1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

Metadata

• Author: Ai Weiwei and Allan H. Barr
• Full Title: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
• Category:#books

Highlights

• In that information-deprived era, personal choice was like floating duckweed, rootless and insubstantial. Denied the nourishment of individual interests and attachments, memory, wrung out to dry, ruptured and crumbled: “The proletariat has to liberate all of humanity before it can liberate itself,” the saying went. After all the convulsions that China had experienced, genuine emotions and personal memory were reduced to tiny scraps and easily replaced by the discourse of struggle and continuous revolution. (Location 92)
• I made a simple oil lamp by pouring kerosene into an empty medicine bottle, poking a hole in the bottle cap, and threading a scrap of shoelace through it. (Location 131)
• As night fell and an impenetrable darkness descended on the wheat fields outside, the insects kept up a constant drone. Father and I would sit on either side of our little table, the oil lamp casting our shadows—one big, one small—on the wall behind us. My mind was often as bare as the room itself, empty of imagination and empty of memories, and my father and I were like strangers, with nothing to say to each other. I would often simply stare into the lamp’s jumping flame. (Location 228)

New highlights added February 3, 2023 at 5:25 AM

• A poet, he argued, is different from somebody who simply writes poetry. A poet is loyal to his own experience and does not write about things outside his own understanding, whereas somebody who writes poetry simply puts together sentences, whose words he arranges in separate lines. Without fresh colors, without luster, without images, he asked, where is a poem’s artistic life? (Location 948)
• If I were a bird I would sing hoarsely Of this storm-buffeted land This river forever surging with our grief and outrage This furious wind that never stops blowing And the warm dawn that comes from the woods And then I would die, Letting even my feathers rot in the earth. Why do I so often have tears in my eyes? Because I love this land so deeply. (“I Love This Land,” 1938) (Location 971)

New highlights added February 7, 2023 at 10:31 AM

• On the approach of night, the wind would pick up, roaring menacingly as it gusted through the valley. Father would tell us then, consolingly, that the forest was the wind’s home: every night, after its busy labors, the wind needed to come home, just as we did. In his eyes, the wind was the mountain’s oldest citizen, and I was its youngest. (Location 1837)
• Shihezi was inhabited by people with checkered careers, people quite willing to sever connections with their earlier lives and embrace a new beginning, having learned from painful experience that memory and identity were dangerous. The state was a machine that sucked up memory and bleached it white. (Location 1922)
• Society needed to be thrown into chaos, he said, before it could be properly governed. Every seven or eight years, a movement of this kind would be needed, to draw the “ox demons and snake spirits” out of their dens, in keeping with their class nature. The Cultural Revolution would be a war exercise on a national scale, in which leftists, rightists, and vacillating fence-sitters would all receive their proper due. (Location 1984)
• We stacked the books up next to a bonfire, and one by one I tore out the pages and tossed them into the fire. Like drowning ghosts, they writhed in the heat and were swallowed by flames. At the moment they turned to ash, a strange force took hold of me. 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 was a commitment to reason, to a sense of beauty—these things are unbending, uncompromising, and any effort to suppress them is bound to provoke resistance. (Location 2029)
• My life at this point could be described in one word: “dangling.” And it was not just me who was dangling; the whole era was—swinging, swaying, in idle, purposeless, uncertain motion. People had nothing better to do; we were all waiting for things to change. In this unusual moment, the entire society was stifled, depressed. Beijing was gray and silent. (Location 2250)
• The pleasure gained from this single-minded focus in turn disengaged me from other kinds of connection and gave me a feeling of release. With art I opened up a space that was new to me, an abandoned space infested with weeds, in wild and desolate ruin. Perhaps what I was doing was decadent and self-indulgent, but it offered the prospect of self-redemption and a path toward detachment and escape. (Location 2277)
• And how could it block the ideas Freer than the wind Of thousands and millions of people? Or a resolve even firmer than earth? Or a desire even longer than time? (Location 2369)

