Books by Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei: Beijing Photographs, 1993-2003 (The MIT Press)
by Ai Weiwei, John Tancock, Stephanie H. Tung
An autobiography in pictures: photographs taken by Ai Weiwei that capture his emergence as the uniquely provocative artist that he is today.
Ai Weiwei: Beijing Photographs 1993–2003 is an autobiography in pictures. Ai Weiwei is China's most celebrated contemporary artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. In April 2011, when Ai disappeared into police custody for three months, he quickly became the art world's most famous missing person. Since then, Ai Weiwei's critiques of China's repressive regime have ranged from playful photographs of his raised middle finger in front of Tiananmen Square to searing memorials to the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died in shoddy government construction in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Against a backdrop of strict censorship, Ai has become a hero on social media to millions of Chinese citizens.
This book, prohibited from publication in China, offers an intimate look at Ai Weiwei's world in the years after his return from New York and preceding his imprisonment and global superstardom. The photographs capture Ai's emergence as the uniquely provocative artist that he is today. There is no more revealing portrait of Ai Weiwei's life in China than this.
The book contains more than 600 carefully sequenced images culled from an archive of more than 40,000 photographs taken by Ai: a narrative arc carefully shaped by an artist keenly aware of photography's ability to tell stories. It includes a shattering series of photographs taken between 1993 and 1996 devoted to the final illness and death of Ai's father Ai Qing. The book is a sequel to Ai Weiwei: New York 1983–1993, a privately published book that collected photographs taken by Ai during his years on the New York art scene.
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Weiwei-isms (ISMs, 1)
by Ai Weiwei
The quotable Ai Weiwei
This collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of Ai Weiwei's thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The short quotations presented here have been carefully selected from articles, tweets, and interviews given by this acclaimed Chinese artist and activist. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections.
Together, these quotes span some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei's eventful career―from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011―providing a window into the mind of one of the world's most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists.
Select Quotes from the Book:
On Freedom of Expression "Say what you need to say plainly, and then take responsibility for it." "A small act is worth a million thoughts." "Liberty is about our rights to question everything."
On Art and Activism "Everything is art. Everything is politics." "The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay." "Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don't feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy."
On Government, Power, and Making Moral Choice "Once you've tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country." "I feel powerless all the time, but I regain my energy by making a very small difference that won't cost me much." "Tips on surviving the regime: Respect yourself and speak for others. Do one small thing every day to prove the existence of justice."
On the Digital World "Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what's on his mind. A fairy tale has come true." "The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It's as simple as that." "The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China."
On History, the Historical Moment, and the Future "If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future." "We need to get out of the old language." "The world is a sphere, there is no East or West."
Personal Reflection "I've never planned any part of my career―except being an artist. And I was pushed into that corner because I thought being an artist was the only way to have a little freedom." "Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom." "Expressing oneself is like a drug. I'm so addicted to it."
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No copies available.
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir
by Ai Weiwei
The “intimate and expansive” (Time) memoir of “one of the most important artists working in the world today” (Financial Times), telling a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process
“Poignant . . . An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his father’s.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, BookPage, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews
Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. 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 and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist—and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.
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. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. 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.
At once ambitious and intimate, Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.
Copies
-
$18.99
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir
by Ai Weiwei
The “intimate and expansive” (Time) memoir of “one of the most important artists working in the world today” (Financial Times), telling a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process
“Poignant . . . An illuminating through-line emerges in the many parallels Ai traces between his life and his father’s.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, BookPage, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews
Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. 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 and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist—and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.
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. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. 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.
At once ambitious and intimate, Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.
Copies
No copies available.
Humanity (ISMs, 2)
by Ai Weiwei
Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale.
This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless.
Select quotations from the book:
"This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment."
"Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era."
"Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art."
"I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice."
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Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir
by Ai Weiwei
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this beautifully illustrated and deeply philosophical graphic memoir, legendary artist Ai Weiwei explores the connection between artistic expression and intellectual freedom through the lens of the Chinese zodiac.
