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Read the opening free
5,464 words · no email, no account
No. 066 · Art & Design · Visual Art
The Eighty-One Days
a biography of Ai Weiwei
What the book is
In a Beijing courtyard strewn with Han dynasty urns, a man lifts one above his head and lets it fall. The shutter clicks three times. The gesture — destruction as devotion, vandalism as inheritance — would come to define a life lived at the seam where art meets the state.
Wei Tao traces the long arc of Ai Weiwei from his childhood in exile, where his father, the poet Ai Qing, was sent to clean latrines in the Gobi, through the downtown Manhattan years of the eighties, the return to a transforming China, and the studio at Caochangdi that became both workshop and lightning rod. He follows the porcelain sunflower seeds into the Turbine Hall, the names of the Sichuan earthquake children onto a museum wall, the eighty-one days of detention into the work that came after.
Drawing on years of interviews, family correspondence, and the artist's own prolific archive of blog posts, tweets, and surveillance footage, Tao assembles a portrait of a man who has insisted, against considerable cost, that a life and a practice cannot be separated.
What emerges is less a chronicle of provocations than a study of inheritance — of what a son owes a father, what an artist owes a public, and what it means to make objects in a country that would prefer you make none at all.</p>
At a glance
- Subject
- Ai Weiwei
- Shelf
- Art & Design · Visual Art
- Written by
- Wei Tao
- Chapters
- 18 across 196 pages
- Narrated by
- Camille Rhodes
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Poet's SonRead free
- 02The Desert4,524 words
- 03East Village4,417 words
- 04The Readymade Life3,148 words
- 05Ginsberg and the Photographs3,222 words
- 06Return3,774 words
- 07The Beijing Underground3,669 words
- 08FAKE Design2,561 words
- 09The Bird's Nest2,986 words
- 10The Boycott2,940 words
- 11The Children's Names3,297 words
- 12The Blow to the Head2,824 words
- 13The Eighty-One Days3,543 words
- 14The Tax Case and the Surveillance2,987 words
- 15Exile3,557 words
- 16Human Flow2,805 words
- 17The Artist Without a Country3,761 words
- 18Everything Is Art, Everything Is Politics3,155 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 196 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 196 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-039-3 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes
ISBN 979-8-90623-020-1
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Eighty-One Days about?
Ai Weiwei. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Eighty-One Days — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,464 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 62,500 words, 18 chapters, 196 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
