Psychological

gave a deep understanding with forces. ( )

Artist Ai Weiwei writes a dual memoir of his father and himself. His father, Ai Qing, was a well-known poet and friend of Pablo Neruda, but during the Cultural Revolution he was put in a camp and treated poorly because the state deemed his poetry anti-Communist. Ai Weiwei, in parallel, is an outspoken artist who found an internet following on Twitter and constantly challenges the status quo. This, too, got him into trouble with the authoritarian state, and he draws parallels between himself and his father and writes about his commitment to art and free expression.

Towards the end of the memoir, Ai Weiwei explains his reason for writing:

"So the idea came to me that if I was released, to bridge the gap between us, I should write down what I knew of my father and tell my son honestly who I am, what life means to me, why freedom is so precious, and why autocracy fears art. I hoped that my convictions could become something he could see and feel in his heart and mind. That way, if one day Ai Lao [his son] wanted to know more, it would be there–my own story, and his grandfather’s."

He does exactly what he sets out to do. The form of the book is nearly evenly split between his father's story and his. Sometimes the timeline in his father's story was a little hard for me to follow, because Ai Weiwei would move forward and back, mostly telling it in chronological order but then referring to something in the future that I wasn't familiar with before picking up the thread. Throughout both men's stories, he reflects on art - and a lot of his thoughts could apply to Art as a whole, including writing - and its meaning to him. I was unfamiliar with his art prior to picking up the memoir, but I found that half of the book especially interesting. Photographs and sketches accompany the text and provide context for the art exhibitions he describes, and now I want to see if I can find at least one of the documentaries he created. He gives a lot of background to his thought process behind his works, and insists that art is always changing and doesn't mean one thing. A book that would equally interest readers of Chinese history and art history. ( )

This is the memoir of Ai Weiwei, a famous Chinese conceptual artist, architect and activist. Although Ai Weiwei has struggled determinately and consistency against the censorship and other oppressions of the current Communist Chinese regime, and has presented his conceptual art in major exhibitions and museums around the world, this is the rare memoir in which the portrayal of the author's childhood is actually more interesting (or at least that was my reaction) than the portrayal of his or her adulthood. That's because Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was also famous, a world renowned lyric poet, who was targeted and harshly oppressed by the forces of Mao's Cultural Revolution. In approximately the first half of his memoir, Ai Weiwei relates his time as a child, moving with his father and his half-brother from one remote and desolate punishment outpost to another, with only intermittent contact with his mother. From his father's early comradeship with Mao, through the descriptions of these horrible work settlements and Ai Qing's day to day degrading humiliations as a "Big Rightist" who is made an example of on an hourly basis, Ai Weiwei walks us through the events and repercussions of the Cultural Revolution and describes the profound loss of history and Chinese cultural identity that resulted.

Oddly, though, once Ai Weiwei grows to adulthood and, especially, once he becomes a noted artist and activist, the narrative flattened out for me. Perhaps some of this has to do with the translation from Chinese to English. Ai Weiwei certainly has led a fascinating and, it seems, a quite admirable life. His conceptual art installations have been aimed at promoting ideas of freedom and individuality, of protesting against the harshness and absurdity of the repression of the Communist regime, and of pointing out the regime's corruption and ineptitude as they steer the country toward capitalism under the guise of communism. One of the issues for me, as I think back on the reading experience, is that Ai Weiwei often presents his own activities in isolation, as if he were the only activist in China. Occasionally other names are mentioned, but I found it off-putting that so much of Ai Weiwei's narrative consisted of statements along the lines of "I created this work in order to say that." Well, it's a memoir, so of course he'd be talking about his own accomplishments, but he seemed to me to be entirely self-focused. With a few exceptions, the entirely of Chinese history during the time under discussion seemed to me to be focused through the lens of his own perspective.

An example of this is Ai Weiwei's description of his discovery of the Internet, and of the beginnings of his life as a blogger with many thousands of followers. There are overstatements like "Every character that I tapped on my keyboard was emblematic of a new kind of freedom." (Again, maybe this is a translation issue.) The next sentence, I'm sure, rang true at the time, though seems less assuredly true by this point: "Buy enabling alternative voices, the internet weakened the power of autocracy, dispelling the obstacles it tried to put in the individual's way." That second sentence and another that follows soon after ("On the internet, social coercion is nullified and the individual acquires a kind of weightlessness, no longer subordinate to the power structure.") made me nostalgic for the early days of the online world, when we still thought such things were unmistakably true. And was Ai Weiwei the only activist blogger at this time? I don't know, but from this memoir, you'd think so.

