"What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned twentieth-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world."

"It guides us from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist era in the 1930s, through Mao Zedong’s revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, and on to the 'reform era' of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and Xi Jinping’s current Leninist restoration, explaining how, as Ai Weiwei writes, 'the whirlpool that swallowed up my father upended my life too, leaving a mark on me that I carry to this day.'... It does not take many pages of this memoir to leave one feeling drowned in toxic revolutionary brine. But even as readers will be repelled by the relentless savagery of China’s capricious revolution, they will be uplifted by this father-and-son story of humanism stubbornly asserted against it. Ai Weiwei reminds us that freedom is part of being human in the modern world: 'Although China grows more powerful, its moral decay simply spreads anxiety and uncertainty in the world.'" 

Writes Orville Schell, "The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei/Ai Weiwei’s memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure" (NYRB). 

The book — which I finished reading yesterday — is "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows." 

I should add — on the subject of fathers — that Ai Weiwei has his own son, and, in the text, that little boy flows from his grandfather and father. I highlighted this:

"Blogging appealed to me because it gave me an opportunity to address the ruptures and dislocations in the society around me...."

"The blog broadened my outlook enormously, for when I responded to one reader, another person whom I didn’t know and would never meet could read what we had written and share their own perspective. Direct, sincere communication with others was no longer a fantasy—and it felt just as real as a declaration of love. I relished the endless possibilities of assuming multiple, separate online existences, and the fragmented, inconsequential, fleeting moments of emotion and engagement it gave me. Every character that I tapped on my keyboard was emblematic of a new kind of freedom. By enabling alternative voices, the internet weakened the power of autocracy, dispelling the obstacles it tried to put in the individual’s way. Freedom, of course, inspires expression, and soon my readers understood me even better than my family did. On the internet, social coercion is nullified and the individual acquires a kind of weightlessness, no longer subordinate to the power structure.... ... I was like a jellyfish, and the internet had become my ocean. I began to see life no longer as an activity taking me in a single direction, but rather as a succession of countless instants and junctures.... Every instant could be presented as a complete world in itself, unpredictable and unrepeatable, dispelling classic meanings and goals. This was empowering rather than destabilizing, and, under a tyranny intent on cheating us out of history and memory, here was a new way of telling our stories."

From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei.

"I was painting less and less, fearing that if I got going and found it difficult to stop, I might end up like Van Gogh, a troubled artist with a room crammed full of pictures."

"Plus, I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame, and I never liked the smell of oils and turpentine. I had lost patience with painting... In the mid-1980s, the art world was still wallowing in German neo-expressionism—large paintings with raw, overdramatic brushwork—whereas I was drawn toward Dada’s countercultural tendencies... It was at this point that I put on my first solo exhibition, Old Shoes, Safe Sex... One solitary review in Artspeak described it as 'such a neo-Dadaist knockout... Duchamp would have enjoyed these tributes....'... Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover."

From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei. 

As someone who studied painting and made a lot of paintings, I completely identify with the line "I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame," the dread of yourself in the future in a room crammed with your own unloved pictures, and the desire to trash them all quickly, and thank God for dumpsters.

ADDED: It's interesting that he wrote "I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me" and not "I didn’t own them and they didn’t own me." That is, he wrote something that was translated that way. Anyway, it's about relationships, not property.

"After several home invasions by the Red Guards, Father decided to burn all his books, and I was his helper."

"We stacked the books up next to a bonfire, and one by one I tore out the pages and tossed them into the fire. Like drowning ghosts, they writhed in the heat and were swallowed by flames. At the moment they turned to ash, a strange force took hold of me. From then on, that force would gradually extend its command of my body and mind, until it matured into a form that even the strongest enemy would find intimidating. It was a commitment to reason, to a sense of beauty—these things are unbending, uncompromising, and any effort to suppress them is bound to provoke resistance.

"Since Father’s vision was deteriorating, he had started to use a magnifying glass for reading. Once, before a sentencing rally..."

"... a security officer burst in, grabbed the magnifying glass, and then climbed a ladder up onto the roof of the auditorium, where, peering through the glass, he scanned the horizon for any sign of hostile activity, such as a pending attack by some rival militant faction. That image of a man trying to use a magnifying glass as a telescope has always stayed in my mind as an example of the ignorance and folly of the Cultural Revolution years."