New highlights added February 10, 2023 at 10:24 AM

• After muddling my way through a year, I felt that if I stayed on in Berkeley any longer, my brain would seize up completely in the unending sunshine. (Location 2557)
• Parsons was like an expensive kindergarten, primly cajoling a bunch of wayward kids into behaving properly. (Location 2586)
• me. A steady drizzle was falling outside, but some people without umbrellas were hanging around the front stoop in the rain, showing no signs of leaving. Drug dealers or junkies, they were comfortable anywhere they were. (Location 2602)
• A sense of belonging is as important to the poor as to the rich, and in Lower Manhattan I felt at home amid the dirt and decay and disorder. (Location 2607)
• Browsing at the far end of the basement of the Strand Book Store, on Broadway, one day I came upon a book entitled The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, with Warhol’s signature on the flyleaf. It was the first book in English that I read devotedly from cover to cover, its language a lot like the terse pronouncements you see on Twitter today. My enjoyment of the book came partly from the pleasure of reading it and partly from imagining the pleasure that I would have once I could make sense of it. My attachment to the book was a bit like a Kenyan’s bond with his cane, which never leaves him whether he’s walking or dancing. I acquired multiple copies of the book, in the same edition and with the same cover, and reading it—with only partial understanding—was like engaging in a religious ceremony. If I were ever to understand it fully, that knowledge would surely disappear to nothing in an instant. (Location 2630)
• I accepted my predicament as the price of my freedom—the mark of my freedom, even—and so long as there was still a carton of milk in the refrigerator, I felt secure. (Location 2639)
• Tehching Hsieh, and I soon learned that he was a performance artist from Taiwan. Several years earlier, he had assembled a wooden cage measuring eleven and a half by nine and standing eight feet high and imprisoned himself inside it for a year, during which time he neither spoke to other people nor read nor wrote. Every day a friend would bring him food and dispose of his waste, and that was all. When I met him, he had already completed three of these One Year Performances, and they weren’t getting any easier. (Location 2664)
• Linda and Tehching were models for me in terms of their unflinching commitment to an artistic vision, and in their company I never felt lonely. Tehching was like a character out of a Kafka novel: nobody understood what he was doing, and very few really took notice. He was like an exquisite plant specimen, immersed in an existence all its own. Now, when Tehching and I meet up, we always share our thoughts on the artist’s life. He’s like a boxer always ready to throw a punch, and I’m the punching bag. (Location 2695)
• Still, I knew that possibilities are never completely exhausted, and life itself is a great work of art, with room enough to encompass disillusionment and anomie. (Location 2706)
• Allen was never without his little Olympus camera, with which he would quietly record the passing moments in his day. No matter how dim the light, he never used a flash, and though the pictures could be grainy, there was a richness to their shadows. The back lot below his kitchen window was a subject he never tired of photographing. (Location 2722)
• Allen reminded me of my father, for both were boys who never grew up. To them, the world was what found sanctuary in their consciousness, and when they died, that piece of the world perished, too. (Location 2726)
• a melting pot, but it’s more like a vat of sulfuric acid, dissolving variety without a qualm. (Location 2733)

New highlights added February 11, 2023 at 4:50 PM

• In a competitive atmosphere where people eyed each other suspiciously, you needed charm to win approval, to be thought of as cool. I relied on my imagination for other friends: on every street, in every window, among the scurrying pedestrians, there were friends of mine—it was just that I didn’t know them. New York is nothing like a village, after all. (Location 2760)
• I had come to realize that art is simply an identity, and nothing else. To break free of constraints doesn’t mean you have gained freedom, for freedom is an expression of courage and sustained risk-taking, and facing freedom is always difficult, whatever the time and place. I felt no need to explain my lifestyle any further, for it could not be categorized one way or another, and what lay ahead was a boundless expanse of aimless and unstructured life. (Location 2798)
• I never fall apart, because I never fall together. (Location 2806)
• It was Duchamp’s work that had caught my eye at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when I first arrived in America, and it was his emphasis on art as an intellectual and not simply a visual experience that would be a lifelong inspiration to me. His interest in ordinary objects, in the “readymade,” was already influencing my own artistic productions. (Location 2815)
• When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover. If they were not going to be hanging on someone else’s wall, they didn’t count as anything at all. (Location 2826)
• My photo appeared in the Metropolitan section, with a credit below in small print: “New York Times, Ai Weiwei.” Seeing these words banished all thoughts of sleep. That photo was so ordinary as to be just one leaf out of the countless leaves that drop in autumn, but the feeling it gave me was special, for it was the first time I had established a true connection with my adopted city. I was no longer simply a spectator. (Location 2859)

New highlights added February 13, 2023 at 3:22 PM

• The dealers found me perplexing, for I followed no prevailing tastes or conventional wisdom. Instead I was taken with obscure objects, and made a point of buying things that seemed to have little or no value; my hungry spirit was nourished as I imagined the stories lurking behind each piece. The observations and insights that came to me from the distant past spurred me on to make art of my own. (Location 2980)
• Art lurks in the obscure parts of one’s inner mind, and often I find it where others do not look; to me it is as solid and authentic as that litter of earthenware shards. (Location 2986)
• like a traditional Chinese physician dispensing cures, I would feel their pulse and offer a prescription, my advice being the same in all cases: they should make no effort to please other people and just concentrate on preserving their vital energy. To conventional culture, I said, art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe: the reason why art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes what seems settled and secure. Change is an objective fact, and whether you like it or not, only by confronting challenges can you be sure you have enough kindling to keep the fire in your spirit burning. Don’t try to dream other people’s dreams, I told them; you have to face up to your own predicament honestly, on your own terms. There’s a huge gulf between your aesthetic passions as an artist and the indifference of the real world. (Location 3014)

New highlights added February 15, 2023 at 1:05 PM

• When we went to the Ministry of Commerce to register our new company, we offered three possible names in Chinese, and the clerk solemnly selected 发课 from among the three nominees. In written Chinese, these characters, placed together, are meaningless and innocuous, but in the Pinyin system they are romanized as FAKE, which of course looks just like an English synonym for “phony.” Even more appealingly, when pronounced in standard Chinese, the characters fākè (发课) also sound very much like the English word “fuck.” One way or another, the name should warn you that it’s a mistake to always take me seriously. (Location 3257)
• But in late 2005 I composed my first blog post, slowly typing out the words “To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.” (Location 3372)
• Freedom, of course, inspires expression, and soon my readers understood me even better than my family did. On the internet, social coercion is nullified and the individual acquires a kind of weightlessness, no longer subordinate to the power structure. Public opinion can take shape under the influence of shared aspirations and enthusiasms, and at times one could see signs of a revolution in the making as ordinary people’s understanding of social realities altered fundamentally, transcending the limitations of time and space, encompassing everything we could see and everything we could not, as naturally as the air we breathed. (Location 3388)

