Ai Weiwei still remembers when he was just a young boy living with his father underground.

You live in a very, very simple and primitive way. Of course, there's no electricity.

You have to carry the water from far away, the waterway only one in this whole village.

It was a village that they didn't live in by choice. Part of a labor camp in northwest China

where Ai's family and others lived underground due to the extreme high and low temperatures

in that region's Goby Desert. They had been exiled there as punishment for Ai Weiwei's father,

Ai Qing. He was a famous poet, branded as a so-called rightist during the cultural revolution

under Mao Zedong. Their exile began in 1958. Ai Weiwei was just a year old.

My father said Ai Qing never changed a bit because he is a very innocent man. He always make mistakes,

big mistakes. That means he never really let the government

touches or twist his way of behaving. He says his father didn't let the government

change who he was. Then after Mao's death in 1976, Ai Qing and his family were allowed to return

from exile. At 19 years old, Ai Weiwei enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, but a career as an artist

wasn't something he could imagine because for decades in China, the purpose of art had been about

serving the state. I will never imagine I would become an artist. In that time, there's only

four professions in China. You're either a farmer, a factory worker, and a soldier,

and a student and teacher. But I, of course, didn't become any of those things. He did become an

artist, and that wasn't the only way he followed in his father's footsteps. I'm just like him.

In 2011, Chinese authorities secretly detained Ai Weiwei in Beijing. He spent 81 days in detention,

and during that time, he found his thoughts drifting to his father over and over again.

On the surface, these two men were so similar, but deep down, Ai Weiwei felt like he never really

knew his father. Because I never really, directly, asked him a single question about his past.

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