From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei.

"Ai Weiwei recounts how his father naively argued with Mao that literature and art cannot be 'a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics' but must instead find 'expression in their truthfulness.'"

"Unfortunately he had no way of knowing that Mao was just then readying a major political 'rectification campaign (整风运动)' against 'incorrect thought (错误思想)' that would make self-expression among Communist intelligentsia as taboo in the arts as in politics. In fact, Mao’s 1942 treatise, The Yan’an Forums on Literature and Art, which formed the basis for this movement, has guided the party’s quest for ideological unity ever since its publication. Under its shadow, writes Ai Weiwei, 'everyone sank into an ideological swamp of "criticism" and "self-criticism"' in which the bourgeois tendencies of his father’s art marked him indelibly as being politically unreliable.... Then, like half a million other intellectuals, he was 'sent down (下放)' to the Great Northern Wilderness (北大荒)....

"I'm grappling with how I feel about that subject and that material. I do grapple with things. I grapple with things personally, and racially, and politically. What does it mean to be me?"

Said Marc Bradford, quoted in a "60 Minutes" interview — presented at CBS News along with video of interviews with other artists. Excerpt:

Like Bradford, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei thinks art should make a statement.

"I think every art, if it's relevant, is political," Ai told Holly Williams when she interviewed him for 60 Minutes in 2017.

Years ago, at a social event, I was talking with a woman who'd worked hard to acquire the ability to make distinctive and aesthetically pleasing bowls and vases and so forth. She said: "I'm still trying to figure out how to make them political." I said — in the sort of response I always imagined would make me a popular party guest — "But political art is the worst art."

ADDED: The subject Bradford says his abstract painting is about — what he's "grappling with" — is the Watts riots 1965.

ALSO: The woman who said "I'm still trying to figure out how to make them political" was absolutely not meaning to be humorous. She was utterly serious and sincere.

"They lost their freedom because they love freedom."

"Life in China is saturated with pretense. People feign ignorance and speak in ambiguities."

"Everyone in China knows that a censorship system exists, but there is very little discussion of why it exists.... The most elegant way to adjust to censorship is to engage in self-censorship. It is the perfect method for allying with power and setting the stage for the mutual exchange of benefit. The act of kowtowing to power in order to receive small pleasures may seem minor; but without it, the brutal assault of the censorship system would not be possible. For people who accept this passive position toward authority, 'getting by' becomes the supreme value. They smile, bow and nod their heads, and such behavior usually leads to lifestyles that are comfortable, trouble free and even cushy.... That’s what we have here in China: The self-silenced majority, sycophants of a powerful regime, resentful of people like me who speak out, are doubly bitter because they know that their debasement comes by their own hand. Thus self-defense also becomes self-comfort...."

From "How Censorship Works," by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (in the NYT). Read the whole thing. It's great, and it's not just about China. The topic is self-censorship, done for comfort and self-interest, and I don't see how we in the United States can read this without thinking of ourselves and how pathetic our self-censorship is, since we have so much less reason to need to self-comfort.

You'd think, given Trump and his wall, that NYC wouldn't go for an art project called "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors."

But it's ironic.

Ai Weiwei, the provocative Chinese artist, will build more than 100 fences and installations around New York City this fall for “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” one of his most large-scale public art projects to date....

You're not supposed to think that fences are good.

“When the Berlin Wall fell, there were 11 countries with border fences and walls,” Mr. Ai said. “By 2016, that number had increased to 70. We are witnessing a rise in nationalism, an increase in the closure of borders, and an exclusionary attitude towards migrants and refugees, the victims of war and the casualties of globalization.”

So he's building fences against fences. It's sort of like we're supposed to hate his art. Get this thing outta here.

It calls to mind the old "Tilted Arc" — a long metal wall that blocked diagonal paths across a plaza that many NYC workers just hated. But I don't think that work was intended to express the idea that walls are bad. I think it meant look at my big, beautiful modernist erection. But for those of us who worked in the area and had an interest in freedom of movement through what would otherwise be an open plaza, the predominant thought was, yes, I've seen it, I've seen it in my way a hundred times, get it the hell out of here. And in the end it was removed. The artist was miffed, but the workers were happy. Not as happy as Berlin when its wall fell, but happy to have the arrogant artist's imposition disimposed.