New highlights added February 16, 2023 at 9:56 AM

• Every few days, my assistant Zhao Zhao would grab Ai Dan’s car, a borrowed media permit taped to the windshield, and drive in and out of the construction sites to document the progress. My motivation was simple: if I did not make a record, nobody else would, and people would end up seeing only the finished product and not the labor that preceded it. A simple visual record becomes a part of human memory, enduring despite efforts to suppress it. I was determined to create a lasting testimony to the hardship of the migrant workers who toiled to build these landmarks. (Location 3439)
• To me, art is in a dynamic relationship with reality, with our way of life and attitude to life, and it should not be placed in a separate compartment. I have no interest in art that tries to keep itself distinct from reality. (Location 3474)
• Fairytale 2007: A Journey to Kassel by 1,001 Chinese Fairytale is a work by artist Ai Weiwei, to be presented at the 12th Kassel Documenta Exhibition. Ai Weiwei will travel with 1,001 Chinese to the city of Kassel in central Germany; this trip to Kassel by 1,001 Chinese is the basic element in the work. The dates of the activity are June 12, 2007, through July 14, 2007. The organizer will be responsible for organizing the participants’ group departure and group return. Procedure: the organizer will circulate application materials prior to March 1, 2007, and prior to April 1, 2007, will review the applications and select participants. After receiving their notifications, the participants will before April 1 mail to the organizer their passports and copies of their identity cards. The organizer by May 1 will initiate visa processing, and all participants will gather at a prearranged time and place to proceed to Germany. (Location 3533)
• I had carefully designed a questionnaire for the volunteers, with a total of ninety-nine questions, including such queries as “Have you ever been to Germany?,” “What would you like to tell the West?,” “What is a fairytale?,” “Can art change the world?,” and “Do you believe in evolution?” I wanted to understand who the applicants were and at the same time make sure they knew I was being serious, (Location 3543)
• When I sent out the invitation, I had added a comment: “Your very act of writing to me will mean that you have already experienced a miracle, in that you are now looking at the world with a new set of eyes and have acquired a new way of thinking.” (Location 3552)
• To me, interaction with the lives of others was no ordinary thing: to explore the world is a right that you acquire when you are born, and these travelers were exercising this right for the very first time. (Location 3600)
• The internet made it possible for me to align personal expression with collective interests, to make people aware that, even if they think they don’t care about politics, once they see what’s being done, they, too, will say, “Hey, things can’t go on like this!” (Location 3795)

New highlights added February 17, 2023 at 4:49 PM

• In late April 2010, as we approached the second anniversary of the tragic Sichuan earthquake, I launched a crowdsourced commemorative activity designed to “respect life, refuse to forget.” I asked netizens to record themselves reading out loud the name of one among the thousands of schoolchildren we had identified as having died, and then send to us the audio file. Some 3,444 people answered the call, often submitting multiple readings, and after completing the audio mixing of more than two thousand such recordings, I put Remembrance online, in tribute and in protest. — (Location 4191)

