The title of Ai Weiwei’s new memoir is 1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows; it’s also an apt description of his life thus far. At 64, he is China’s most famous dissident artist—one whose experience has always belied his chronological age. Since the early 1980s, Ai has produced a prodigious body of conceptual work that includes photographs, paintings, sculptures, installations, films, books, and multimedia and architectural projects. It has involved smashing antique Han Dynasty urns, building assemblages out of old bicycles, and scattering a staggering 100 million handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds across the floor of London’s Tate Modern gallery. Much of it grapples with the forces of autocracy and injustice he witnessed firsthand growing up.
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