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Happy Sunday. I'm Elise Hu.
Today, we have another Sunday Pick episode where we share another podcast from the TED Audio Collective handpicked by us for you.
Internationally renowned Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is well known for his sculptures, and films, as well as his unrelenting activism and open criticism of human rights abuses in China and beyond.
In this beloved episode of Design Matters from 2021, Ai Weiwei sits down with host Debbie Millman to discuss his memoir, 1 ,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, depicting a century -long epic tale of China told through the story of his family, including his arrest in 2011 and eventual exile from China in 2015.
He and Debbie discuss his views on social change, power, and his hopes for the future.
You can find episodes of Design Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective .ted .com.
This archival episode of Design Matters originally dropped in November of 2021.
writing is difficult but to do art is it's just too easy for me to do it so I cannot even compare this to from the TED audio collective this is design matters with Debbie Millman for 17 years Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about What they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on.
On November 10th, 2021, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in front of a live audience, Debbie spoke with artist and political gadfly Ai Weiwei.
They talked about his family, his art, and his new memoir, 1 ,000 Years of Joy and Sorrow.
That's coming up after the break.
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I used to be good. When I was pretty poor, I was pretty good.
I found out that on blackjackchamp .com, Tom, you are regarded in gambling circles as a top tier professional player.
Well, I use that to relax myself and also kill some time.
It's pretty strange.
If you're traveling, you go to a city, you know nobody, and you stay in a very strange hotel, and sometimes you think about gambling.
Weiwei, your remarkable new memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, is a century -long epic tale of China told through the story of your family.
And you begin the book by recounting the events that occurred on April 3rd, 2011, as you were about to fly out of Beijing's capital airport.
There, a swarm of police descended on you, put a hood over your head, and imprisoned you in a detention center.
For the next 81 days, no one knew where you were or if you were even alive.
At the time of the arrest, did you have any idea what crime you were being accused of?
first I feel I'm very safe because I'm at the hand of the this nation you know I've become a kidnapped by by the government so I feel safe and yeah I always wondering how my mom was think about me or other friend because they they simply have no clue or this guy suddenly disappeared I was was quite noisy before I got disappeared.
Noisy in what way? Well, I just keep talking online.
I write a few posts a day.
It could be long articles and make a lot of argument.
So suddenly my disappearance created a volume which is empty.
So everybody asked, where is this guy?
During this time, you were subjected to psychological torture.
You were held captive in a 280 square foot room.
Two armed guards surrounded you and monitored every move that you made.
They watched you eat, sleep, shower, defecate.
And if that weren't torture enough, they also timed every one of these activities which meant if you showered too quickly you had to stand naked and wet before you could dry yourself off and put on your clothes.
Is it true you even had to ask permission to scratch your head?
Well think about that was exactly 10 years ago.
Now I kind of miss that time if I ask somebody to watch me taking a shower.
It's not an easy thing now.
Yes. Not the answer I was expecting.
Yeah, you know, funny enough, those things happened, you know.
But you stated that everything apart from breathing was prohibited while you were in detention, and living didn't seem much different from being dead.
How did you manage this psychologically at the time?
I guess I still have a lot of curiosity to see how this condition would lead me to, because why they start something like this, how would they, what kind of conclusion they would come to.
So I still, every day, I'm waiting for them to make some kind of decisions because nothing you can do.
You're just sitting there and listen to their instructions.
But they were closer to you than I am, from what I understand.
They were like hovering over you.
They were standing like, each of them very close.
But they're not touching you.
They're just staring at you and without even talking, just look at you.
It's a very unique experience.
is. You were unwilling to admit to any wrongdoing when you were imprisoned and went as far as to tell your guards that even if they threatened to shoot you, your position and your politics would not change.
Was there any time during those 81 days that you actually thought you might be be assassinated?
No I don't think so.
I you know nobody would imagine something like that but certainly I was told I'm going to be sentenced for over 10 years you know to be in jail which is not I will not say that as a threaten but it could be true.
Till today many of my close friend, they are still serving time in jail.
Some are sentenced as lifetime sentence which they never had a crime, you know, one of them are university professors and yes they are serving time.
time. While you were imprisoned, you thought a lot about your father, Ai Qing, who one year after you were born was imprisoned after Chairman Mao unleashed a political initiative designed to purge artists from China who had criticized the government.
And this included your father, who was one of the most important poets in China.