New highlights added February 18, 2023 at 8:15 PM

• They were offended, I realized. Their life’s work was not something to be trifled with, and they didn’t care for this weird shoe of mine. When you are the master of a craft, you have a firm bond with society—something I sorely lacked at the time. I carried this knowledge with me in creating the sunflower project. One Man Shoe, 1987 (Location 4212)
• Regarding this huge expanse of sunflower seeds, visitors to the Tate wondered, “Where do they all come from? Why so many? Who made them?” The show elicited positive reviews, even in quarters where I had received only faint praise in the past. The Chinese critic Fu Xiaodong described the exhibition as “an emblematic event in the art world, one that nobody can ignore.” As he put it, “With one hundred million handmade sunflower seeds, Ai Weiwei has, in the most patient and extreme way possible, asserted the independence of each individual. Just as every one of these seeds is different, complete in itself, every life is valuable: none deserves to be drowned in the swirling red dust of worldly strivings.” (Location 4233)
• The museum set up a video feed in the exhibition gallery, enabling visitors to ask me questions so that after I got back to Beijing I could respond to them online. A number of people told me they thought of the sunflower seeds as “seeds of freedom” and asked if they could have one to keep; one correspondent said he fantasized that someday the seed in his hand would give off light in the darkness, and that would be the moment that freedom would come. In the following two years, we mailed off more than forty thousand seeds to my supporters. (Location 4239)
• Through some remarkable knack, they could maintain a faint conversation without moving their lips, in a sound softer than an electric fan, so that the microphone hidden in the wall could not pick it up at all. Thus began their nightly outpourings, regarding parents and wives back in their home districts, episodes from their childhood, and anxieties about the future. Listening to them, I lay there like a corpse slowly sinking into the sea, drifting down through the algae blooms and the dark waters to the black depths where no light shone. (Location 4762)
• I began to sympathize with them. They were like me, in a way, confined and constricted, their present ruptured from the past, and lacking anticipation of their future. Sooner or later the prisoners would move elsewhere, but these men would have to continue standing guard—the one skill they possessed—until the day that a whistle would blow and suddenly they’d have to leave and return to the place they came from. (Location 4775)
• Always curious, he once asked me, “Dad, how long has it been? Is it a hundred days?” “What do you mean ‘how long’? How long since when?” “Since we were monkeys.” (Location 4992)
• “Do you think love is useful?” his mom asked. “Love can give us feelings,” he answered. “So what do you think love is, exactly?” “Love?” He pondered for a moment. “Love is a water bottle that’s easily broken, but if you drop it on the floor it doesn’t break.” (Location 4995)
• Once, in the car, I was telling him stories and asked, “What should we write on a hero’s tombstone?” “Dad, write this,” he said. “ ‘I hope a breeze that likes him blows over his tombstone.’ ” I loved that line. Keep it for me, I thought. (Location 5006)
• Every day I would spend hours at my desk, writing IOUs. Each IOU was an exquisitely designed creation, with the names of the borrower and lender and the amount of the loan carefully recorded in traditional script in neat, handwritten vertical columns, and my signature and seal affixed, with a couple of grass-mud horse or sunflower seed stamps in the top right corner, further certifying the agreement. (The grass-mud horse is an imaginary alpaca-like creature that symbolizes resistance to internet censorship; its name in Chinese sounds a lot like an insult.) Then the IOU, together with a couple of my ceramic sunflower seeds—the seeds of freedom—and one of my documentaries would be mailed off to the lender. Once again, my art was part and parcel of a citizens’ movement. (Location 5065)
• As a subtler form of protest, outside the studio gate, I leaned a bicycle up against a young ginkgo tree, and at nine o’clock every morning I would place a bunch of fresh flowers in the bicycle basket, take a picture, and post it on Instagram. I had begun to use Instagram on August 7, 2011, a month and a half after my release from detention, sharing things that happened in my life and selfies taken with people I met. Now I planned to maintain this ritual of photographing fresh flowers each day until I had recovered my passport and regained my freedom to travel. The flowers would serve as a living symbol of the loss of liberty, and they made for a benign, lyrical form of resistance, silent but beautiful, refreshed daily, no matter how inhospitable the weather. Art always engages with the uncertainty of life, and empathy and trust are prerequisites for any fruitful discussion. The act of putting flowers in the basket established just that kind of connection. I could be disappeared, but art could not, just as my father’s poetry continued to live on in people’s minds even when he was in exile. (Location 5154)
• What captives yearn for most is confirmation that the outside world exists. Accordingly, in a section of the exhibition entitled “Yours Truly,” visitors could, as they chose, write messages on postcards pre-addressed to innumerable prisoners of conscience. Many did so. (Location 5170)
• For me, inspiration comes from resistance—without that, my efforts would be fruitless. Having a real—and powerful—adversary was my good fortune, making freedom all the more tangible—freedom comes from all the sacrifices you make to achieve it. Limitations come only from a fear inside the heart, and art is the antidote to fear. I did not need sympathy, for courage itself is an aesthetic feeling, and it’s only when true feeling is transformed into something broadly understood that art can avoid drying up. (Location 5174)
• Ai Lao’s Frozen Hammer, 2015 Later, in one of our video chats, Ai Lao told me he had put a hammer in the freezer. “It’s a present for you,” he said. “The hammer represents Ai Weiwei. No matter how much hassle he gets from the police, Ai Weiwei is always Ai Weiwei—he’s not going to change. When the ice thaws, the hammer is still the hammer.” (Location 5330)
• Shortly before my departure for Germany, the authorities tried to retrieve listening devices they had planted in the walls of my studio, which I had uncovered. (I had celebrated my discovery by setting off firecrackers right next to their transmitter.) But I preferred to keep the devices as a memento. “These things are secret,” I told the police. “They don’t exist. How can I return to you something that is not supposed to be?” To this day, they are still in my possession. A listening device discovered at 258 Caochangdi (Location 5385)
• I am reminded of lines my father wrote after visiting the ruins of an ancient Silk Road city in Xinjiang: Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows Not a trace can be found You who are living, live the best life you can Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory The efforts we make, the mishaps we encounter—all count as repayment for living. (Location 5422)
• A sense of belonging is central to one’s identity, for only with it can one find a spiritual refuge: as the Chinese saying has it, “It’s once you’re settled that you can get on with life.” (Location 5466)
• No one can rid themselves of the imprint of their era’s language and culture, and art serves simply as a pioneer for collective reflection: it offers a chance for a group, or a nation, to become alert to an issue, and to enhance its awareness of things. (Location 5486)
• The fates of our three generations—my father’s, my son’s, and my own—are tightly linked to the fates of countless people we have never met and will never know. This gives me all the more reason to say what’s in my heart, to share with others, and to make myself heard. Self-expression is central to human existence. Without the sound of human voices, without warmth and color in our lives, without attentive glances, Earth is just an insensate rock suspended in space. (Location 5496)

