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

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If it was the symbolic center of China, it also evoked such “a mixture of helplessness and humiliation” that in 1995 he shot what was to become one of his most confrontational and famous works of art: a photo showing him giving Tiananmen Gate and its giant portrait of Mao the finger. It’s both a sad and awe inspiring memoir and I felt small and insignificant after getting to know such artists. He endured many hardships and in spite of, or because of, that Ai Weiwei became an activist, using his art to speak for the rights of people. Years of Joys and Sorrows touches on the inevitable contradictions of being an activist and an art superstar, but it is above all a story of inherited resilience, strength of character and self-determination. While confined, Ai thought of his father, the celebrated poet Ai Qing, who was imprisoned for “causing a public disturbance through Communist Party activities” in the 1930s and exiled to remote work camps by the Communists during a purge of government critics in the late 1950s.

He and his family were banished to a desolate place known as ‘Little Siberia’, where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labour 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. A comprehensive excursion, complete with abundant illustrations and material, through the life and work of this star artist, who like no one since Joseph Beuys has succeeded in intertwining scupltural, media and political thinking.He remained there for 12 years, mostly living in New York, where he won a scholarship to Parsons School of Design, only to forfeit it with an impetuous decision: leaving an art history exam paper blank save for his signature. The way that Ai père et fils sought justice, truth, freedom, and liberty in the face of the party’s myriad oppressive attacks makes them of a kind. Living in a dug-out pit, the boy foraged for firewood to keep warm, his father forced to clean latrines in which “faeces would freeze into icy pillars”. However, as the weeks wore on, “doubts crept in as I lay awake in the late hours—about how this all would end, and about the path that had led me here….

Despite his aversion to Tiananmen Square, he found himself going there “again and again, as though drawn by some irresistible force.

The life of the Ai family composes a drama whose every act brings ever more egregious assaults by the state against it. He’d already concluded that “if you’re not prepared to make a name for yourself through resistance, the only way to win distinction is through bowing and scraping. The publication will also include excerpts from his blog and a wide selection of essays by leading critics, art- historians, as well as interviews with the artist. In my case, as time went on, the intrusions afflicted me with a nameless exhaustion, as though some unidentifiable foreign body had been planted inside me.