1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

June 1, 2021

Exiled with his family to China's remote Little Siberia after his father was declared a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, Ai was eventually able to study art in the United States, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and checked out Andy Warhol's work. He returned home to become a world-renowned artist, the subject of two award-winning documentaries and a member of the team that designed the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. He also became an ardent activist who has been jailed for his art and his beliefs. With two eight-page color inserts and line drawings throughout.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 29, 2021
In this impassioned and elegant work, acclaimed Chinese artist and activist Weiwei (Humanity) tells his story alongside his father’s—renowned poet Ai Qing—to describe the personal cost of resistance. In 1957, the year Weiwei was born, Qing was exiled during China’s purge of “rightist” intellectuals, first to the far northeast and later to the base of Xinjiang’s Tian Shan mountain range. “The whirlpool that swallowed up my father... a mark on me that I carry to this day,” Weiwei writes. Though Qing’s reputation was later restored, Weiwei, at 19, felt alienated by “the new post-Mao order.” Novelistic in its scope and detail, his story follows his search for freedom across decades and borders, from New York City—where he moved in 1981 and found minor success as an artist—back to Beijing in 1993, where he continued his subversive art, “damaging the past and reconstructing it.” Despite being commissioned to design Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics (“I was as much of an attraction to as the Great Wall”), Weiwei continued to rail against the country’s oppressive systems with his art and writing, continuing to do so even after his imprisonment in 2011. Astounding and provocative, this easily sits in the top tier of dissident writing. Agent: Peter W. Bernstein, Bernstein Literary.

Starred review from October 1, 2021

Artist Ai Weiwei has penned an engrossing memoir that takes readers back and forth through time as he examines the life and legacy of his father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, as well as the evolution of his own political and artistic sensibilities, all in the shadow of the tremendous upheaval in China over the past century. The first half of the book is an accounting of the experiences of Ai Qing during Mao's rise and fall in China; the poet was alternately celebrated and denounced, working with the Chinese Communist Party at one point, and being exiled to a remote re-education camp at another. Ai Weiwei then turns his lens on his own young adulthood and his development as an artist. He draws contrasts between his own and his father's experiences of the Chinese State, travel, incarceration, immigration, and repatriation. The memoir is illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of Ai's artworks that reflect on people and place and evoke raw emotion. VERDICT Ai creates a vivid portrait of two generations grappling with their place in the Chinese cultural and political landscape, and gives readers a glimpse of his approach to art and the creative process. Highly recommended for those interested in art, memoir, politics, and history.--Rebecca Brody, Westfield State Univ., MA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2021
The artist and social activist explores his father's turbulent relationship with the early Communist regime and his own struggle for creative freedom. Spurred by his imprisonment in 2011 for "economic crimes" against the authoritarian Chinese government, Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) uses his father's heartbreakingly difficult life as a point of departure to tell his own story. Born in 1910, just as the Qing dynasty was collapsing, Ai Qing was part of the new idealistic proletariat, trained as an artist and schooled for a year in Paris before taking his place as part of the increasingly ideological cultural force in the new Communist China. But Mao Zedong unleashed waves of political upheaval, and just when the author was born, Ai Qing was exiled during the so-called Anti-Rightist campaign. Most miserably, during the Cultural Revolution, father and sons were sent to "Little Siberia," on the edge of the Gurbant�ngg�t Desert, where they lived 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." Still, his father's indomitable spirit remained intact, and under Deng Xiaoping's leadership, the family was able to return to Beijing. At this point, the author segues into his own restless seeking. He spent more than a decade in New York City before returning to Beijing to try his hand at curating art shows, designing architecture (he consulted on the "Bird's Nest" stadium for the 2008 Olympics), and engaging in social activism (Black Cover Book). The author eventually ran afoul of the party leadership for his "intolerable insolence," but the tenacity of his father and his artistic vision have always guided him. "In China," he writes, "we were still living in a culturally impoverished era, but art had not abandoned us--its roots were deeply planted in the weathered soil." Throughout, the author maintains a fluid, heartfelt narrative. A beautiful and poignant memoir demonstrating perseverance and the power of art.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 15, 2021
World-acclaimed artist of conscience Ai Weiwei's exceptional facility with language is as essential to his profoundly imagined, audaciously produced, and deeply humanitarian creations as his courageous opposition to Chinese authoritarianism. His eloquence and commitment to freedom of expression mirrors that of his father, the revered poet Ai Qing, who was labeled a traitor, harshly abused, and exiled during Mao's reign of terror. As a boy, Ai Weiwei lived with his father in a totalitarian hell in China's "Little Siberia." Ai Weiwei felt impelled to tell his father's story and share his own harrowing experiences after he was cruelly detained, and tortuously separated from his son, in 2011, the culmination of relentless government surveillance and harassment. Ai Weiwei's bone-deep empathy and utter devotion to the fight for truth and justice shape every page in this galvanizing record of his and his father's ordeals which embody a century of valorous artistic exploration in spite of diabolical tyranny. Excerpts from Ai Qing's poems are matched with unprecedented accounts of Ai Weiwei's acceptance that, for him, ""inspiration comes from resistance"" and the resulting evolution of his boldly innovative, endangering, yet empowering collaborative projects, from documentaries to architecture, mind-whirling and profoundly affecting installations, and gutsy digital dissent. Ai Weiwei's historically precise, generously candid, and deeply delving chronicle is clarion testimony to how intrinsic art is to human nature and to defining and protecting human rights. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Revered artist and activist Ai Weiwei has a ready audience for this revelatory and moving family history and memoir.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.