People can change) reading on the subway while making little notes in the margins about the necessity of sacrificing ones’ self for artistic expression, while literally attending NYU.

Nonetheless, “my father, my son, and I have all ended up on the same path, leaving the land where we were born. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions to set up new possibilities and conditions for his audience to examine society and its values. An extravagantly rewarding hybrid: a combination history of modern China, biography of a dissident poet and memoir by his provocateur son . But even as readers will be repelled by the relentless savagery of China’s capricious revolution, they will be uplifted by this father-and-son story of humanism stubbornly asserted against it. Ai Weiwei’s sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing.Shortly after his release, he asks Lao what he thinks of his forced disappearance, and receives a wise reply: “They were doing a commercial for you, to make you more famous. As readers delve deeper into the beautifully illustrated pages of Zodiac, they will find not only a personal history of Ai Weiwei and an examination of the sociopolitical climate in which he makes his art, but a philosophical exploration of what it means to find oneself through art and freedom of expression.

I love going to museums but I’m not very knowledgeable about art, and particularly ignorant about modern art. In his first memoir, “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows,” Ai recounts this and other showdowns with the state — confrontations that, alongside his iconoclastic art, have both forged his status as an international icon and forced him to work in political exile.However, as the weeks wore on, “doubts crept in as I lay awake in the late hours—about how this all would end, and about the path that had led me here…. Ai Weiwei recounts how his father naively argued with Mao that literature and art cannot be “a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics” but must instead find “expression in their truthfulness.

No matter how the Chinese government tries to suppress him, Ai Weiwei never fails to speak up and to use his work to speak for those who are unable to speak for themselves. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol.

He has done important work leading an amateur investigation into the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which thousands of children died when shoddy buildings collapsed. I openly declared my opposition to the status quo, reaffirming, through the act of non-cooperation, my responsibility to take a critical stance. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his life story and that of his father, whose creativity was stifled. In November 2010 he joined a group of artists protesting the seizure of their homes by local officials, and marched with them into Tiananmen Square.

Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his life story and that of his father, whose creativity was stifled. His incendiary digital attacks and then a documentary film, Little Girl’s Cheeks, about those who’d died led to repeated altercations with police, including one in which he was beaten so badly that he needed brain surgery. And in a final act of lèse-majesté, he constructed a replica of his prison cell complete with wax figures of himself and his guards as an art installation for museums around the world. The RA is a unique institution, an independent charity with a mission to be a clear, strong voice for art and artists, where art is made, exhibited and debated. Instead, the artist has increasingly turned to documentary-making to highlight the government’s corruption and censorship, as well as embracing blogging and social media with bravado.

It received a single, short, affirmative review in Artspeak , which described it as “a neo-dadaist knockout”. The works featured in the book include Straight, Ai’s gigantic installation made from 150 tons of rebar salvaged from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which comments on governmental corruption and negligence, and Sunflower Seeds for which the artist filled the enormous Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern with 100,000,000 porcelain seeds, each made by Chinese craftspeople. Eine absolute Empfehlung für alle, die sich für Ai Weiwei, Kultur, Menschenrechte und China interessieren. With behind-the-scenes studio pictures, production shots, and numerous statements derived from exclusive interviews with Ai, we gain privileged access to the artist’s process, influences, and importance.