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title: “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows” author: “Ai Weiwei and Allan H. Barr” url: "" date: 2023-12-19 source: kindle tags: media/books

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

Metadata

• Author: Ai Weiwei and Allan H. Barr
• Full Title: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
• Category:#books

Highlights

• In that information-deprived era, personal choice was like floating duckweed, rootless and insubstantial. Denied the nourishment of individual interests and attachments, memory, wrung out to dry, ruptured and crumbled: “The proletariat has to liberate all of humanity before it can liberate itself,” the saying went. After all the convulsions that China had experienced, genuine emotions and personal memory were reduced to tiny scraps and easily replaced by the discourse of struggle and continuous revolution. (Location 92)
• I made a simple oil lamp by pouring kerosene into an empty medicine bottle, poking a hole in the bottle cap, and threading a scrap of shoelace through it. (Location 131)
• As night fell and an impenetrable darkness descended on the wheat fields outside, the insects kept up a constant drone. Father and I would sit on either side of our little table, the oil lamp casting our shadows—one big, one small—on the wall behind us. My mind was often as bare as the room itself, empty of imagination and empty of memories, and my father and I were like strangers, with nothing to say to each other. I would often simply stare into the lamp’s jumping flame. (Location 228)
• A poet, he argued, is different from somebody who simply writes poetry. A poet is loyal to his own experience and does not write about things outside his own understanding, whereas somebody who writes poetry simply puts together sentences, whose words he arranges in separate lines. Without fresh colors, without luster, without images, he asked, where is a poem’s artistic life? (Location 948)
• If I were a bird I would sing hoarsely Of this storm-buffeted land This river forever surging with our grief and outrage This furious wind that never stops blowing And the warm dawn that comes from the woods And then I would die, Letting even my feathers rot in the earth. Why do I so often have tears in my eyes? Because I love this land so deeply. (“I Love This Land,” 1938) (Location 971)
• On the approach of night, the wind would pick up, roaring menacingly as it gusted through the valley. Father would tell us then, consolingly, that the forest was the wind’s home: every night, after its busy labors, the wind needed to come home, just as we did. In his eyes, the wind was the mountain’s oldest citizen, and I was its youngest. (Location 1837)
• Shihezi was inhabited by people with checkered careers, people quite willing to sever connections with their earlier lives and embrace a new beginning, having learned from painful experience that memory and identity were dangerous. The state was a machine that sucked up memory and bleached it white. (Location 1922)
• Society needed to be thrown into chaos, he said, before it could be properly governed. Every seven or eight years, a movement of this kind would be needed, to draw the “ox demons and snake spirits” out of their dens, in keeping with their class nature. The Cultural Revolution would be a war exercise on a national scale, in which leftists, rightists, and vacillating fence-sitters would all receive their proper due. (Location 1984)
• We stacked the books up next to a bonfire, and one by one I tore out the pages and tossed them into the fire. Like drowning ghosts, they writhed in the heat and were swallowed by flames. At the moment they turned to ash, a strange force took hold of me. 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 was a commitment to reason, to a sense of beauty—these things are unbending, uncompromising, and any effort to suppress them is bound to provoke resistance. (Location 2029)
• My life at this point could be described in one word: “dangling.” And it was not just me who was dangling; the whole era was—swinging, swaying, in idle, purposeless, uncertain motion. People had nothing better to do; we were all waiting for things to change. In this unusual moment, the entire society was stifled, depressed. Beijing was gray and silent. (Location 2250)
• The pleasure gained from this single-minded focus in turn disengaged me from other kinds of connection and gave me a feeling of release. With art I opened up a space that was new to me, an abandoned space infested with weeds, in wild and desolate ruin. Perhaps what I was doing was decadent and self-indulgent, but it offered the prospect of self-redemption and a path toward detachment and escape. (Location 2277)
• And how could it block the ideas Freer than the wind Of thousands and millions of people? Or a resolve even firmer than earth? Or a desire even longer than time? (Location 2369)
• After muddling my way through a year, I felt that if I stayed on in Berkeley any longer, my brain would seize up completely in the unending sunshine. (Location 2557)
• Parsons was like an expensive kindergarten, primly cajoling a bunch of wayward kids into behaving properly. (Location 2586)
• me. A steady drizzle was falling outside, but some people without umbrellas were hanging around the front stoop in the rain, showing no signs of leaving. Drug dealers or junkies, they were comfortable anywhere they were. (Location 2602)
• A sense of belonging is as important to the poor as to the rich, and in Lower Manhattan I felt at home amid the dirt and decay and disorder. (Location 2607)
• Browsing at the far end of the basement of the Strand Book Store, on Broadway, one day I came upon a book entitled The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, with Warhol’s signature on the flyleaf. It was the first book in English that I read devotedly from cover to cover, its language a lot like the terse pronouncements you see on Twitter today. My enjoyment of the book came partly from the pleasure of reading it and partly from imagining the pleasure that I would have once I could make sense of it. My attachment to the book was a bit like a Kenyan’s bond with his cane, which never leaves him whether he’s walking or dancing. I acquired multiple copies of the book, in the same edition and with the same cover, and reading it—with only partial understanding—was like engaging in a religious ceremony. If I were ever to understand it fully, that knowledge would surely disappear to nothing in an instant. (Location 2630)
• I accepted my predicament as the price of my freedom—the mark of my freedom, even—and so long as there was still a carton of milk in the refrigerator, I felt secure. (Location 2639)
• Tehching Hsieh, and I soon learned that he was a performance artist from Taiwan. Several years earlier, he had assembled a wooden cage measuring eleven and a half by nine and standing eight feet high and imprisoned himself inside it for a year, during which time he neither spoke to other people nor read nor wrote. Every day a friend would bring him food and dispose of his waste, and that was all. When I met him, he had already completed three of these One Year Performances, and they weren’t getting any easier. (Location 2664)
• Linda and Tehching were models for me in terms of their unflinching commitment to an artistic vision, and in their company I never felt lonely. Tehching was like a character out of a Kafka novel: nobody understood what he was doing, and very few really took notice. He was like an exquisite plant specimen, immersed in an existence all its own. Now, when Tehching and I meet up, we always share our thoughts on the artist’s life. He’s like a boxer always ready to throw a punch, and I’m the punching bag. (Location 2695)
• Still, I knew that possibilities are never completely exhausted, and life itself is a great work of art, with room enough to encompass disillusionment and anomie. (Location 2706)
• Allen was never without his little Olympus camera, with which he would quietly record the passing moments in his day. No matter how dim the light, he never used a flash, and though the pictures could be grainy, there was a richness to their shadows. The back lot below his kitchen window was a subject he never tired of photographing. (Location 2722)
• Allen reminded me of my father, for both were boys who never grew up. To them, the world was what found sanctuary in their consciousness, and when they died, that piece of the world perished, too. (Location 2726)
• a melting pot, but it’s more like a vat of sulfuric acid, dissolving variety without a qualm. (Location 2733)
• In a competitive atmosphere where people eyed each other suspiciously, you needed charm to win approval, to be thought of as cool. I relied on my imagination for other friends: on every street, in every window, among the scurrying pedestrians, there were friends of mine—it was just that I didn’t know them. New York is nothing like a village, after all. (Location 2760)
• I had come to realize that art is simply an identity, and nothing else. To break free of constraints doesn’t mean you have gained freedom, for freedom is an expression of courage and sustained risk-taking, and facing freedom is always difficult, whatever the time and place. I felt no need to explain my lifestyle any further, for it could not be categorized one way or another, and what lay ahead was a boundless expanse of aimless and unstructured life. (Location 2798)
• I never fall apart, because I never fall together. (Location 2806)
• It was Duchamp’s work that had caught my eye at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when I first arrived in America, and it was his emphasis on art as an intellectual and not simply a visual experience that would be a lifelong inspiration to me. His interest in ordinary objects, in the “readymade,” was already influencing my own artistic productions. (Location 2815)
• When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover. If they were not going to be hanging on someone else’s wall, they didn’t count as anything at all. (Location 2826)
• My photo appeared in the Metropolitan section, with a credit below in small print: “New York Times, Ai Weiwei.” Seeing these words banished all thoughts of sleep. That photo was so ordinary as to be just one leaf out of the countless leaves that drop in autumn, but the feeling it gave me was special, for it was the first time I had established a true connection with my adopted city. I was no longer simply a spectator. (Location 2859)
• The dealers found me perplexing, for I followed no prevailing tastes or conventional wisdom. Instead I was taken with obscure objects, and made a point of buying things that seemed to have little or no value; my hungry spirit was nourished as I imagined the stories lurking behind each piece. The observations and insights that came to me from the distant past spurred me on to make art of my own. (Location 2980)
• Art lurks in the obscure parts of one’s inner mind, and often I find it where others do not look; to me it is as solid and authentic as that litter of earthenware shards. (Location 2986)
• like a traditional Chinese physician dispensing cures, I would feel their pulse and offer a prescription, my advice being the same in all cases: they should make no effort to please other people and just concentrate on preserving their vital energy. To conventional culture, I said, art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe: the reason why art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes what seems settled and secure. Change is an objective fact, and whether you like it or not, only by confronting challenges can you be sure you have enough kindling to keep the fire in your spirit burning. Don’t try to dream other people’s dreams, I told them; you have to face up to your own predicament honestly, on your own terms. There’s a huge gulf between your aesthetic passions as an artist and the indifference of the real world. (Location 3014)
• When we went to the Ministry of Commerce to register our new company, we offered three possible names in Chinese, and the clerk solemnly selected 发课 from among the three nominees. In written Chinese, these characters, placed together, are meaningless and innocuous, but in the Pinyin system they are romanized as FAKE, which of course looks just like an English synonym for “phony.” Even more appealingly, when pronounced in standard Chinese, the characters fākè (发课) also sound very much like the English word “fuck.” One way or another, the name should warn you that it’s a mistake to always take me seriously. (Location 3257)
