Ai Weiwei is arguably the world’s most famous dissident artist, celebrated for his prolific and profound output of sculpture, installation, architecture, photography and film-making, which is never afraid to take on systems of power and oppression. What is less well known, however, is his extraordinary backstory. His father was distinguished poet Ai Qing, who was a key cultural figure during the Communist rise to power but was one of over half a million intellectuals who fell afoul of the state during the Cultural Revolution. He lost everything and was exiled alongside his young son to ‘Little Siberia’ in northernmost China. For the first 20 years of his life, Ai Weiwei’s experience of his father was not as a writer but as an ‘enemy of the state’. Ai Weiwei tells Simon the harrowing story of his childhood, and his memories of his father’s stoicism in the face of decades of persecution. He reflects on the lessons he took from his father, above all that ‘freedom of expression is the fo