First he was sent to an icy wilderness in far northeast China and then when you were 10, he was banished to a location known as Little Siberia.
Where is Little Siberia?
Well, this is located in northwest of China.
It's probably, if you go further, you'll end up in Pakistan or Russia.
You know, it's really at the border of the very remote province.
Because the Xinjiang province, where the Uyghur people today has to be putting the re -education or some kind of labor camps.
So they are an attempt to remold people through hard labor.
They don't like those intellectuals.
When you don't like someone, you think you should put them as far as possible.
So the farthest place is the location.
Many, many people have been put far away.
way. You went to Little Siberia with your father.
I grew up there. I spent about 16 years there.
My father spent about 18 years there.
Your mother and your little brother did not go to Little Siberia.
They did but they come they went out for one year then they come back.
As your mother was leaving you didn't beg her to stay in your book you stated I held my tongue neither saying goodbye nor asking if she was coming back you were only 10 years old did you think that you were ever going to see her again I always being like this.
I know there's certain sense beyond any kind of mercy or, you know, there's nothing she can do to help, so why wasting the time?
Your father was denounced as a bourgeois novelist, which was really odd since it was poetry that actually made him famous.
And his work was considered highly original, but it was also really risky.
And you write about how at the time only pentasyllabic or heptasyllabic rhyming verse in classical Chinese was considered good poetry.
How did your father first distribute his work?
come back from Paris and they just published his poetry outside the jail and his pen name Ai Qing and later we all followed his pen name so.
Can you share how your father came up with with his pen name?
Well, it's... in Chinese it's easier, but he doesn't like the leader at that time.
It's Mr. Jiang. You know, and his family name is also Mr. Jiang.
So if he cross the name, it comes out the name Ai.
So that's the story.
Sorry. It's easier if you understand Chinese.
Yeah. Story of my life.
Despite your dad's fame, your father had a really turbulent upbringing.
A fortune teller told his parents that the newborn child was at odds with their fate.
And if they raised him at home, he would be the death of them.
So they understood this to mean that the baby should be cared for by others.
And they wrapped your father tightly inside a comforter, embroidered with the words 10 ,000 joys, and sent him to another family to be raised.
And he's written quite, quite powerful poetry about these experiences.
Did your father ever feel that he had a home?
Well, he had a home, but he was raised by a poorest lady in that village.
That lady, in order to breastfeed him, she had to draw a newly born girl to save the milk for him.
So she was his wet nurse.
Yeah, it's really a shocking story, but it's quite common in old China.
And yeah, so he can never call his parents mom and father, but rather to call them uncle and auntie.
Even he's the biggest boy in the family.
so you know when I give a baby later I really trying to find another fortune teller and yeah it may tell me something I will never understand When you and your father arrived at Little Siberia you write about how your life became a course in wilderness wilderness survival training.
And I want to describe what you were living in for the audience.
Your home was a square hole dug into the ground.
Your bed was a raised dirt platform covered with wheat stalks with a square hole in the roof to let in light.
The paraffin lamp you used inside made your nostrils black with soot.
Rats were a constant problem, as were lice.
Your dad's job for much of this time was cleaning out communal toilets, which consisted of holes over a cesspit.
And you write, in winter, this involved breaking up the frozen feces into manageable pieces and shifting them out of the latrine one by one.
One of China's most famous poets, most talented poets, cleaning a latrine and removing feces.
Yet you said that it was a hard time, but there was also a lot of joy.
And I was wondering if you can talk about what that joy was.
Well, life was simple and you are very clear, you are an enemy of the state.
That means you would have no friend.
And that makes sense, much clearer.
And also my father, he is always concentrated on how to clean those toilets.
which is extremely difficult.
Difficult in the summer, it's very hot.
And in the winter, it's totally frozen.
So he had to find a way to manage how to do it.
And he refused anybody even want to help him because he think that what a break is a procedure.
He steps very clear way how he should do it because he always have to focus on there's nobody's going to help him.
So it's very difficult if you watch how he worked because he's a poet, he never know how to handling physical work, but he always made those toilets so clean.
Yeah, you even think it's a crime to use that again.
It's totally clean.
But next day, it will be the same.
It will start again.
People. Human nature.
Yes. Were you lonely?
No, if you're scared of people, you'll never feel lonely.
I understand that you have a picture of that home and for a time it was your phone screen saver yeah but sorry I only can share with you but it's legit thank you your father was forbidden to write for 20 years from the time he was 47 until the time He was 67, what could have been the most fertile time of his career.
