An interrogator working for China's state security forces provided the most accurate assessment of the artist Ai Weiwei. It happened 51 days after he was imprisoned in 2011 on false tax evasion allegations. According to Ai's memoirs, the agent "understood that I wasn't an evil person, just a troublemaker."

The agent informed him, "Everything I did was basically a form of dadaism." "My specialty was cultural subversion."

When he supervised the collection and publishing of the names of 4,851 children who perished in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the artist became "a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe" of the Chinese Communist party. Their deaths, according to Ai, were a direct result of corruption and shoddy school construction.

If Ai had limited his politicking to the gallery, the state security agencies would not have been as zealous in their pursuit of him. Indeed, we hear very little about the conceptual work that first made his name: the 1,001 Chinese citizens from all walks of life who became a living artwork at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 2007 receive only a few paragraphs, and his later installation of 100m ceramic sunflower seeds in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2010 receives even less.

"A safe haven, a language that was less confrontational," Ai says of Art. Instead, the artist has become more interested in filming documentaries to expose the government's corruption and restrictions, as well as brazenly embracing blogging and social media. Politics, he claims, is a "readymade" kind of art.

The earthquake isn't the only subject that Ai is passionate about. He has called attention to labor violations during the building of the 2008 Beijing Olympics stadium, which he helped design; he has auctioned a box of infant formula to draw attention to its high amounts of hazardous melamine; and he has campaigned against the cat-meat trade.

After traveling to Chengdu, China's southwest, in 2009 to assist a fellow activist on trial, the artist was attacked and his team was imprisoned in their hotel rooms.

Ai obviously enjoys the attention that these clashes bring him, and he makes no attempt to win over the reader. In 1994, he published The Black Cover Book, a collection of artworks and essays that was dispersed beneath the censors' radar.

Despite the fact that it drew the attention of the cops, spooking his accomplices, Ai expresses disappointment when he says, "They did not directly interfere." He claims he was "determined to see how far I could go" after Chengdu.

Shortly after, he was arrested, drawing worldwide outrage (in 2015, when the UK issued only a limited visa to allow him to visit his show at the Royal Academy in London due to his criminal record, home secretary Theresa May intervened to extend it).

Given the contentious nature of AI, there are a few odd exclusions. He makes no mention of the backlash he received after reenacting Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who was photographed dead on a beach, with himself in the role of the drowned kid.

He also makes no mention of Julian Assange's backing. He argues how "ideological cleansing" continues in the contemporary west "under the influence of politically correct extremism" – but leaves the argument hanging early in the book, in a passage about self-criticism sessions in 1940s China – but leaves the issue hanging.

Ai's disobedience stems from his father's chaotic background. He claims that he was never emotionally attached to Ai Qing, a well-known poet. Nonetheless, Ai's attitude was clearly shaped by his father's persecution, first as a Nationalist in the 1930s and later as a "rightist" during the Cultural Revolution.

Ai Qing became a member of the Communist Party in 1941 and became close to its leaders, including Mao Zedong, whom he described as "thoughtful and composed, and widely read... cracking the occasional joke." However, he soon became a victim of the leader's purges.

The book is at its most vivid and informative when it recounts Weiwei's adolescent years in a province known as "Little Siberia." The youngster foraged for fuel to stay warm in a dug-out pit, while his father was forced to clean latrines where "feces would freeze into icy pillars."

"Father would always light a cigarette and inspect the work as if he were looking at a Rodin sculpture." "The nicotine rush would give him the courage he needed to face the task at hand," he writes. "I have to admit I lack that level of forbearance," Ai Qing said of his stoicism in the face of persecution.

When Ai Qing was finally politically rehabilitated, he declared himself at peace, but the humiliations left a lasting impression on his son. He expresses "impatience with my father's generation's timidity."

Despite these conflicting emotions, 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrow is ultimately an elegy to his father's professional and personal legacy. He cites from Ai Qing's poetry, and some of them are reproduced in their entirety. "Loving freedom, hating war / In a fury over these things / In anguish over them / Working up a sweat / Tears in their eyes," writes his father in one of his early compositions, penned in Paris.

Ai currently lives in Portugal, and despite his realistic grasp of art's constraints in the face of tyranny and his rejection of his father's notion that poetry was "inseparable from the future of democratic politics," art remains a symbol of societal health for him. "The cruelest form of violence," argues Ai, is censorship.

Thanks to Oliver Basciano at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.