I've talked about "Tilted Arc" a few times on this blog, notably here:

The sculpture's high art proponents ridiculed the complaints, including a fear of "terrorists who might use it as a blasting wall for bombs." Serra himself said that to move the "site-specific" sculpture would be to destroy it. He also said: "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people." Fine, but then, keep it out of the plaza! And don't take taxpayer money. The Grand Central carpeting on the other hand, can be walked on comfortably, is amusing for almost everybody, and is going to be removed after a short time, so any perception of ugliness will soon enough give way to the good feeling of relief when it is gone. "Tilted Arc" was there, in the way, permanently, with no feeling or sensitivity for the people who worked in the Plaza. I worked in the area at the time and know first-hand its effect on human beings, who had "site-specific" jobs and did not deserve to be challenged by art to take a 120-foot walk around a steel arc hundreds or thousands of times.

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some discussion of the extent to which the taxpayers are funding this. And Matthew Sablan wants to talk about the Robert Frost poem (the full text of which you can read here):

The fence/wall in the poem always struck me as one guy saying, "we don't need this; it wastes our time every year rebuilding the damn thing," and the other guy saying, "yeah, but we might need it in the future, and besides, you and I trust each other, yet, trust but verify."

There's a lot packed into the poem, but in general, it is two different people approaching the wall problem. Frost wants us to think the narrator makes a good point, but the other guy has plenty of valid reasons for wanting a wall (without it, in say, 20 years, how will they know where the property line is? What if an apple tree DOES sprout on the opposite side?)

Also, the wall ISN'T walling the two people out from each other. They could talk over it, if they wanted. Without the wall there, they wouldn't see each other any other time in the year.

That made me read the poem and feel I can enlighten you. This is purely on my reading it just now and not looking at what anybody else says. I think the narrator enjoys the yearly activity with his neighbor. He calls it a "game." They don't really need a wall because they're only growing trees and the trees aren't going anywhere. But a second amusing thing you can do when you've got another person with you — besides playing a physical game like wall-building — is to have a conversation. The narrator is satisfied with the wall-building game — he's not really trying to avoid the trouble. He kind of likes it.

He's disappointed by the inability to get the verbal game started. He parries with that idea that the trees aren't going to behave any differently. But the other guy has a go-to old saying: "Good fences make good neighbours." The narrator babbles out a few things and stops short of another idea he could throw out — that elves are taking the wall down — but "But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather/He said it for himself." The narrator wants to have a conversation. But the other guy is just doggedly continuing the physical game, lugging another stone. And all he adds to the conversation — that the narrator thinks could get really interesting with elves or something, anything — is another repetition of the old saying.

Yes, there's repetition in rebuilding the wall every year, and yes, that repetition isn't really necessary, but I think the central problem is frustration at not getting a conversation started. I think the narrator would be just as happy to get a flow of interesting words about the good of maintaining an old fence and redoing the shared annual ritual of moving the stones back where they were. What he wants is to do something with another person with his mind and not just his body. But the other man — whose body is good enough to lift "boulders" — just doesn't have a mind that can do much. He says the same old thing twice, and the narrator wants a real conversation. When the narrator says "Something there is that doesn't love a wall/That wants it down," he means Talk to me, for God's sake!

Those who try to order vast quantites of Legos will no longer be asked what they intend to do with them.

This policy change is a reaction to the criticism the company received when it refused to sell Legos in bulk to the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Lego didn't want its product connected to in anything political.

In response, Mr. Ai called Lego’s decision an act of “censorship and discrimination,” and set up Lego collection points at sites across the world, including outside the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin and his own studio in Beijing.

In a statement posted on its website on Tuesday, the Lego Group said it had previously asked customers to explain the “thematic purpose” of bulk orders “as the purpose of the Lego Group is to inspire children through creative play, not to actively support or endorse specific agendas of individuals or organizations.”

The old policy was deemed vulnerable to "misunderstandings."

Corporations are censors too.

In September Lego refused Ai Weiwei Studio's request for a bulk order of Legos to create artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria as "they cannot approve the use of Legos for political works." On Oct 21, a British firm formally announced that it will open a new Legoland in Shanghai as one of the many deals of the U.K.-China "Golden Era."

