Orville Schell is Vice President of the Asia Society, the Arthur Ross Director of its Center on US–China Relations, and a former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. When the Wenchuan earthquake hit Sichuan Province in 2008, Ai Weiwei attacked the shoddy “bean curd” construction of the collapsed schools and buildings in which thousands of children died, as well as the corrupt officials who had allowed them to go up. When the previous year Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign encouraging intellectuals to speak out, Ai Qing did exactly that. For the Chinese authorities, who would take time to come to terms with and control the internet, this was the first of many transgressions that would lead to his blog being shut down in 2009 and to his subsequent arrest and detention in 2011.

Years of Joys and Sorrows touches on the inevitable contradictions of being an activist and an art superstar, but it is above all a story of inherited resilience, strength of character and self-determination. In 1979 the fifteen-year prison sentence given to the Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng deepened Ai Weiwei’s “understanding of the cynical and brutal nature of the Chinese state, and the Communist Party’s fundamental opposition to freedom of expression. Barr (translator, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows ) is the author of a study in Chinese of a literary inquisition in the early Qing dynasty, Jiangnan yijie: Qing ren bixia de Zhuangshi shi’an 江南一劫：清人笔下的庄氏史案, and the translator of several books by contemporary Chinese authors, including Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words and Han Han’s This Generation .For an artist’s memoir, there is little discussion of actual artmaking, and only passing explanations of his rise.

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. His father was assigned to trim trees on a nearby farm and, after a long day’s labour, was forced to attend a public gathering of his fellow exiles, during which he would often be singled out and denounced as a “bourgeois novelist”.An extravagantly rewarding hybrid: a combination history of modern China, biography of a dissident poet and memoir by his provocateur son . But Ai Weiwei’s defiance is the dialectical result of the party’s own unyielding and often destructive militancy. After Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1959 to reorganize rural China into “people’s communes (人民公社)” and precipitated one of the worst famines in Chinese history, the Ai family was moved for further “remolding” to a still more godforsaken place of exile: Xinjiang, China’s westernmost desert province.

The tough, resolute critics to whom China has repeatedly given rise—such as the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, the Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng, the dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, and most recently the law professor Xu Zhangrun—were all forged on the anvil of the party’s own extremism.

Here, through the sweeping lens of his own and his father's life, Ai Weiwei tells an epic tale of China over the last 100 years, from the Cultural Revolution to the modern-day Chinese Communist Party. This is the rarest sort of memoir, rising above the arc of history to grasp at the limits of the soul. 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 - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - weaves a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own life and that of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. We sat and talked at the long table that’s in one of my photos, and at a certain point he saw my camera and suggested I might like to wander around the studio with it on my own.