This book was cool since it brought light to Ai Weiwei's art and activism, but the book doesn't seem to have the same sort of passion he has for his art, so the book was hard to get through and felt dry.

Ai Weiwei's story is told in multiple parts, from his father's history to his own artistic beginnings and then into his activism against the Chinese government later on. Having heard about Ai Weiwei before and seen his art about the death of the school children during the earthquake, I was eager to read this. Unfortunately, it wasn't that attention-getting, and while there were moments that moved me, it was a struggle to read. There were intense moments, but unfortunately, it fell flat. I would still encourage others to read it just to understand what the Chinese government does to its citizens.

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows is a memoir by Ai Weiwei of the sociopolitical changes in the 20th century in China and of his own place in the larger picture as an artist, philosopher, and activist. Released 2nd Nov 2021 by Penguin Random House on their Crown Publishing imprint, it's 400 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. Paperback format due out in 4th quarter 2022. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately it makes it much easier to find particular text in a search.

This is an engaging and honest memoir of the author's life, part of which he spent in exile as a child with his father, a poet of renown. The philosophy with which he was surrounded and the privation of his early life informed much of his personality and later artistic expression. The writing is intelligent and open and there are glimpses of genuine wit and humor. I enjoyed his reminiscences very much; the recollections of culture shock and confusion as a young Chinese student in America were touching and honestly told.

The book is enhanced throughout with glimpses into his sketchbooks and drawings. They add a lot of depth to the read. The translation work is flawlessly provided by Dr. Allan Barr. It scans very well and doesn't read in the English edition as though it were translated, which is obviously the ideal.

Four and a half stars. This would be a superlative choice for public library acquisition as well as recommended for readers of memoir and biography.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Only a year older than my father, Ai Weiwei's memoir takes me to the era that my parents grew up in and lived through. A bit of a political radical himself, my father shares a lot of the views of Ai and through this book I feel like I could understand a little bit about where he came from and a big reason of why our family is where we are today. I enjoy learning about the journey of how Ai Weiwei became so prolific in the art world today, as well as a little about his father the poet.
It was a long read and took me months, but a worthwhile one for sure.

It takes some balls to stage an art exhibit under the watchful eye of an oppressive government and call it Fuck Off. Translated in the Chinese as “Uncooperative Attitude,” this was how artist-dissident-activist-pain-in-the-ass Ai Weiwei plied his wares at the turn of the millennium, and how he continues to do it today (a recent Instagram series shows the artist walking on a treadmill, naked). Yet his touching memoir, 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrows, is to some degree a more contemplative recollection than one might expect from someone so apt to flip the bird at convention. This can make things slow-going—until he inevitably gets pissed off, which he reveals in ways both subtle and seething.

While the book is on the whole chronological, Ai intersperses memories of his childhood with stories of his father, poet Ai Qing. The elder Ai was a favored son of the Chinese Communist Party—until he wasn’t. The younger Ai weaves his story in and out of time, from his father’s idealized youth as an enthusiastic Communist supporter, to the rise of Mao, promising and initially delivering to the people before roundly taking everything away, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and sending Ai and his father into exile for decades. Nearly half these 1000 Years is devoted to his father’s struggle and late-career renewal, and running through this conventional autobiographical narrative is an undercurrent of helpless rage. Ai was still young during this period, and he could merely watch as, during the Cultural Revolution, his aging father was forced to clean communal latrines, grueling work that he kept doing even when he began to suffer from a hernia.

So one can understand why Ai Weiwei might have a problem with China and Communism, and that long affected his art. One of his most notorious aesthetic pranks is the series of self-portraits he made in 1995 as he deliberately dropped a priceless Han Dynasty urn and let it shatter to pieces. He had not yet run afoul of authorities, but even this iconoclastic imp admits that it was a “capricious, inane act.”

Even after Mao’s death and the rehabilitation of his father’s reputation, Ai, whose family had been for so long tormented by their country, left to study in New York City, and for a time in the ‘80s he even worked Times Square drawing caricatures of tourists. Despite struggles in America, he felt more at home on the Lower East Side, and while passages recounting his father’s trials could at times be dry, this is where his writing gets livelier, as did his art. The back half of these 1000 Years chart Ai’s growing reputation in the art world—as well as increased attempts by the “reformed” Chinese government to break his spirit by means of a Kafkaesque level of police harassment.

