276°
Posted 20 hours ago

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

£12.5£25.00Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his father’s. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, BookPage, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews • “With uncommon humanity, humbling scholarship, and poignant intimacy, Ai Weiwei recounts a life of courage, argument, defeat, and triumph. During his months in detention, Ai became determined to leave a trace; regret about the unbridgeable gap between himself and his late father, and the fear that his young son might never know who his father really is, gave rise to the idea of a book.

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. In 1989, after watching the events in Tiananmen Square unfold on CNN, he marched and staged a hunger strike in front of the UN. 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. Outspoken artist and international human-rights icon Ai Weiwei here chillingly documents--originally as a record for his young son, and subsequently for all the rest of us--the brutal life of privation and repression he experienced growing into manhood in remote China before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution as the son of a prominent poet, one of many thousands of wrongfully imprisoned political prisoners.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. In November 2010, he was placed under house arrest after the authorities suddenly authorised the demolition of his newly built studio in Shanghai.

We sat and talked at the long table that’s in one of my photos, and at a certain point he saw my camera and suggested I might like to wander around the studio with it on my own.Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, just as a high tide of Maoist political campaigns was upending every aspect of Chinese life.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Photograph: Steffen Roth/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘His prose is determinedly matter of fact’: Ai Weiwei. Years of Joys and Sorrows is a memoir worth reading, and Ai Weiwei is a man worth admiring and emulating. Eine eindrückliche Lebensgeschichte, die nicht nur zeigt, wie sich ein berühmte Person sondern auch wir im kleinen für die Menschenrechte überall auf der Welt einsetzen können.Five hours of each day were taken up with enforced exercise, which consisted of walking seven steps, back and forth, within an allotted space in the middle of the room, all the time flanked by his two attendants.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment