1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

by Weiwei Ai

Memories were a burden, and it was best to be done with them; soon people lost not only the will but the power to remember. When yesterday, today, and tomorrow merge into an indistinguishable blur, memory—apart from being potentially dangerous—has very little meaning at all.

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.

revolution needed to have enemies—without them, people would feel a deep unease.

These messages served a function similar to Donald Trump’s late-night tweets while in office. They were the direct communication of a leader’s thoughts to his devoted followers, enhancing the sanctity of his authority. In the Chinese case, these pronouncements went even further, requiring total compliance.

Our life was a stage, with everyone automatically playing their appointed roles:

In Little Siberia, isolation forged a closeness between us, and material deprivation brought with it a different kind of plenty, shaping the outline of my life to come.

Memory was like a rope they could clutch as they made their way forward, or use to haul themselves back to days that had passed.

In Father’s view, poets needed to free themselves from formal constraints, using vibrant, colloquial language rather than following the contrived, effete literary fashions that had long held sway.

The estrangement and hostility that we encountered from the people around us instilled in me a clear awareness of who I was, and it shaped my judgment about how social positions are defined. Although in most situations I found myself on the defensive, over time my passive stance gradually evolved into one where I held the initiative.

“Poetry today ought to be a bold experiment in the democratic spirit,” he declared, “and the future of poetry is inseparable from the future of democratic politics. A constitution matters even more to poets than to others, because only when the right to expression is guaranteed can one give voice to the hopes of people at large, and only then is progress possible. To suppress the voices of the people is the cruelest form of violence.”

literature and art share the same goals as politics, but literature and art are not an appendage to politics—they are not a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics. Literature and art’s integration with politics finds expression in their truthfulness: the more truthful the works, the closer their alignment with the progressive political direction of their era.

A home that cannot be protected and sustained loses its persuasiveness; trust and attachment, when not anchored in memory, also cease to exist.

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.

Never forget that under a totalitarian system cruelty and absurdity go hand in hand.

Facing a nonviolent opposition, a totalitarian regime will not retreat a single step; instead it will always display its essential nature, retaliating with brute force, whatever the cost in human lives and human liberty.

Disaster tests people’s endurance, but the real seismic rupture takes place deep in people’s hearts—stoic endurance is just what we see from the outside.

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.

As artworks rise in monetary value, their spiritual dimension declines, and art is reduced to little more than an investment asset, a financial product.

The United States likes to think of itself as a melting pot, but it’s more like a vat of sulfuric acid, dissolving variety without a qualm.

My memories didn’t belong to me; in the episodes that I recalled most clearly, my existence was nullified, and writing them down would be like tossing a handful of sand into the wind.

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.

Violence, so deeply rooted in American life that you could never escape it, reflected the profound flaws built into the country’s social fabric.

I knew what I didn’t want, but I was not quite sure what I did want.

In China, we were still living in a culturally impoverished era, but art had not abandoned us—its roots were deeply planted in the weathered soil. The stubborn survival of this indigenous artistic tradition demonstrated that our narrow-minded authoritarian state would never be able to remake our culture in its own image.

Disdain is a chasm that no power can cross; it makes space for itself by subverting order.

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.

Young people in China today have no knowledge at all of the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and if they knew they might not even care, for they learn submission before they have developed an ability to raise doubts and challenge assumptions.

The difficulty in making something happen, I have found, is often directly correlated to its importance: things that come easy aren’t worth doing.

“It’s a painful fact that today, as we import science and technology and Western lifestyles, we are unable to introduce spiritual enlightenment, or the power of justice, or matters of the soul.”

An individual has no right to challenge authority, and humiliation is often presented as an honor that you are fortunate to receive. Power erases individual thoughts and feelings, always.

When authority determines meaning, independent thought does not exist, and everything is an extension of the discourse of power.

“To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.”

A simple visual record becomes a part of human memory, enduring despite efforts to suppress it.

Art should be recognized, yes, but not in the form of expensive collectibles to be deposited in MoMA storage to molder—that’s simply a waste.

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.

When you break away from mandated meaning, you enter a state of tension with your surroundings, and it is then, when you are uncomfortable, that you are at your most alert.

When administrative power is unlimited, when the judiciary is subject to no scrutiny, when information is shielded from public view, society is bound to operate in the absence of justice and morality. Corruption of the judiciary is the public face of a morally bankrupt body politic, a scar disfiguring the era in which we live.

Freedom is the precondition for fairness, and without freedom, competition is a sham.

“In this world where everything has a political dimension, we are now told we mustn’t politicize things: this is simply a sporting event, detached from history and ideas and values—detached from human nature, even. Politics always reminds us who has built two different worlds and two totally different dreams. There are many things we need to repudiate, but let’s first say goodbye to autocracy, no matter what form it takes and no matter how it’s justified, because the result is always the same: denial of equality, perversion of justice, warping of happiness.”

Belief and ideology were no longer the real battlefield. The real battlefield was profit—naked profit—spanning across regions, conglomerates, and nations, inspired by the globalizing dream of capitalist powers.

If art cannot engage with life, it has no future.

Human rights were downplayed in the interests of globalization and economic growth, confirming that, East or West, it’s money that talks.

self-censorship amounts to self-abasement, and timidity is the road to despair.

To speak is better than not to speak: if everyone spoke, this society would have transformed itself long ago. Change happens when every citizen says what he or she wants to say; one person’s silence exposes another to danger.

simply denouncing totalitarianism does not achieve a transformation of society as a whole; true change requires all kinds of favorable conditions.

Never love a person or a country that you don’t have the freedom to leave.”

In its business deals with China, the West always avoids issues of freedom of speech and citizens’ rights—one of the most glaring moral failures of our time. The West has an obligation to reaffirm human rights, for otherwise its conduct is tantamount to a neocolonialist exploitation of developing nations.

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, individuals can retain the power to be human, and society is shaped by the actions of countless individuals. People have their own sense of right and wrong, one that cannot be entirely replaced by authoritarian principles.

Art always engages with the uncertainty of life, and empathy and trust are prerequisites for any fruitful discussion.

Tolerating the distortion of history is the first step toward tolerating humiliation in real