Ai Weiwei: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. A Memoir

Ai Weiwei is the kind of visionary any nation should be proud to count among its creative class. He has drawn the world's attention to the vibrancy of contemporary Chinese culture ― Time Magazine

[An] ambitious memoir... 1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows touches on the inevitable contradictions of being an activist and an art superstar, but it is above all a story of inherited resilience, strength of character and self-determination -- Sean O'Hagan ― Observer

Ai Weiwei's detention in 2011... forms by far the most compelling part of the book... These exchanges are crisply and humanely recreated, as are those with Ai's well-educated interrogators -- Christopher Harding ― Daily Telegraph

A close look at a father-son dynamic, written in affecting terms, as well as a narrative about legacy, politics and creativity ― Time

Few people have combined art and activism to greater international acclaim than Ai Weiwei, with installations that address free speech, the environment and the global migrant crises.... Ai's new memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, can be seen as another act of defiance. As a child in Mao Zedong's China, he writes, he was subject to a culture "that made our memories vanish like shadows." The book, published November 2, is his effort to reclaim his country's and his family's dramatic past ― Wall Street Journal Magazine

An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his father's... Ai writes evocatively of the nights spent in his detention cell when "all I could do was use memories to fill the time, looking back at people and events, like gazing at a kite on a long string flying farther and farther, until it cannot be seen at all." Most poignant are his midnight conversations with the young, rural-born men employed to guard his door, their cracking joints reminding Ai of "a crisp snapping sound like a turnip being broken into two pieces... In "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows," Ai does not allow his own scraps to remain buried. To unearth them is an act of unburdening, an open letter to progeny, a suturing of past and present. It is the refusal to be a pawn - and the most potent assertion of a self ― New York Times Book Review

Moving and passionate... Weiwei writes with clarity and detail, and readers can feel the anxiety of political turmoil and the power of disobedience as he defies Chinese authorities, over and over again ... heart-rending yet exhilarating ― Bookpage

Ai Weiwei is one of the world's most important living artists. Born in 1957, he lives in Cambridge, UK.

Allan H. Barr is the author of a study in Chinese of a literary inquisition in the early Qing dynasty, Jiangnan yijie: Qing ren bixia de Zhuangshi shi'an, and the translator of several books by contemporary Chinese authors, including Yu Hua's China in Ten Words and Han Han's This Generation. He teaches Chinese at Pomona College in California.