Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was both an artist and one of China's most revered contemporary poets, who as a young man studied Baudelaire and Mayakovski in Paris. When he returned to Shanghai in 1932, the ruling Kuomintang party jailed and tortured him, calling him a leftist. It was right: in 1941, Ai Qing joined the Communist Party.,,BUT 17 years later, in the infancy of Mao's new People's Republic, he ran afoul of the Communist Party for subtly criticizing its suppression of free speech. The party exiled him, first to Manchuria, then to remotest northwest China; Siberia, essentially.,,Mr. Ai and his family lived in a hut dug into the ground. His job for the next 16 years was to clean out the village's public toilets.,,"He was 60 years old. He had never done physical work in his life and he had to start doing it," his son said. "Every night, he comes home very, very dirty. But he says, 'For 60 years, I don't know who cleans my toilets. So now I do something for them.',,"That's something I learned from him. He became very powerful in terms of his thinking. He made the toilet so clean, he would see it as a work of art --- like a museum, like MoMA."

found footage: NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/world/asia/28weiwei.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2