1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
A Memoir
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4.4 • 17 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The “intimate and expansive” (Time) memoir of “one of the most important artists working in the world today” (Financial Times), telling a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process
“Poignant . . . An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his father’s.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, BookPage, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews
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. 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. 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, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
