The artist's first flowering is a big deal in any memoir. Li Kunwu's comes in the mid-1960s when he and his friends are on a Mao-inspired crusade. "Complicated haircuts are a legacy of the decadent classes," rules ringleader Hongbao, but the sly local hairdresser claims his illiterate clientele won't be able to read the list of restrictions they've written. So 11-year-old Li spends the night sketching barnet after barnet, marking stray curls, fancy bows and anything else that might get in the way of serious labour with a bold "X". The signs go up, the hairdresser glowers, and Li can celebrate: "It was my first artistic success, and it wasn't just any success. It was a revolutionary success."

The incident – which manages to be both a youthful jape and a depressing suppression of freedom – is told straight and unapologetically by an artist who was born in China's poor southwest in 1955, who went hungry in the Great Leap Forward, tramped borders for the People's Liberation Army, drew cartoons for his province's paper and ended up hobnobbing with mineral-water magnates in the southwestern city of Kunming, and French artists at Angoulême's famous comics festival.