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

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Neon lights will be delivered in 2-4 weeks, as they are made in small batches and shipped separately from other items. While in detention, he was interrogated daily, threatened with myriad but ever-changing charges, endlessly pressured to confess, and monitored constantly by cameras as well as two guards who stood inside his cell twenty-four hours a day “like wooden statues.

His TASCHEN publications include the Collector’s Editions Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Beatriz Milhazes, Ai Weiwei, Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel, and the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs such as the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat.The life of the Ai family composes a drama whose every act brings ever more egregious assaults by the state against it. But “to me the loss of the freedom to express myself was itself tantamount to captivity,” and soon Ai Weiwei was tweeting about his prison experiences. He is a coauthor, with John Delury, of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. Through it all, his wit, his optimism, and his playful vision of art as meaningful expression remain unstoppable.

An extravagantly rewarding hybrid: a combination history of modern China, biography of a dissident poet and memoir by his provocateur son . Even if you threaten to drag me out now and shoot me, my position won’t change,” he told his captors.In 1979 the fifteen-year prison sentence given to the Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng deepened Ai Weiwei’s “understanding of the cynical and brutal nature of the Chinese state, and the Communist Party’s fundamental opposition to freedom of expression. He also published several art books and set up an architectural firm, FAKE Design, that worked on the National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. But even in our darkest days, we might well have a little handful of sunflower seeds in our pockets. In 1994 he produced The Black Cover Book, a compendium of artworks and texts distributed under the radar of the censors.

In the relatively open climate of the 1990s Beijing art scene, he was chosen to represent China at the 1999 Venice Biennale. 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's the story of a father and a son, of exceptional creativity and passionate belief, and of how two indomitable spirits enabled the world to understand their country.

This is a peculiar interpretation of a concept that its inventor professed was grounded in “indifference,” but it has been productive for Ai. It received a single, short, affirmative review in Artspeak , which described it as “a neo-dadaist knockout”. I met Ai Weiwei for the first time in Beijing with Orville Schell in September 2011, soon after he was released from prison.

An English-language edition will be published in Canada by Bond Street Books, an imprint of Doubleday Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada and in the UK and British Commonwealth territories by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage at Penguin Random House UK. His few friends included the remarkable performance artist Tehching Hsieh, the freewheeling painter Martin Wong, and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who told Ai that “his warmest memory of China was the hug that my father had given him.This could be a cool book if it were trimmed down and focused in more on the history of China’s oppression of the arts – if that sounds intere According to the officer, Ai’s high profile has made him an expedient tool for Westerners to attack China, but “pawns sooner or later all get sacrificed.