The disaster resonated with Ai during the 2008 quake in Sichuan, which left 69,000 dead.
Following Mao’s death a few months later, the ruling Gang of Four tried to play down the catastrophe for political purposes. It was the year of a 7.5-magnitude earthquake in nearby Tangshan whose death toll was estimated between 242,000 and 655,000. But instead of being feted by authorities, he was already a target, having used his newfound prestige to publicize the harsh treatment of migrant workers during the Olympic Games.Īi’s discontent with both the capital and the party traces back to the day he arrived there in 1976. He gave the government a starchitectural structure projecting a chic, modern image of the Middle Kingdom onto the world stage. It’s a world I’m familiar with because of my father.”Īi Weiwei on activism in the U.S., his art response to COVID-19 and a secret Wuhan filmĪi Weiwei discusses his new film, “Yours Truly,” probing his life and work - and meeting the current moment with artĮven so, 15 years later the city was the site of his most famous artistic achievement, the Bird’s Nest, centerpiece of the 2008 Olympic Games. “They created this inner world which has a clear texture and light and you can walk into it. “He reminded me of my father,” Ai says of the Beat poet. On East 7th Street he lived just a few blocks from an old acquaintance of his father, Allen Ginsberg. and wound up staying in New York until 1993.
In 1981 he went abroad to study in the U.S. Weiwei studied animation at the Beijing Film Academy and co-founded the Stars, an early avant-garde art group. In 1976, the Ais returned to the capital. “Those writings and those images are a real threat to someone or some system.” But he also recognizes the power implied in the need to destroy them. “When I see he has to burn those books he loved and we all loved, all those images. Even so, as the Cultural Revolution raged on into the 1970s, Ai Qing decided his expansive book collection might put the family in jeopardy. That makes his memoir, like his career, an alchemical mix of art and activism.Īi Qing was rehabilitated in 1961 with a good word from then-Vice Premier Xi Zhongxun, the father of current President Xi Jinping.
the Bird’s Nest, his larger body of work is inseparable from his human rights advocacy in China and beyond. Though Ai is best known for his collaboration on the Beijing National Stadium, a.k.a. “So the idea came to me that if I was released, to bridge the gap between us,” he would write a book, partly to explain to his son “what life means to me, why freedom is so precious, and why autocracy fears art.” “During those long weeks in secret detention my fear was not that I might not be able to see my son, but that I might not have the chance to let him really know me,” Ai writes of his 81 days in Chinese custody in 2011. As an adult he became China’s preeminent contemporary artist and, almost inevitably, another government target. As a child, Ai watched his father suffer the humiliations and privations of political persecution. Two people activate artist Ai Weiwei’s new memoir, “ 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows”: his father, renowned poet Ai Qing, and his 12-year-old son, Ai Lao. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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