Mist, whirlwind, typhoon… The terms Ai Weiwei uses to describe communist China leave no doubt about his convictions. An apostle of freedom of expression and an ardent fighter against state violence, the author leads us, with 1000 years of joys and sorrowsin the depths of a scary totalitarian system.
A portrait of China in the last hundred years, the brick delivers the memories of Ai, a planetary figure in contemporary art, need we remind you. The resulting autobiography hides a second biography, that of the artist’s father, the poet Ai Qing (1910-1996). The title of the work comes from the pen of the father, quoted more than once. “A thousand years of joys and sorrows, / Of which not the slightest trace remains to me”: these verses translate, according to son, “the price to pay to live”.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Like “Father”, Ai Weiwei reveals himself to be a colorful writer, with an elegant style and a rich vocabulary. Like him, his words and his protesting attitude cost him his freedom of movement, but also made him famous. “As a public enemy, he notes, I was my father’s equal. Eighty years apart, in the same country, similar offenses would bring us together. »
The impression of the double biography is due to the construction of the story, practically split in two. The first nine chapters are devoted to the poet, first persecuted as a communist by the tyrannical regime of Chiang Kai-shek, then reviled as an intellectual and wrongly accused of being a “rightist” by Mao’s doctrine.
The other ten sections concern Ai Weiwei’s adulthood, including his exile in New York in the 1980s and his terrible stay under law enforcement, eighty-one days described with fury and serenity. The man who was very active in Twitter was no longer unknown – he was associated with the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron with a view to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, exhibited at Documenta in 2007… The experience of spring 2011 nevertheless makes him one of the most famous dissidents.
“If, in a totally dark room, I find a single candle, I will light it, he replies to the writer who is worried about him. No matter how the government tries to silence me, I will always strive to be heard. »
The pages are punctuated with savory expositions on politics — “the freedom that Westerners so cherish loses its meaning [s’ils] don’t fight[tent] not for freedom elsewhere,” it read. And creation? Ai Weiwei does not hesitate to comment on it, calls for a more spiritual, less commercial art. Known for his excessive installations and for a middle finger that he declined in more than one variant, the extrovert character says he is inhabited by an “instinctive aversion for cultural authority”. His practice testifies to life, without fear, because “the art that seeks to distinguish itself from reality [l]’not interested’.
The only downside: the many factual errors and typos, proof of the haste to publish the translation of a work whose original edition appeared in 2021.