If I look at it, I would laugh. I don’t know how I became successful.
AI WEIWEIThe Internet is the best thing that ever happened to China. It turns us into individuals and also enables us to share our perceptions and feelings. It creates a culture of individualism and exchange even though the real society doesn’t promote it.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don’t feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.
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The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.
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Today, the general masses in this society are in this political-social condition that really encourages people to become rich and become a star and be unique.
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China didn’t want to lose the cutting edge of technology. So the idea of having a Sina Weibo was an attempt to compete with Twitter. However, it has no soul – which is freedom of expression. Nevertheless,
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Creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put, aside from using one’s imagination – perhaps more importantly – creativity is the power to act.
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Even if I have hundreds of things to do, the disconnected feeling is still there because it is very hard to find a real purpose of life.
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When you have strict censorship of the internet, young students cannot receive a full education. Their view of the world is imbalanced. There can be no true discussion of the issues.
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China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here.
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At the moment about 350,000 students return to China from abroad each year – 350,000 young and educated people. I know about them because they know me and often ask me in the street if they can take a selfie with me.
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Everything is selected by the central government without good judgment or an understanding of culture to make it really safe. They will become nobody to maintain their power and be raised to the next higher level.
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Paintings can be painted with the left hand, the right hand, someone else’s hand, or many people’s hands. The scale of production is irrelevant to its content.
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I think China is laughing about the results of the presidential elections. China, Russia, they all laugh about it.
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That’s why the country can’t face up to open competition – unless it resorts to measures like North Korea.
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Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.
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I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years.
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The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.
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I will bring 1,001 Chinese to participate as my artwork there – any Chinese who is a Chinese passport holder and over eighteen years old could apply through my blog.
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They very often just try to cope with their own election, their own popularity, solving the problem or selling the ideas to meet their own voters. By doing that, it creates a great imbalance in terms of making deals or treaty or all those things.
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It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.
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I don’t want the next generation to fight the same fight as I did.
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Technology is a liberation. I think the information age probably is the best thing to happen to the human race in human evolution.
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The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.
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Selling high or low doesn’t mean anything. It has to do purely with the market.
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I think it’s more important to show your work to the public.
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Even though everybody who looked at me would call me a Chinese artist, that’s the 1980s. New York in the ’80s was not so interesting.
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People have been longing for this moment, because it symbolises a turning point in China’s relationship with the outside world.
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