For inspiration, he lingered long in downtown galleries and secondhand bookstores. 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. He survived in New York by doing part-time jobs and becoming a street artist sketching tourists in Times Square. As protests go, it was oddly self-defeating in its vagueness. He remained there for 12 years, mostly living in New York, where he won a scholarship to Parsons School of Design, only to forfeit it with an impetuous decision: leaving an art history exam paper blank save for his signature. In 1981, during a period of tentative reform by the Chinese government, Ai was among the first group of students to be granted a visa to study in America. That same year, he also became one of the founders of the mostly self-taught avant garde art group Stars, who were pioneers for today’s thriving art scene in China.Īi Weiwei on New York’s Lower East Side, 1985. His creative life, which began in 1978 when he enrolled on an animation course at the Beijing Film Academy, had taken time to find its footing. As Ai puts it himself, the blog propelled him into “the public’s field of vision with the force of a bullet from a gun”.
The first post read: “To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.” For the Chinese authorities, who would take time to come to terms with and control the internet, this was the first of many transgressions that would lead to his blog being shut down in 2009 and to his subsequent arrest and detention in 2011. It initially took the form of a blog that first appeared towards the end of 2005.
While Ai undoubtedly inherited his father’s stoicism, the defiance that would characterise his later activism was all his own. His sense of isolation was so acute that he refused to answer the door to callers at his grotty apartment in New York 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”. 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 wife, exhausted and demoralised, returned to Beijing with their youngest son, but Ai, not yet 10, chose to go with his father. In 1967, his father’s life was upended once again, when he was transported to a desert region known as Little Siberia to undergo political “remoulding”. “The whirlpool that swallowed up my father upended my life too, leaving a mark on me that I carry with me to this day,” Ai writes in the opening chapter of this ambitious memoir, in which his father’s story gives way to, and often echoes, his own.
Ai’s father, Ai Qing, a respected poet, was one of them.
By the end of the year, about 300,000 people had been rounded up, the majority of them exiled to the country’s remote border regions to undergo “reform through labour”. I n 1957, the year of Ai Weiwei’s birth, China’s leader, Chairman Mao, launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, a purge of intellectuals whose work was deemed critical of the state.
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