He was not even allowed to touch a pen.
And you stated that for him, writing was as important as life itself.
How did he manage? Well, he even tried a few times to suicide.
I guess I never asked that question actually but this I suppose is very difficult because he you know he's when he visit Paris he was 19 years old he learned art and the poetry and he's very idealistic a high aesthetic judgment but to be punished with no reason is absolutely absurd so he has to think his life is going to be like that that is very hard to understand the first book that he published he also created the art for the cover so he was also an artist and I was wondering if you have memories of the first time that you remember being creative?
I never think I have been creative.
Really? It's true. Really?
It's true. And even when I play blackjack, I never think I've been creative.
You know, it's just, you just do it.
Do you remember the first piece of art you ever created?
it? Maybe next year I will do something, but not now.
Fair enough. Let's move on.
You write about how every time you were ostracized and rejected in Little Siberia, your perspective on society shifted accordingly.
And you go on to state that that the estrangement and hostility that you encountered instilled in you a clear awareness of who you were and it shaped your judgment about how social positions are defined.
I kind of feel like I know what the answer's going to be to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
Answer it first. When did it occur to you that you might also want to be an artist?
No, I really not. To be very, well, I will not say honest, but, you know, I never really honest, but to be frank, I never really want to become an artist. And I become artist because I think I'm not capable of doing something else.
So it was sort of the fallback position?
It's true. You can see that.
When you were in detention in 2011, you state that at the onset of your being in prison, you were proud of being detained, much like your father had been.
Why proud? Well, I think, first, there's something I would never understand about my father, why he has been put in prison.
so until I'd been put in the same condition then I said the wow this is a I can match you know even I don't understand clearly why I have to be put in the prison but still I think I matched my father that moment was pretty joyful did you feel like you understood him better in that position at that time yeah we are very in very different positions and I never been sentenced even the state never formally accused me they just trying to investigate and or maybe to intimidate me you want to write about how you began to realize that you actually knew very little about your father's ordeal in detention.
And despite the many questions you had for him when he was alive, you had never asked them.
And you write this in your memoir.
I was stupid. I was not conscious and now I will never get a solid answer.
Weiwei, what do you wish you could have asked him?
I would not ask him if he can play cards or something like that.
But definitely, I would want to know what is in his mind when he's being punished.
And I want to know what is is how he would explain to me about what China is and what kind of system.
And so it takes me much longer to find out by writing this book.
Did you interview a lot of people that knew him to find answers?
I did interview a few, like my mom and a few others.
there's quite a lot of existing material in study of him so I give basic information about what he did during his lifetime did anything that you found surprise you not much surprise because it's repeating each other and you always want to find out what is the truth behind these existing materials.
So I asked my mom. My mom is very respected now.
But I said, can you ask my father's working unit, which everybody belongs to the system, and he's in the very high position as head of a literature world.
So he passed away for a few decades now.
Can you get his personal file, you know, the party kept everybody's file?
So my mom said, yeah, that is not a bad idea, because you're writing this memo.
You need to know all the facts.
and she applied to hire leader and they clearly told her this is not possible nobody can see those secret files so so did you ever really understand what the motivation was for his specific imprisonment?
I would, I actually in those files you can see must be some of my father's confession because in every political movement those people who consider us anti -revolutionary they have to repeatedly write about what they they did wrong.
And also you can see other comrades or fellow literature writers confess about each other.
You know, they have to write those kinds of reports.
For me, those reports would be most crucial to understand the person.
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You were imprisoned when your own son was two years old.
And thinking you were going to be detained for ten years, you came to realize that you had been happy and satisfied with your own life but you also began to feel a deep regret at not having reflected more on your father's life and you decided you needed to write an honest account of what had been happening in China for the last hundred years including as much of your father's history as you could find for your son How well did you think you could rely on your own memories?
About my... About your past and about your father?
Well, I tried to be more factual and I did a lot of research, the original material will be about 800 ,000 words.
We reduced to a little bit over 100 ,000 words.
So there's a lot of materials, and basically I would write very factual sense and I want to hand it to my son so he would have a very clear record about his father and his grandfather.
What was it like for you to write this book?
Writing for me is always...
It's not a very natural act, but it's more like a job.
So I spend two hours every morning, sit down and do right, till I get easily to get tired while riding because you have to concentrate so much it's not very natural.
