1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS
In his widely anticipated memoir, “one of the most important artists working in the world today” (Financial Times) tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, the nation’s most celebrated poet.
“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.”—Michiko Kakutani
Hailed as “an eloquent and seemingly unsilenceable voice of freedom” by The New York Times, Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir that presents a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process.
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. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist—and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.
Ai Weiwei’s sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. 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.
At once ambitious and intimate, 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.
“1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows” is out now. Find out more on aiweiweibook.com.
Ai Weiwei with his father, celebrated Chinese poet Ai Qing, at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, November 1959.
I was born in 1957, eight years after the founding of the “New China.” My father was forty-seven. When I was growing up, my father rarely talked about the past, because everything was shrouded in the thick fog of the dominant political narrative, and any inquiry into fact ran the risk of provoking a backlash too awful to contemplate.
A photo of Ai Weiwei’s son, Ai Lao, walking on Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern, London, U.K., 2010.
I wanted to try something involving a material object that had close associations with culture and history, memory and identity, a subject that would be instantly recognizable but at the same time open to a variety of interpretations…
In Mao’s China, sunflowers also had a special, symbolic status. In countless pictures, with captions reading “Beloved Chairman Mao, we will always be faithful to you!” or “Chairman Mao Is the Reddest, Reddest Red Sun in Our Hearts,” Mao, smiling smugly, dominated the center of the picture, a huge red sun rising like a halo behind his head, while below a sea of sunflowers turned their enraptured faces toward him, basking in the sunshine of his infallible thought.
By March 2010, when I submitted my proposal to the Tate Modern, the concept was clear in my mind: to fill the immense space in the Turbine Hall not with a large, imposing structure but with its opposite. Across the huge floor I would lay a bed of tiny, humble objects: sunflower seeds, one hundred million of them. All yet to be made.