As a child living in exile during the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei often found himself with nothing to read but government-approved comic books. Although they were restricted by the confines of political propaganda, Ai Weiwei was struck by the artists’ ability to express their thoughts on art and humanity through graphic storytelling. Now, decades later, Ai Weiwei and Italian comic artist Gianluca Costantini present Zodiac, Ai Weiwei’s first graphic memoir.
Inspired by the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac and their associated human characteristics, Ai Weiwei masterfully interweaves ancient Chinese folklore with stories of his life, family, and career. The narrative shifts back and forth through the years—at once in the past, present, and future—mirroring memory and our relationship to time. 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.
Contemplative and political, Zodiac will inspire readers to return again and again to Ai Weiwei’s musings on the relationship between art, time, and our shared humanity.
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$22.99
Ai Weiwei (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)
by Ai Weiwei, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Karen Smith, Bernard Fibicher
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is truly an artist for the twenty-first century. In his sculptures he refashions artefacts and antiques into surprising, sometimes monumental constructions such as Template (2007): hundreds of wooden doors and windows taken from demolished Ming and Qing dynasty temples and arranged into a massive outdoor sculpture. As much as these materials look to the past, they also speak of the present, because never before (and probably never again) have they been available in such abundance. Like his benches carved from centuries-old temple beams, Template is a sly commentary on the speed with which China's building boom is obliterating its past. (When Template collapsed in a rainstorm two weeks after its unveiling at Documenta 12, the artist embraced its demise as a clever artistic twist.)
In China today, making art that's critical of current cultural and economic policies is not a particularly safe career move. But Ai's father, the poet Ai Qing, walked a similar path, absorbing European avant-garde styles while studying in 1930s Paris and later standing by them in the face of Communist opposition, a move that eventually led to his exile to the distant provincial town where his son Weiwei came to be born and raised. In the late 1970s Ai Weiwei moved to Beijing, banding together with other pro-democracy artists in a loose collective known as the Stars Group. In 1981, following government retaliation against one of their exhibitions, Ai moved to New York, where he attended art school and lived the life of the bohemian for twelve years, his East Village apartment serving as a base for countless visiting Chinese artists. When his father became ill in 1993 Ai returned to China, settling in Beijing and finally taking up his art career in earnest.
Weiwei's artistic forebears belong primarily to the Western modernist avant-garde (Duchamp and Beuys are particularly relevant). But Ai has equally and increasingly been influenced by modernist architecture and contemporary urban planning, citing the need for an ideal for living in a country where runaway economic development has shown little regard for the everyday life of the individual. In stark contrast to the glass-and-steel high-rises going up around Beijing, the art galleries, ateliers and homes Ai designs are boxy and modest, made from brick and other vernacular materials. Their resolution of Eastern and Western styles is a fitting parallel to his antique readymade sculptures.
At a time when the West is finally discovering Chinese contemporary art, Ai is one of the few to have transcended the label 'Chinese artist'. In part thanks to his gallery Urs Meile (Lucerne and Beijing), Ai has won the support of strong European collectors. His work is increasingly being shown at major venues around the world (Kunsthalle Bern, Kunsthaus Graz, Tate Liverpool) and included in major international exhibitions (the Moscow Biennial, the Guangzhou Triennale, Documenta). A complex, multi-faceted artist, Ai is poised to make a deep impact on contemporary art far beyond China's borders.
In the interview Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses Ai Weiwei’s life and motivations, his childhood in a rural province close to the Russian border, his underground political work, his move to New York in the 80s and consequent return to China in the 90s, and his break within the art world.