So two hours make me whole day feel tired it's not a good job but but it it takes 10 years to really make you feel okay that's a book it's not you're satisfied but to think you can't put it down and to do something else.
How similar or different was your approach to writing to the way that you approach art?
Writing is difficult, but to do art is just too easy for me to do it.
So I cannot even compare pair of this too.
In your book, you include this quote from your father about the purpose of poetry.
You write, poetry today ought to be a bold experiment in the democratic spirit, and the future of poetry is inseparable from the future of democratic politics.
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.
Weiwei, it sounds like your father really influenced your own purpose for for creating art.
Or as my wife would say, you come to your craft honestly.
Well, is that really I write down those things?
Yeah. Okay. It's quite astonishing.
Your dad wrote that.
Yeah, that's why writing's difficult because it's really leading you to somewhere where you will not even think about or even touch about.
80 years later, your father's faith in poetry as freedom's ambassador has yet to find any kind of vindication in China.
And you state that refusing to forget can become an act of resistance.
are you at all optimistic that your book might make inroads in changing anything in China I don't have that kind of ambition and yeah I think if everybody writes then the change will automatically come but the problem is only a few people would write and Will your book be published there?
I don't think so. Never.
You write about how you believe the best things that happen in our lives and the moments we treasure most are those when we don't consciously understand ourselves.
Which is true. Like now, I don't understand why I'm sitting here.
are you having any fun at all yeah it's nice to be here talk a little bit more about how you think that lack of consciousness creates openings for things to happen you're you're less prepared and that means you're more more bold, because you don't have this clear sense how dangerous your situation is.
I think that helps a lot.
Do you like danger?
I think any true happiness or the moment is always related to danger.
In what way? Because you are breaking the normal rationality which trying to protect you.
And, you know, so then very often you have no, no way to, to start something new.
At the onset of starting something new, do you experience insecurity?
Oh, why we need to be so secure?
We are staying here all the time anyway, so...
Do you ever have moments of doubt?
Always. Why? Because I couldn't figure out all those things, why we are here and where we are going from here.
And it's very hard to figure it out.
out. Do you do a lot of planning?
No. I always listen to other people's orders, like now, you know?
I'm waiting for the question, but I never really planned since.
What would you like to be asked?" I'd like to be asked where I would like to be asked.
We're having fun. Do you mind if I quote something from from your book?
Whatever. You detail how hard it is to measure.
Are you bored? No, no, I'm trying to be creative.
Thank you. But of course anything creative always come from boredom.
So you're bored. I've been creative.
you're a good blackjack player.
Let's talk about the social purpose of art.
You wrote an article in The Economist just recently where...
Why you read that? We're supposed to talk about the book.
Well, this is about the book.
It's just not in the book.
But it does refer to the book in that you talk about what the purpose of art is and the economic value that is put on and in art and you say that contemporary art has been compromised by capitalism and I'm wondering if you can talk about how this has happened and what if anything can be done about it we find a lot of of problems, but we don't know how to, you know, how to deal with it.
It's just like a pandemic.
We know it's existing, but sometimes we think it's really existing, but of course if you read the numbers, you would understand, yes, so many casualties and so many things has been affected.
Same as when you look at the contemporary art, it's easily, you can draw the conclusion who is benefited and where those art goes and who is collecting and which museum they will later sit in.
So I think it's easy to figure out what is wrong.
How do you think it should be fixed?
How to fix it? Maybe burn all those museums. Maybe, it's not only maybe.
Don't do it. But film it while it's happening so you at least have a piece of art that you make.
You know, it's not my suggestion.
I think in the surrealist in the last century they said something like that.
But if you could redesign the system of buying and selling art, what would you envision?
I don't think anybody can design the system.
The system very often design the art behaving.
so. So, you feel like there's no alternative?
There's no other way to consider...
I mean, we still have intention.
We still, for the most part, do things somewhat consciously.
I think it's much more complicated.
Where it's really or aesthetic or moral or philosophy.
It has to work together in any so -called creative work and education and everything, politics.
And you know, this conversation is still too short for that because by eight o 'clock I have to take an airplane to another nation, you know, England.
Then I have to fly to Scotland.
You created 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds for an installation.
It's not created. I ordered from workers in China.
You know, I... I paid them the salary and 1 ,600 ladies, women that's what they do for two years 100 million sunflower seeds yes so I've been visiting a number of different artist studios over the last year and almost everybody that i visit now has a lot of assistants they're an artist but they have a lot of people working for them because they are lazy or because they well i i mean that's i think an easy answer i think that makes sense if you're thinking about somebody making something by hand in the traditional way, but it does allow for an artist to produce more work, to get more work out there,
to be more prolific.
