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’s first feature-length documentary Human Flow premiered at the 74th Venice Film Festival in competition. Despite his aversion to Tiananmen Square, he found himself going there “again and again, as though drawn by some irresistible force. Then the sons and daughters of many other exiled “literary types” who’d once been regular guests in the Ai home began ransacking their house. For this special edition, Ai Weiwei hand-painted hardback dust jackets in a selection of ten colours.

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 and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp. He would spend the next two decades with his father, in effect a juvenile political prisoner in internal exile. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions to set up new possibilities and conditions for his audience to examine society and its values. Ai was nine, in 1967, when his father was banished to an area known as “Little Siberia,” in the Gurbantünggüt Desert during the Cultural Revolution. One of his father’s earliest works, written in Paris, describes his fellow exiles “loving freedom, hating war / In a fury over these things / In anguish over them / Working up a sweat / Tears in their eyes”.The two different stories are supposed to highlight how the memory of government oppression in China has continued ripple effects across generations. Sie haben sich erfolgreich zum "Mein Buchentdecker"-Bereich angemeldet, aber Ihre Anmeldung noch nicht bestätigt.

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. Ai Weiwei’s steadfast devotion to free expression and resistance to the Chinese Communist Party’s unrelenting pressures make this book glow as if irradiated with righteousness. But when talking about his own life, I got the sense that he’s never really examined his personal choices or the impact that he has had on the people around them.It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don’t believe in,” he says.

As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago.

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. Throughout his life, Ai has sacrificed almost every creature comfort and stability in pursuit of his artistic freedom (and the right of others to enjoy the same) against overwhelming odds, enduring a fallen-apart marriage, an art studio bulldozed before his eyes, hostile 24/7 surveillance by Chinese police and state, and much more. There was no way they would countenance someone like him repeatedly poking fingers in their eyes in such a public and unrepentant way. 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.

All collections are from our warehouse in Melksham, Wiltshire (address found at the bottom of the page).Robert Dorsett has also published his own poetry in The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.