A photo posted by Ai Weiwei (@aiww) on Oct 23, 2015 at 6:04am PDT

"'I don’t encourage anyone to protest by destroying other people’s property,' said Ai, apparently forgetting that time..."

"... he dropped Han dynasty urns, cut up shoes, wrecked a bunch of chairs, and ruined some perfectly good bicycles. Mr. Ai claims that the Miami vase-smashing is 'very different,' because when Ai ruined pots and bikes and the lot, they 'raised some new questions.'"

(I previously discussed this art vandalism conundrum here.)

IN THE COMMENTS: American Liberal Elite said (quoting the linked article):

"It's a fair point to say that Ai owned the objects he destroyed, while Caminero did not." 

So, of course, it's a point, but is it a conclusive consideration, especially when we are talking about ancient artifacts? Do you accept destruction of unique objects? This reminds me of the flag-burning cases. To those who wanted it to be possible to punish someone who conveyed his message by burning an American flag, was it enough of an answer to say that the protester was burning his own flag? Don't you think that the destruction of ancient artifacts could be banned and should at least be condemned, even when it's the destroyer's own property? One could also view it as morally wrong to destroy any useful object, and it's certainly fair to express disapproval of expressive conduct that comes in the form of destroying things.

Why did the artist break the $1 million Ai Weiwei vase?

1. Look at this picture of the entire room, with 3 big photos of Ai Weiwei dropping what is (supposedly) an ancient Chinese vase. In the middle of the room, on a low platform, not protected or roped off in any way, are 16 vases, which may or may not be ancient, which have been dipped in garish bad paint. What is this supposed to mean?

2. Now, we get the news that "Maximo Caminero, a well-known local painter," walked into the room (which is at the Pérez Art Museum Miami), picked up one of the vases and let it drop, and "I did it for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here. They have spent so many millions now on international artists. It's the same political situation over and over again. I've been here for 30 years and it's always the same." We're told the vase was worth $1 million, but Caminero says he didn't know that and feels "so sorry about it, for sure."

3. But Caminero also suggests that he perceived an interactive display, with the photographs intended to convey Ai Weiwei's message that they should follow his example and, as in the photographs, drop a vase and break it, and this seems to make sense in light of the apparent cheap crappiness of the vases out there unprotected on the floor:

"It was a spontaneous protest... I was at PAMM and saw Ai Weiwei's photos behind the vases where he drops an ancient Chinese vase and breaks it. And I saw it as a provocation by Weiwei to join him in an act of performance protest. If you saw the vases on display and the way they were painted there was no way one would think the artist had painted over an ancient artifact... Instead I thought it was a common clay pot like you would find at Home Depot, frankly.... I lifted the Vase and let it smash on the floor like WeiWei did in his picture then waited for authorities peacefully and never resisted punishment.... But honestly I had no idea the vase had any value. I admire Ai Weiwei greatly and have always supported his actions while he was suffering indignities from the Chinese government."

4. Ai Weiwei presents the vases as dating back to "China's Neolithic period, making them anywhere from 5,500 to 7,000 years old, and have been dipped in cheap, garishly colored industrial paint." Could this possibly be true? Would he wreck ancient vases like that? The linked story says: "Given the historical context, Ai's vandalistic alterations to the vases makes for a stirring and visually striking metaphor for the conflict between East and West, a conflict between culture and commercialism." That's the sort of tedious text one is used to reading on cards stuck to walls in museums, but perhaps that is satire. I find it hard to believe the vases are actually ancient.

5. Whether the vases are actually ancient and whether they are individually worth $1 million...



... (and not simply easily replaceable objects in an assemblage that as a whole is worth $1 million) and whether Ai Weiwei intended to convey the message that visitors should do what he is doing in the photographs and pick up a vase and break it, isn't it believable that Caminero genuinely understood that to be the message?

6. Was it the message?

"I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom."

"Freedom of expression is a very essential condition for me to make any art. Also, it is an essential value for my life. I have to protect this right and also to fight for the possibility.... [P]eople in office just try to maintain so-called stability to protect their own profit, or their own interest. They have to crush other voices. There’s no real communication or discussion.”

Said Ai Weiwei.