When Ai returned to China after his New York sojourn, young artists flocked to him for advice, and he dispensed it without prejudice: “To conventional culture, art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe: the reason why art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes what seems settled and secure.” Yet Ai’s prose isn’t as mischievous as his artwork—at least not on the surface; what may be more alarming to his readers is his not-so-subtle skewering of Western politics, in which he flips his favorite digit at certain popular ideals. Describing his father’s exile and Mao’s atrocities, Ai warns: “Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—it is also present, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans.” There’s a middle finger one might not have expected.

The book’s title comes from one of Ai Qing’s poems, written after a trip to the ruins of an ancient city on the Silk Road:

A thousand years of joys and sorrows
Of them now there is no trace
May we the living live the best life we can
We can’t expect the world to remember

Ai Weiwei wants his son to remember what his father and grandfather suffered; he doesn’t want the world to forget, either.

This is a simply told yet unique and often fascinated story of the author's life and his father's life. It's a real window into China from the mid-century revolution onward.

(First of all, thank you for sending me a review copy of the book. Note: I posted my review both on Amazon.com and today on The Internet Review of Books!)

I was blown away by the first third of the memoir and then a little iffy about the middle part, and then I thought the last part was strong.

The beginning of the book launches Ai Weiwei (born 1957) right into exile along with his dad, a famous poet who has been dubbed a "rightist" by the Mao regime. The description of what the author went through as a ten-year-old in Northern China when he and his father lived together in a cave for a year and a half, abandoned by Ai's mother, while Ai Qing worked as a woodcutter and cleaned toilets... well, this was a disturbing and riveting exploration of a dysfunctional society *and* a dysfunctional father-son relationship. I was moved by Ai Weiwei as a little boy proudly making things for their home, making a primitive oil lamp, a stove. No wonder he became a "maker."

And I really enjoyed the historical look back at his father's life, a past that Ai had to reconstruct because his father told him virtually nothing. His father's life included a year in Paris in the 1930s and a stint in jail for being a Communist; ironically, he was briefly famous once China won independence. But then Mao turned against him and against all artists. Ai's sympathetic narration conveys how much of a betrayal this was, how much pain his father must have borne. And all he got from his own father was scorn for wanting to be a poet.

However, it was slow going once Ai decided to leave China for New York. Interestingly, he followed a girlfriend there. The New York scenes lacked energy. Perhaps he was very depressed and aimless when he was there. You get the sense that he didn't feel in control of his own life, and no wonder, after his experiences as a child. Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag pop up, but you feel that Ai didn't try hard enough to make a connection. Perhaps it was all too foreign for him. He misses the Tiananmen Square debacle.

Then once he returns to China, he becomes famous rather quickly and he doesn't really explain how. Somehow he is involved in the construction of the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing. He builds his own house, too, and attracts followers and helpers. Then he gets really into the internet... He moves from one wife to another as well, but stays living platonically with the first wife while he has a child with the second partner.

And then he is persecuted. This part of the book really picks up and becomes fascinating. He's taken into custody to a secret place, he's "disappeared" for a few months, and when he returns, he has become old. I found the dynamics of him resisting the scolding and psychological torture of his jailers very compelling. All in all, his analysis of cynical, utterly corrupt modern China is extremely sharp and provocative. In the end, he became a fighter despite himself. And he got out.

His deepest love appears to be for his son, Ai Lao. I found the way he approached the women in his life rather strange, as if he was embarrassed to explore his feelings for them. (His father was much the same, apparently.) So it goes, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but despite some arrogance, I found that Ai was the stubborn, complex, ironic person I thought he was. The line drawings of his artworks are a lovely touch—surprisingly delicate.

The final chapters read like a mission statement, going back and forth between proud assertions of his commitment to freedom of expression and sad personal reflections. He writes: "My past and my present have become disconnected, like the skeleton of a dead animal whose bones have long lost connective tissue, and despite my best efforts I still find it hard to present the entirety of my experience. This same puzzle is found in my art." And, "My father, my son, and I have all ended up on the same path, leaving the land where we were born. A sense of belonging is central to one's identity, for only with it can one find a spiritual refuge: as the Chinese saying has it, 'It's once you're settled that you can get on with life.' Without a sense of belonging, my language lost, I feel on edge and unsure about things, facing an equally anxious world."

No wonder he is obsessed with the struggle of refugees trying to reach Europe. His art is eloquent and he is famous, but it's the insecure man who has trouble "integrating himself," as Western psychology would put it, that interests me the most.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-weiweis-artistic-rebellion-11635683260?mod=wsjmag_bucket1

Interview for WSJ Magazine

I was lucky enough to win an electronic galley of Ai Weiwei's 1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS in a Shelf Awareness giveaway. Thank you for the early look, and I hope the rest of your summer is safe and happy!