One more example of this sort of thing: In his role as an architect, Ai Weiwei had an active role in the designing of the stadium (referred to by Ai Weiwei as "the Bird's Nest") to be used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The description of the teamwork and creative process in this work was very interesting. But Ai's final comments on the endeavor had me scratching my head:

"The design of the Bird's Nest aimed to convey the message that freedom was possible: the integration of its external appearance whites exposed structure encapsulated something essential about democracy transparency, and equity. In defense of those principles, I now resolved to put a distance between myself and the Olympics, which were simply serving as nationalistic, self-congratulatory propaganda. Freedom is the precondition for fairness, and without freedom, competition is a sham."

I found Ai Weiwei's assumption that any more than a slight handful of observers would notice a message of freedom in the design of a stadium to be unfortunately self-absorbed, and his shock that the Chinese government was using the Olympics as a propaganda tool, despite the artistic splendor of the stadium design, to be more than a little disengenuous.

Ai Weiwei's personal relationships get more or less short shrift. I understand that his focus here was on his artistic and political accomplishments and on exposing conditions in China, but no matter how reasonable the intent, the result for me was a memoir somewhat drained of dimension and empathy.

I have waited much too long to say that Ai Weiwei is clearly a man of courage who has inspired a great many of his internet followers, and admirers of his art, to maintain a resistant attitude toward the oppression of the Chinese regime. He has done so despite the constant threat to his own freedom, even to his life. In this, we has clearly been inspired by his father's example. Also, I have a lot of respect for conceptual artists, those who attempt to challenge our preconceived notions of reality, life and politics through their work. Ai Weiwei's output, and the degree to which he is clearly admired and respected by other artists and curators, speaks volumes about the value of his accomplishments. Many of the installations and exhibits Ai Weiwei describes sound like works I would love to see and experience, and there's quite a lot of interest in the memoir about the creative process in general. And as a tour through Chinese history from the end of World War 2 through the present day, and as a close-in look at the threats, oppressions and dangers experienced by artists fighting to stay relevant within oppressive regimes, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows is a valuable narrative and testimony. ( )

My best friend is an artist, and when she showed me the draft of a memoir she'd written, I was outraged - "Wait, you're an artist AND a writer? No fair!". My response to this memoir of Ai Weiwei is the same: we know of his skill as an artist and his political struggles against the Chinese government, but he’s also an incredibly skilled writer. The memoir begins with the exile of Ai Weiwei’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, to the Chinese equivalent of Siberia, along with his two sons. Ai Qing was a political prisoner who suffered greatly under Mao’s administration. Although they lived side-by-side in a freezing dugout, Ai Weiwei never spoke with his father about his punishment, nor about the regime that caused so much suffering for those who were considered to be elites. As Ai Weiwei’s own talent in architecture and in conceptual art became recognized, he was able to leave China and travel to the US and to Europe, and, while enjoying his freedom from constant observation and harassment, he was always drawn back to China. Eventually he was done in by his outspoken rebellion on social media, and was also imprisoned and banned from the internet and from participating in Chinese and international exhibits. He now lives in England. His métier is Dada and his idol is Marcel Duchamp. Ai Weiwei is a true anarchist, dedicated only to his son and his artistic spirit, and permanently contemptuous of any regime that represses the spirit of its citizens. His memoir is a powerful outcry against the rigidity of modern Chinese society.

Quotes: “Memories were a burden, and it was best to be done with them.”

“I felt an aversion to all the norms and premises that others never thought to challenge, and this kept me in an almost permanent state of tension.”

“Violence, so deeply rooted in American life that you could never escape it, reflected the profound flaws built into the country’s social fabric.”

“By the very absence of explicit guidance from my father, a spiritual connection was forged between us; he, in his way, protected me.”

“Then, as now, I seemed to have, however childishly, an instinctive resistance toward cultural authority.”

“When Chinese are abroad, they love nothing more than getting together with people they know – even being with people they don’t like is better than being by themselves! This sense of insecurity when alone stems from the lack of basic guarantees in Chinese society – kinship and bonds of affection are what you count on for protection.”

“Inherent ideas and frameworks left me dissatisfied. When you break away from mandated meaning, you enter a state of tension with your surroundings, and it is then, when you are uncomfortable, that you are at your most alert.”

“Limitations come only from a fear inside the heart, and art is the antidote to fear.” ( )