"I did this drawing right after I left Xinjiang where I spent about 20 years with my father who was in exile there. Once I arrived in Beijing, at that time my father was still considered as someone who needed to be reeducated or punished. So I went to study art with his old friend and he told me something about drawings but mainly I never liked art that much, I just wanted to escape from the political situation. The drawing was made in the Summer Palace, there is a little hill and almost daily I would ride a bicycle to there, it was quite far from the central Beijing, maybe one and half hours to arrive. This is one of the drawings, I did many but my mom basically after I left Beijing she threw away all of them. This one left only because one day my father was rehabilitated, so they reprinted his selected poems which was a big event because he was a top Chinese poet and his book after a twenty-years of forbidden to write can be reprinted. So he really almost casually wanted this drawing to become a cover of his book. I didn't feel anything, I said ok, you know I was just a teenager back then. Many years later this drawing, that we gave to the publisher for the design of the book cover, disappeared, nobody even questioned, and many many years later people told me this was in one auction and someone bought it. So that's the basic story of this drawing. This drawing we consider as the first formal study I ever made. I used pen and ink, as a sketch. I am happy this can be printed again. That's it." [Ai Weiwei]
Limited edition offset lithograph print.
Dimensions 210 x 300mm.
Edition of 200.
Hand-signed by Ai Weiwei. Individually numbered.
Published by Damocle Edizioni, Venice. December 2024.
Each edition comes with a numbered Certificate of Authenticity (COA).
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