Karen Smith’s survey examines the evolution of Ai Weiwei’s work from the early paintings, drawings, and sculptures pieces through his most recent installations and architectural work, including the cotton-made sculpture World Map (Biennale of Sydney, 2006), the wooden doors and windows structure Template (Documenta 12, 2007) and his collaboration with the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron for the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Bernard Fibicher focuses on Working Progress (Fountain of Light) (2007), a site-specific sculpture for Tate Liverpool inspired by Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919) and
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Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters - Art Architecture and Activism
by Ai Weiwei
A richly illustrated exploration of Ai Weiwei's installation and architecture projects, focusing on the artist's use of space.
Outspoken, provocative, and prolific, the artist Ai Weiwei is an international phenomenon. In recent years, he has produced an astonishingly varied body of work while continuing his role as activist, provocateur, and conscience of a nation. Ai Weiwei is under “city arrest” in Beijing after an 81-day imprisonment; he is accused of tax evasion, but many suspect he is being punished for his political activism, including his exposure of shoddy school building practices that led to the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2009, he was badly beaten by the police during his earthquake investigations.
Ai Weiwei's work reflects his multiple artistic identities as conceptual artist, architect, filmmaker, designer, curator, writer, and publisher. This monumental volume, developed in association with the artist, draws on the full breadth of Ai Weiwei's architectural, installation, and activist work, with a focus on his use of space. It documents a huge range of international projects with drawings, plans, and photographs of finished work. It also includes excerpts from Ai Weiwei's famous blog (shut down by Chinese authorities in 2009), in which he offers pithy and scathing commentary on the world around him. Essays by leading critics and art historians and interviews with the artist, drawing out his central concerns, accompany the 450 beautifully reproduced color illustrations of his work.
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No copies available.
Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 (Writing Art)
by Ai Weiwei
Manifestos and immodest proposals from China's most famous artist and activist, culled from his popular blog, shut down by Chinese authorities in 2009.
In 2006, even though he could barely type, China's most famous artist started blogging. For more than three years, Ai Weiwei turned out a steady stream of scathing social commentary, criticism of government policy, thoughts on art and architecture, and autobiographical writings. He wrote about the Sichuan earthquake (and posted a list of the schoolchildren who died because of the government's “tofu-dregs engineering”), reminisced about Andy Warhol and the East Village art scene, described the irony of being investigated for “fraud” by the Ministry of Public Security, made a modest proposal for tax collection. Then, on June 1, 2009, Chinese authorities shut down the blog. This book offers a collection of Ai's notorious online writings translated into English—the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language.
The New York Times called Ai “a figure of Warholian celebrity.” He is a leading figure on the international art scene, a regular in museums and biennials, but in China he is a manifold and controversial presence: artist, architect, curator, social critic, justice-seeker. He was a consultant on the design of the famous “Bird's Nest” stadium but called for an Olympic boycott; he received a Chinese Contemporary Art “lifetime achievement award” in 2008 but was beaten by the police in connection with his “citizen investigation” of earthquake casualties in 2009. Ai Weiwei's Blog documents Ai's passion, his genius, his hubris, his righteous anger, and his vision for China.
Copies
No copies available.
Zodiac A Graphic Memoir
by Ai Weiwei
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this beautifully illustrated and deeply philosophical graphic memoir, legendary artist Ai Weiwei explores the connection between artistic expression and intellectual freedom through the lens of the Chinese zodiac.
ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
As a child living in exile during the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei often found himself with nothing to read but government-approved comic books. Although they were restricted by the confines of political propaganda, Ai Weiwei was struck by the artists’ ability to express their thoughts on art and humanity through graphic storytelling. Now, decades later, Ai Weiwei and Italian comic artist Gianluca Costantini present Zodiac, Ai Weiwei’s first graphic memoir.
Inspired by the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac and their associated human characteristics, Ai Weiwei masterfully interweaves ancient Chinese folklore with stories of his life, family, and career. The narrative shifts back and forth through the years—at once in the past, present, and future—mirroring memory and our relationship to time. 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.
Contemplative and political, Zodiac will inspire readers to return again and again to Ai Weiwei’s musings on the relationship between art, time, and our shared humanity.
Copies
-
$28.99