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

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It does not take many pages of this memoir to leave one feeling drowned in toxic revolutionary brine.

But even in our darkest days, we might well have a little handful of sunflower seeds in our pockets. Despite these mixed feelings, 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrow is ultimately an elegiac tribute to his father’s professional and personal legacy. Ai clearly relishes the publicity these confrontations afford him and he makes no huge effort to ingratiate himself with the reader.First, his strong views on the importance of intellectual and artistic independence got him accused by the Nationalists of “damaging the republic” and sentenced to six years in prison. In 1989, after watching the events in Tiananmen Square unfold on CNN, he marched and staged a hunger strike in front of the UN. His 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. He endured many hardships and in spite of, or because of, that Ai Weiwei became an activist, using his art to speak for the rights of people.

It is powerful and interesting, a unique blend of historical fact, memoir, and philosophical thoughts. Years of Joys and Sorrows is a memoir worth reading, and Ai Weiwei is a man worth admiring and emulating.Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. As the Cultural Revolution reached its apogee in 1967, Ai Qing was being paraded through the streets of their labor camp in a dunce cap and mocked at “denunciation meetings (批斗大会).

His memoir tracks the parallel events of his father’s life (a famous Chinese poet who was exiled to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution), and his own clashes with authority, which culminated in his 3-month detention in 2011.He has done important work leading an amateur investigation into the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which thousands of children died when shoddy buildings collapsed. It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don’t believe in,” he says. But Ai Weiwei’s defiance is the dialectical result of the party’s own unyielding and often destructive militancy.