If you were sitting yourself painting ceramic sunflowers, if you were making 100 million of them, you'd be doing that for the rest of your life.
So does it change the way you view the art if somebody else is helping you?
It changes the way I view the art because because although sound forces still stays in my warehouse, because there's too many and nobody can ever handle the many sounds.
And also if you see every artist produce so much, but if you go to MoMA, the museum, you see what they are hanging there is about works happening 100 years ago, like Van Gogh or...
Right, he didn't have a bevy of assistants.
No, no, no. They're so timid.
They don't know how to handle the art of today.
And they're so, I don't know.
They don't even drink, but they seem so drunk.
Do you view the art differently, though?
Do you think less of it if there's more assistance in making it?
I don't know. You ask too many serious questions.
I'll lighten it up a little bit.
let's talk about hope that's easy you've said that the consequences of hope are to show the condition of our heart i'll say that again so that the audience can really appreciate it the consequences of hope are to show the condition of our heart that will end up tragic Tragically...
I actually was going to ask you if that means you're an optimist, and now you're telling me that it's tragic.
Why is it tragic? Because being real can be very damaging and can be very tragic in our society.
Then why even think about hope?
It's just, as human, As human, we have a lot of...
We constantly make mistakes, so think of hope as one of them.
You think hope is a mistake?
Most likely. I cannot say every hope is mistake, but...
What are your hopes?
I hope the hope is not mistake.
your son Ilao was born shortly before your imprisonment in 2009 and you live in Portugal now no he's in Cambridge and he's in Cambridge going to school yeah um and you've stated that you You, your father, and your son have all ended up on the same path, leaving the land where you were born.
And you go on to write that a sense of belonging is central to one's identity.
How has leaving China impacted how your son is being raised?
It's just started. I have to see the result maybe 30 years later.
are you worried no i believe your son calls you by your full name i wei wei always like that why and i think i don't know i maybe he doesn't trust me to call me a father or or daddy you know but he called me i wei wei so your son seems also to have inherited inherited both you and your father's artistic ability.
And I understand he also writes poetry.
He and his mother left China before you did.
And at the time, he gave you a poem that he wanted you to wait to read until he turned eight years old.
And he was five years old when he wrote it.
So he wanted you to wait three years.
He said he was giving it to you ahead of time, but it was about his five -year -old self.
From a conceptual standpoint, that's pretty advanced for a five -year -old.
Yeah, he tried to confuse me.
I'd like to read that poem.
So this is a poem by Ai Lao, Bai Weiwei's son, five years old.
The wind blows westward. The water flows eastward. I stand here remembering this lovely scene three years ago when I was still a little kid.
I was already smart.
Goodbye, nation. I like the last sentence, goodbye, nation.
given one of your father's most famous poems is titled I love this land I felt that there was a really interesting symmetry to the poetry he also created another conceptual piece titled Frozen Hammer tell us about that well I guess he is pretty frustrated I cannot be with him and so so he put a hammer in a freezer with water, so the hammer freezes into a block.
And he said if one day I get released, he will unfreeze that hammer, and so I think he symbolically think I'm the hammer, but actually I'm only a nail.
so yeah I think it's pretty what he did I actually put the image in the book he made the drawing I'm going to close tonight's interview with a quote you've said that 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.
Ai Weiwei, I'd like to thank you for making our world a better one, a more vibrant one, a more conscious one.
And on behalf of everyone here, I want to thank you for joining us tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, Ai Weiwei.
This interview was recorded at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn, New York, as part of the Unbound series.
The program was co -presented by BAM, Greenlight Bookstore, and PEN America.
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions.
In non -pandemic times, the show is recorded at the School of Visual Arts Master's in Branding program in New York City, The first and longest -running branding program in the world.
The editor -in -chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wyland.
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This is Mike. Mike.
Mike's stuck in traffic.
The only thing that could make this worse is if he promised to cook his date dinner at eight, which he did, but it's now 7 .30 and he's still on the five.
Good thing Mike has Grubhub Plus with Prime.
Zero dollar delivery fees, zero stress, zero rush.
Dinner's covered and so is his reputation.
Free Grubhub Plus. It's on Prime.
Additional terms and fees apply.
