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He has done important work leading an amateur investigation into the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which thousands of children died when shoddy buildings collapsed. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his life story and that of his father, whose creativity was stifled. Once a close associate 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.
He met, and briefly befriended, Allen Ginsberg, a champion of his father’s poetry, and for a time shared a loft with the performance artist Tehching Hsieh who happened to be spending a year tied to fellow artist Linda Montano with an 8ft rope.
After having first been excluded and then absenting himself from his own society for so many years, collecting things from China’s past was a way for him to reattach himself. A sense of belonging is central to one’s identity, for only with it can one find a spiritual refuge,” he wistfully notes. But when Mao halted the campaign as suddenly as he’d started it and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign pillorying the very critics he’d just emboldened, Ai Qing paid grievously for his frankness. He does not address the criticism levelled at him after he recreated the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee pictured dead on a beach, with himself in the position of the drowned boy.
He briefly mentions friends, colleagues, lovers, and then rushes on from them (both figuratively and literally. At once ambitious and intimate, Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression. The RA is a unique institution, an independent charity with a mission to be a clear, strong voice for art and artists, where art is made, exhibited and debated.
Published to coincide with his major exhibition at the Royal Academy, this book explores the multidisciplinary work of Ai Weiwei Hon RA in texts by Tim Marlow, John Hancock and Daniel Rosbottom. After all, as Deng Xiaoping began opening China up, more and more foreigners were arriving in Beijing and asking after its most celebrated twentieth-century poet. 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. Nonetheless, “my father, my son, and I have all ended up on the same path, leaving the land where we were born. 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.
Born in Beijing in 1957, Ai Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate across today’s geopolitical world. 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. 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).While in detention, he was interrogated daily, threatened with myriad but ever-changing charges, endlessly pressured to confess, and monitored constantly by cameras as well as two guards who stood inside his cell twenty-four hours a day “like wooden statues. But whereas Ai Qing’s initial commitment to socialism made it difficult for him to ever fully turn against Mao’s revolution, his son, lacking that same idealism, slid more easily into opposition, cynicism, and then finally resistance.
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