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

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Ai Weiwei reminds us that freedom is part of being human in the modern world: “Although China grows more powerful, its moral decay simply spreads anxiety and uncertainty in the world. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. As the Cultural Revolution reached its apogee in 1967, Ai Qing was being paraded through the streets of their labor camp in a dunce cap and mocked at “denunciation meetings (批斗大会).

Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. Ai Weiwei wryly observes, “Never forget that under a totalitarian system cruelty and absurdity go hand in hand.Born in Beijing in 1957, Ai Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate across today’s geopolitical world.

The absurdity of first seeking to destroy him for decades only to later “rehabilitate” him without explanation was not addressed.

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.

Tate Modern posted a giant “Release Ai Weiwei” sign on the facade of its building; it was also home to what has since become his most celebrated piece of art: an arrangement of millions of tiny, hand-carved porcelain sunflower seeds symbolising hope and survival. 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. This selection is drawn from more than 220 previously unpublished photographs of Ai Weiwei’s studio. A sense of belonging is central to one’s identity, for only with it can one find a spiritual refuge,” he wistfully notes. As he put it, earlier in life he’d had no idea who cleaned toilets for him,” he remembers, “and so it wasn’t unreasonable to expect him now to do cleaning for others.

An extravagantly rewarding hybrid: a combination history of modern China, biography of a dissident poet and memoir by his provocateur son . There was no way they would countenance someone like him repeatedly poking fingers in their eyes in such a public and unrepentant way. I was now nineteen, and though my ideas were often fuzzy, on one point I was clear: nobody could possibly look forward to a change more than I did. Ai Weiwei’s intimate, unflinching memoir is an instant classic in the literature of China’s rise, a protest against the destruction of memory, and a glorious testament to the power of free expression.

In fact, Mao’s 1942 treatise, The Yan’an Forums on Literature and Art, which formed the basis for this movement, has guided the party’s quest for ideological unity ever since its publication. Of Deng’s reforms, Ai Weiwei remarked to one interviewer, “I could see so many luxury cars, but there was no justice or fairness in this society. He counterattacked against the party’s practice of “intimidating you and weakening your resistance” until you censor yourself.But even as readers will be repelled by the relentless savagery of China’s capricious revolution, they will be uplifted by this father-and-son story of humanism stubbornly asserted against it.