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

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His wife, exhausted and demoralised, returned to Beijing with their youngest son, but Ai, not yet 10, chose to go with his father. For almost a decade, they existed in “a square hole dug into the ground, with a crude roof formed of tamarisk branches and rice stalks, sealed with several layers of grassy mud”. His father was assigned to trim trees on a nearby farm and, after a long day’s labour, was forced to attend a public gathering of his fellow exiles, during which he would often be singled out and denounced as a “bourgeois novelist”. His sense of isolation was so acute that he refused to answer the door to callers at his grotty apartment in New York Once you know where those rebars come from and what was involved in putting them to use, the sculpture opens up to multiple resonances and meanings. It is, first of all, beautiful in a sleek, minimal way. It is also suggestive, both of the ground fissure caused by the earthquake and of the gulf between, perhaps, official and unofficial, inhuman social engineering and actual human experiences of their lives and places. Without me there would be no such project’ … the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing. Photograph: Wang Xinchao/AP

Ai WeiWei's marble sculpture resembles a Surveillance Camera to express the alarming rate of how technological advancements are being used in the modern world. [148] WeiWei created this sculpture in response to the Chinese Government surveilling and incorporating listening devices in and around his studio, located in Beijing. The Chinese government did this as punishment for WeiWei's outspoken criticism of the Chinese Government. [149] He Xie/Crab [ edit ] Mami Kataoka: Forever could be interpreted in many ways. From a structural point of view, it is again the way of destructing normal use and creating new values by reconstruction. And art- historically speaking, the father of contemporary art, Marcel Duchamp, made one of his first readymade sculptures using existing products in 1913, about 100 years ago, with wooden stools and a wheel of a bicycle, which opened up so many possibilities for the artists in coming generations, including Ai Weiwei. Sheng Xue, an exiled Chinese author, speaking about the importance of the work Ai did to ensure the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake are not forgotten Ai wants to start a conversation. The government does not want to talk.” – Bill Schiller for Star Dispatches (e-book)Along with this documentary, Fairytale was documented through written materials and photographs of participants and artifacts from the event. [118]

Merewether, Charles, Ruins in Reverse, in Ai Weiwei: Under Construction, University of New South Wales press, Sydney, 2008, pp.29. The United States and European Union protested Ai's detention. [61] The international arts community also mobilised petitions calling for the release of Ai: "1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei" was organized by Creative Time of New York that calls for artists to bring chairs to Chinese embassies and consulates around the world on 17 April 2011, at 1pm local time "to sit peacefully in support of the artist's immediate release." [62] Artists in Hong Kong, [63] Germany [63] and Taiwan demonstrated and called for Ai to be released. [64] His art is as big, as outsized as it needs to be to speak to his nation's deepest instincts. He is very, very Chinese in his approach to discussing politics and art. He embraces the gigantic but he also critiques it, revealing it to be — no surprise — a complex self-conception, full of contradiction and one that allows far too much dehumanization and cruelty. Ai's father was the Chinese poet Ai Qing, [3] who was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement. In 1958, the family was sent to a labour camp in Beidahuang, Heilongjiang, when Ai was one year old. They were subsequently exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang in 1961, where they lived for 16 years. Upon Mao Zedong's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the family returned to Beijing in 1976. [4]

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He survived in New York by doing part-time jobs and becoming a street artist sketching tourists in Times Square. He had few friends and, at one point, his sense of isolation was so acute that he refused to answer the door to callers at his grotty apartment on the Lower East Side. For inspiration, he lingered long in downtown galleries and secondhand bookstores. He met, and briefly befriended, Allen Ginsberg, a champion of his father’s poetry, and for a time shared a loft with the performance artist Tehching Hsieh who happened to be spending a year tied to fellow artist Linda Montano with an 8ft rope. They were, writes Ai, “models for me in terms of their unflinching commitment to an artistic vision”.

I don’t even look at a final product. I don’t care about it much. The process is sensuous, it has blood – but the final is just a dead corpse

I don’t care about Lego that much’ … Ai Weiwei’s re-creation of Monet’s Water Lilies at the Design Museum. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian In 2019, he announced he would be leaving Berlin, saying that Germany is not an open culture. [22] In September 2019, he moved to live in Cambridge, England. [23] Featuring photographs, sculpture, installation art and audio and video pieces, Ai Weiwei: According to What? examines how the artist spotlights the complexities of a changing world and probes such issues as freedom of expression, individual and human rights, the power of digital communication and the range of creative practice that characterizes contemporary art today both in China and globally.

Matthew Teitelbaum, Director and CEO of the AGO, introducing Ai Weiwei and discussing his importance as an international artist and his passionate activism for freedom of expression Asteroid 83598 Aiweiwei, discovered by Bill Yeung in 2001, was named in his honor. [207] The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 28 November 2010 ( M.P.C. 72991). [208] Charlie Foran: Ai Weiwei, as the AGO show makes so apparent, thinks in terms of numbers, usually very big ones. China does that to a person: always the reality is of staggering, numbing statistics and of individuals struggling to be, in effect, anything other than just another number and a very small one. But 3,000 river crabs in this funny, semi whimsical piece are foremost a straightforward and quite daring critique of the Chinese government's ferocious determination to restrict freedom of expression. He Xie doesn't only literally mean “river crab,” it's a also a word that sounds like the word that both means “harmonious” to the Communist Party and is the informal term among netizens for the censorship going on on the net. But for a Chinese artist, particularly a Chinese artist raised during the culture revolution when smashing old culture was cynical, disastrous political dictate, smashing a valuable vase must mean something more.

Permanent exhibit, unique setting of two Iron Trees from now on frame the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, Israel where Dead Sea Scrolls are preserved. [158] [159] Journey of Laziz [ edit ] Ai Weiwei is a child of the Cultural Revolution. Now, every Chinese citizen who experienced the Cultural Revolution, no matter their age or circumstance, was profoundly shaped by it. The decade haunts a quarter billion lives, easily. His father, the poet Ai Ching, suffered terribly and predictably during the Cultural Revolution but at least survived. Ai Weiwei, a boy and then a teenager during the madness, came of age in a China where esteemed poets cleaned toilets and senior politicians were publicly humiliated and temples were destroyed, books burned, old culture devastated for no reason, for no obvious end. An artist raised in an era when young men and women called Red Guards, working on behalf, they believed, of supreme leader Mao Zedong did their best to obliterate that glorious history, to reduce it to rubble for later use — why not? — in a beautiful sculpture.