The title translates as On Censorship, and over the course of his life, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has encountered it far more than most people. (The book was originally published in English; I received this edition as a birthday present. It was translated into German by Luca Groß, and it reads both smoothly and clearly.) His father was the poet Ai Qing, and thanks to the censorship of the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party, the Ai family was exiled from Beijing to northeastern China in 1958, and then further to Xinjiang in 1959. The family did not return to Beijing until 1976, when the younger Ai was 19. By 1978, he was part of an avant-garde art group, and in 1981 he was one of the earliest reform-era Chinese students in the United States. A chance encounter led to a friendship with Allen Ginsburg, and a living link to America’s beatniks and counterculture history.

He has worked in a wide variety of media, and he has also been a civic activist. He drew particular ire from Chinese authorities when he conducted an independent investigation into why so many buildings, especially schools, collapsed following the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. Local and national authorities wanted to censor reports of corruption; they also wanted to prevent an open accounting of how many children died in the quake’s aftermath. A police beating led to a cerebral hemorrhage, which was treatable because he was in Munich when it occurred. In 2010, local authorities in Shanghai slated his studio for demolition, and placed him under house arrest. In 2011, he was arrested on tax charges; the Chinese state confiscated his passport. In 2015, he was allowed to leave China and he settled in Germany until 2019. He declared Germany a closed society and decamped for England. He now divides his time between England, where his children are in school, and Portugal.

Censorship and control, and his reactions against them, have shaped his life and art. The best parts of this brief book are where he relates his own experiences as a way of illustrating the harm that censorship imposes on people’s lives. The book itself comprises about a score short essays, from the initial definitions of “On Censorship” and “What is Censorship?” to more oblique considerations in “Surveillance” and “Understanding the Unknown.” He offers more detailed ideas in “Censorship and Privacy” or “Censorship and Education.” For Ai, censorship is any control or attempted control of a person’s thoughts and expression by an institution with the power to try to enforce such control. Self-censorship is particularly important, because the authorities do not have the capacity to be everywhere, so they rely on people to censor themselves.

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