• But in late 2005 I composed my first blog post, slowly typing out the words “To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.” (Location 3372)
• Freedom, of course, inspires expression, and soon my readers understood me even better than my family did. On the internet, social coercion is nullified and the individual acquires a kind of weightlessness, no longer subordinate to the power structure. Public opinion can take shape under the influence of shared aspirations and enthusiasms, and at times one could see signs of a revolution in the making as ordinary people’s understanding of social realities altered fundamentally, transcending the limitations of time and space, encompassing everything we could see and everything we could not, as naturally as the air we breathed. (Location 3388)
• Every few days, my assistant Zhao Zhao would grab Ai Dan’s car, a borrowed media permit taped to the windshield, and drive in and out of the construction sites to document the progress. My motivation was simple: if I did not make a record, nobody else would, and people would end up seeing only the finished product and not the labor that preceded it. A simple visual record becomes a part of human memory, enduring despite efforts to suppress it. I was determined to create a lasting testimony to the hardship of the migrant workers who toiled to build these landmarks. (Location 3439)
• To me, art is in a dynamic relationship with reality, with our way of life and attitude to life, and it should not be placed in a separate compartment. I have no interest in art that tries to keep itself distinct from reality. (Location 3474)
• Fairytale 2007: A Journey to Kassel by 1,001 Chinese Fairytale is a work by artist Ai Weiwei, to be presented at the 12th Kassel Documenta Exhibition. Ai Weiwei will travel with 1,001 Chinese to the city of Kassel in central Germany; this trip to Kassel by 1,001 Chinese is the basic element in the work. The dates of the activity are June 12, 2007, through July 14, 2007. The organizer will be responsible for organizing the participants’ group departure and group return. Procedure: the organizer will circulate application materials prior to March 1, 2007, and prior to April 1, 2007, will review the applications and select participants. After receiving their notifications, the participants will before April 1 mail to the organizer their passports and copies of their identity cards. The organizer by May 1 will initiate visa processing, and all participants will gather at a prearranged time and place to proceed to Germany. (Location 3533)
• I had carefully designed a questionnaire for the volunteers, with a total of ninety-nine questions, including such queries as “Have you ever been to Germany?,” “What would you like to tell the West?,” “What is a fairytale?,” “Can art change the world?,” and “Do you believe in evolution?” I wanted to understand who the applicants were and at the same time make sure they knew I was being serious, (Location 3543)
• When I sent out the invitation, I had added a comment: “Your very act of writing to me will mean that you have already experienced a miracle, in that you are now looking at the world with a new set of eyes and have acquired a new way of thinking.” (Location 3552)
• To me, interaction with the lives of others was no ordinary thing: to explore the world is a right that you acquire when you are born, and these travelers were exercising this right for the very first time. (Location 3600)
• The internet made it possible for me to align personal expression with collective interests, to make people aware that, even if they think they don’t care about politics, once they see what’s being done, they, too, will say, “Hey, things can’t go on like this!” (Location 3795)
• In late April 2010, as we approached the second anniversary of the tragic Sichuan earthquake, I launched a crowdsourced commemorative activity designed to “respect life, refuse to forget.” I asked netizens to record themselves reading out loud the name of one among the thousands of schoolchildren we had identified as having died, and then send to us the audio file. Some 3,444 people answered the call, often submitting multiple readings, and after completing the audio mixing of more than two thousand such recordings, I put Remembrance online, in tribute and in protest. — (Location 4191)
• They were offended, I realized. Their life’s work was not something to be trifled with, and they didn’t care for this weird shoe of mine. When you are the master of a craft, you have a firm bond with society—something I sorely lacked at the time. I carried this knowledge with me in creating the sunflower project. One Man Shoe, 1987 (Location 4212)
• Regarding this huge expanse of sunflower seeds, visitors to the Tate wondered, “Where do they all come from? Why so many? Who made them?” The show elicited positive reviews, even in quarters where I had received only faint praise in the past. The Chinese critic Fu Xiaodong described the exhibition as “an emblematic event in the art world, one that nobody can ignore.” As he put it, “With one hundred million handmade sunflower seeds, Ai Weiwei has, in the most patient and extreme way possible, asserted the independence of each individual. Just as every one of these seeds is different, complete in itself, every life is valuable: none deserves to be drowned in the swirling red dust of worldly strivings.” (Location 4233)
• The museum set up a video feed in the exhibition gallery, enabling visitors to ask me questions so that after I got back to Beijing I could respond to them online. A number of people told me they thought of the sunflower seeds as “seeds of freedom” and asked if they could have one to keep; one correspondent said he fantasized that someday the seed in his hand would give off light in the darkness, and that would be the moment that freedom would come. In the following two years, we mailed off more than forty thousand seeds to my supporters. (Location 4239)
• Through some remarkable knack, they could maintain a faint conversation without moving their lips, in a sound softer than an electric fan, so that the microphone hidden in the wall could not pick it up at all. Thus began their nightly outpourings, regarding parents and wives back in their home districts, episodes from their childhood, and anxieties about the future. Listening to them, I lay there like a corpse slowly sinking into the sea, drifting down through the algae blooms and the dark waters to the black depths where no light shone. (Location 4762)
