of children died, as well as the corrupt officials who had allowed them to go up.

After Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1959 to reorganize rural China into “people’s communes (人民公社)” and precipitated one of the worst famines in Chinese history, the Ai family was moved for further “remolding” to a still more godforsaken place of exile: Xinjiang, China’s westernmost desert province. This is the rarest sort of memoir, rising above the arc of history to grasp at the limits of the soul. But it was not directed solely at me—its attention was directed at every individual, for everyone has soft, hidden places that they don’t want others to touch. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned twentieth-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world. In 1957, the year of Ai Weiwei’s birth, China’s leader, Chairman Mao, launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, a purge of intellectuals whose work was deemed critical of the state.Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Ai Weiwei …He became ‘a spike in the flesh’ of the Chinese Communist party.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Night and day, he shared his living space with two guards, whom he was forbidden to look at and whose permission he needed for every movement and utterance. The little he wrote about himself and his early years is entwined with details of his father's life. While his father was cleaning latrines, scraping feces that had frozen “into icy pillars,” 10-year-old Ai built the stove, fetched water from the well and endured a life that resembled “an open-ended course in wilderness survival training, if we were lucky enough to survive. Then, to prevent him from attending the opening of his new studio in Shanghai, he was put under house arrest and the studio was bulldozed. Ai Weiwei’s steadfast devotion to free expression and resistance to the Chinese Communist Party’s unrelenting pressures make this book glow as if irradiated with righteousness.