A Chinese Art Critic Weiwei and His American Counterpart William Are Both Lookingg
Nonfiction
For His Male parent and His Son, Ai Weiwei Is Determined to Go out a Trace
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1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS
A Memoir
By Ai Weiwei
Translated past Allan H. Barr
"You're just a pawn in the game, y'all know," a public security officeholder summarily informs Ai Weiwei, China's well-nigh controversial — and to the Chinese Communist Party, its almost dangerous — artist. Information technology is 2011 and Ai, suspected of "inciting the subversion of state power," has recently been held convict for 81 days; soon after his release, he is slapped with a tax nib equivalent to $two.4 million. Co-ordinate to the officeholder, Ai's high profile has made him an expedient tool for Westerners to attack China, but "pawns sooner or later all get sacrificed." Of form, it'due south obvious that Ai also regards the officer equally a pawn, one who, in serving an oppressive regime, has sacrificed his freedom to speak for himself.
In his first memoir, "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows," Ai recounts this and other showdowns with the state — confrontations that, aslope his iconoclastic art, have both forged his status as an international icon and forced him to work in political exile. The volume takes its title from verses that his father, the famed poet Ai Qing, wrote while visiting the ruins of an aboriginal city on the Silk Road: "Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows / Not a trace can exist found." During his months in detention, Ai became adamant to leave a trace; regret about the unbridgeable gap between himself and his belatedly father, and the fear that his young son might never know who his father really is, gave rise to the thought of a book.
Ai's story begins with his childhood, years of which were spent living with his begetter in the remote hinterlands of China, where Ai Qing was exiled in 1967 to do reform labor during Mao's murderous purge of intellectuals. While his father was cleaning latrines, scraping feces that had frozen "into icy pillars," 10-year-former Ai built the stove, fetched water from the well and endured a life that resembled "an open-ended grade in wilderness survival training, if we were lucky enough to survive." During countless "denunciation meetings" of which Ai Qing was a primary target, the author bore intimate witness to his male parent'south ritualized humiliation. "The estrangement and hostility that nosotros encountered from the people around us instilled in me a clear awareness of who I was," Ai writes, "and information technology shaped my judgment near how social positions are defined" — and the necessity of enemies in the rhetoric of revolution.
Interspersed throughout this narrative are flashbacks to the senior Ai'southward birth, his childhood every bit the eldest son of prosperous landowners who often abased him to the care of his nursemaid, a loving peasant adult female named Big-Leaf Lotus. The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 mired the country in turmoil, but it also stirred in its youths new possibilities for the futurity. At 19 Ai Qing traveled to France, where exposure to Apollinaire and Breton reshaped his aesthetic sensibility and honed an appreciation for the relationship between fine art and politics. Upon his return to China in 1932, he was arrested in Shanghai'southward French Concession for "causing a public disturbance through Communist Party activities," an criminal offense for which he served virtually 3 years in prison. Information technology was from backside bars that Ai Qing composed his beginning masterpiece, "Dayanhe, My Wet Nurse," a tender tribute to Big-Leaf Lotus and her countless Chinese countrywomen who toil and perish in obscurity.
An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his begetter'due south. The accuse of "damaging the republic" for which Ai Qing was incarcerated is not unlike the political offense of "inciting subversion" his son is jailed for fourscore years later on. Similarly, a Western metropolis — New York — would go for Ai Weiwei what Paris was for his begetter: a kaleidoscopic swirl of influences that catalyzes new ways of seeing.
Epitome
If Ai Qing was tentatively searching for a new vernacular to democratize the subject and scope of verse, Ai Weiwei found in the technology of communication a way to democratize his audience. In 2005, Ai discovered the blogosphere, where he accrued a large following with his singular, irreverent voice: "I was like a jellyfish, and the internet had become my body of water." Like his weblog entries, Ai'due south fine art — whether information technology's a 1995 photo that captures him flipping the bird to Tiananmen Square, or an architectural installation fabricated up of rebar mangled in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, or the numerous documentaries that expose the negligence and corruption of Chinese authorities — is forged "in a country of flux," always operating inside and reacting to the constraints of an evolving reality.
Ai claims that unlike his male parent, "I lacked that power to harness the power of words"; but this isn't true. He is most eloquent when he stops pontificating on art and surrenders, almost despite himself, to the act of remembering. Ai writes evocatively of the nights spent in his detention prison cell when "all I could practice was use memories to make full the time, looking dorsum at people and events, like gazing at a kite on a long string flight 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 existence cleaved into two pieces." The guards "gradually became fully, noisily human to me," Ai writes. "They were like me, in a way, confined and constricted, their present ruptured from the past, and lacking anticipation of their time to come." Recalling Ai Qing'due south affection for Large-Leafage Lotus, this moment catches Ai freed from his self-appointed office as provocateur, and permits him the creative person's near mundane freedom: to observe the world dispassionately and recognize in himself and others that nigh human capacity to be simultaneously both prisoner and guard, role player and pawn.
In the final pages of the volume, Ai writes that "advancement of liberty is inseparable from an endeavor to attain it, for liberty is not a goal but a direction, and it comes into beingness through the very act of resistance." Remembering, too, is a course of resistance. In documenting the past, he is also repudiating the country'southward generations of imposed amnesia. "After all the convulsions that China had experienced, genuine emotions and personal retentivity were reduced to tiny scraps and easily replaced by the soapbox of struggle and continuous revolution," Ai writes. In "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows," Ai does not permit his ain scraps to remain cached. To unearth them is an act of unburdening, an open letter to progeny, a suturing of past and present. Information technology is the refusal to exist a pawn — and the most potent assertion of a self.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/books/review/1000-years-of-joys-and-sorrows-ai-weiwei.html
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