• I began to sympathize with them. They were like me, in a way, confined and constricted, their present ruptured from the past, and lacking anticipation of their future. Sooner or later the prisoners would move elsewhere, but these men would have to continue standing guard—the one skill they possessed—until the day that a whistle would blow and suddenly they’d have to leave and return to the place they came from. (Location 4775)
• Always curious, he once asked me, “Dad, how long has it been? Is it a hundred days?” “What do you mean ‘how long’? How long since when?” “Since we were monkeys.” (Location 4992)
• “Do you think love is useful?” his mom asked. “Love can give us feelings,” he answered. “So what do you think love is, exactly?” “Love?” He pondered for a moment. “Love is a water bottle that’s easily broken, but if you drop it on the floor it doesn’t break.” (Location 4995)
• Once, in the car, I was telling him stories and asked, “What should we write on a hero’s tombstone?” “Dad, write this,” he said. “ ‘I hope a breeze that likes him blows over his tombstone.’ ” I loved that line. Keep it for me, I thought. (Location 5006)
• Every day I would spend hours at my desk, writing IOUs. Each IOU was an exquisitely designed creation, with the names of the borrower and lender and the amount of the loan carefully recorded in traditional script in neat, handwritten vertical columns, and my signature and seal affixed, with a couple of grass-mud horse or sunflower seed stamps in the top right corner, further certifying the agreement. (The grass-mud horse is an imaginary alpaca-like creature that symbolizes resistance to internet censorship; its name in Chinese sounds a lot like an insult.) Then the IOU, together with a couple of my ceramic sunflower seeds—the seeds of freedom—and one of my documentaries would be mailed off to the lender. Once again, my art was part and parcel of a citizens’ movement. (Location 5065)
• As a subtler form of protest, outside the studio gate, I leaned a bicycle up against a young ginkgo tree, and at nine o’clock every morning I would place a bunch of fresh flowers in the bicycle basket, take a picture, and post it on Instagram. I had begun to use Instagram on August 7, 2011, a month and a half after my release from detention, sharing things that happened in my life and selfies taken with people I met. Now I planned to maintain this ritual of photographing fresh flowers each day until I had recovered my passport and regained my freedom to travel. The flowers would serve as a living symbol of the loss of liberty, and they made for a benign, lyrical form of resistance, silent but beautiful, refreshed daily, no matter how inhospitable the weather. Art always engages with the uncertainty of life, and empathy and trust are prerequisites for any fruitful discussion. The act of putting flowers in the basket established just that kind of connection. I could be disappeared, but art could not, just as my father’s poetry continued to live on in people’s minds even when he was in exile. (Location 5154)
• What captives yearn for most is confirmation that the outside world exists. Accordingly, in a section of the exhibition entitled “Yours Truly,” visitors could, as they chose, write messages on postcards pre-addressed to innumerable prisoners of conscience. Many did so. (Location 5170)
• For me, inspiration comes from resistance—without that, my efforts would be fruitless. Having a real—and powerful—adversary was my good fortune, making freedom all the more tangible—freedom comes from all the sacrifices you make to achieve it. Limitations come only from a fear inside the heart, and art is the antidote to fear. I did not need sympathy, for courage itself is an aesthetic feeling, and it’s only when true feeling is transformed into something broadly understood that art can avoid drying up. (Location 5174)
• Ai Lao’s Frozen Hammer, 2015 Later, in one of our video chats, Ai Lao told me he had put a hammer in the freezer. “It’s a present for you,” he said. “The hammer represents Ai Weiwei. No matter how much hassle he gets from the police, Ai Weiwei is always Ai Weiwei—he’s not going to change. When the ice thaws, the hammer is still the hammer.” (Location 5330)
• Shortly before my departure for Germany, the authorities tried to retrieve listening devices they had planted in the walls of my studio, which I had uncovered. (I had celebrated my discovery by setting off firecrackers right next to their transmitter.) But I preferred to keep the devices as a memento. “These things are secret,” I told the police. “They don’t exist. How can I return to you something that is not supposed to be?” To this day, they are still in my possession. A listening device discovered at 258 Caochangdi (Location 5385)
• I am reminded of lines my father wrote after visiting the ruins of an ancient Silk Road city in Xinjiang: Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows Not a trace can be found You who are living, live the best life you can Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory The efforts we make, the mishaps we encounter—all count as repayment for living. (Location 5422)
• A sense of belonging is central to one’s identity, for only with it can one find a spiritual refuge: as the Chinese saying has it, “It’s once you’re settled that you can get on with life.” (Location 5466)
• No one can rid themselves of the imprint of their era’s language and culture, and art serves simply as a pioneer for collective reflection: it offers a chance for a group, or a nation, to become alert to an issue, and to enhance its awareness of things. (Location 5486)
• The fates of our three generations—my father’s, my son’s, and my own—are tightly linked to the fates of countless people we have never met and will never know. This gives me all the more reason to say what’s in my heart, to share with others, and to make myself heard. Self-expression is central to human existence. Without the sound of human voices, without warmth and color in our lives, without attentive glances, Earth is just an insensate rock suspended in space. (Location 5496)