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

Product Information

This is the rarest sort of memoir, rising above the arc of history to grasp at the limits of the soul. 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. Robert Dorsett has also published his own poetry in The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.

The Chinese government, accordingly, seeks to erase individual space, suppress free expression, and distort our memory. As a bonus, Ai's memoir is replete with his own sketches of scenes and artworks which played a pivotal role throughout his development as artist and human-rights advocate. Renowned for his politics as much as for his art based on social intervention, a new approach to the readymade, and Chinese traditional crafts, Ai Weiwei’s fame extends beyond the art world. It was a commitment to reason, to a sense of beauty—these things are unbending, uncompromising, and any effort to suppress them is bound to provoke resistance. Ai Weiwei’s memoir is an effort to fill this lacuna, to spell out who his father was and who he now is himself as a person and a father.Even if you threaten to drag me out now and shoot me, my position won’t change,” he told his captors. 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. The first follows Qing, who was born into a well-off family in a village in Jinhua in 1910, developed into a freethinking painter, traveled to Paris in the late 1920s, and later became enmeshed in the impossible politics of revolutionary China. Similarly, a Western metropolis — New York — would become for Ai Weiwei what Paris was for his father: a kaleidoscopic swirl of influences that catalyzes new ways of seeing.

Ai now lives in Portugal, and, for all his pragmatic understanding of art’s limits in the face of totalitarianism, rejecting his father’s belief that poetry was “inseparable from the future of democratic politics”, art nonetheless remains for him a signifier of social health.The first book to dive exclusively into Weiwei’s approach to design and collecting, shedding light on the value we ascribe to everyday objects. The main studio space contained various artworks, some finished, some not, many in a state of perpetual refinement. Do not bet on that happening anytime soon: last month, a coterie of blue-chip galleries opened pop-up shows in a Beijing free-trade zone. 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. The artist first became “a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe” of the Chinese Communist party when he orchestrated the gathering and publication of the names of 4,851 children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.