Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it.
AI WEIWEISociety becomes very destructive.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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They’ve become part of a conspiracy, collaborators of the crime, which is lying to the general public and trying to hide the kind of criminal acts happening in many cases.
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[Cultural departments] don’t care about culture. Maybe they’re the furthest from the people who understand culture.
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I think it’s quite narrow-minded. There wasn’t much encouragement or opportunities for any artist – not just Chinese artists.
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You need a purpose to express yourself, but that expression is its own purpose.
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They lack any ability to sense what is beautiful or what is proper. They can be learned and skillful, but they lack the ability to make their own free judgment. It is really sad to see young adults of 20, 25 years who were never taught to make their own decisions.
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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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If people are being abused or even killed during an arrest, this is highly disturbing.
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I think of art as coming from daily life, daily experience. I think it’s very important not to have it become work for some kind of elite circle.
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Any politician who respects China’s government should tell it openly what is in his heart. It is disrespectful to keep quiet about such issues – both vis-a-vis the government and the people concerned.
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I think to deal with the situation like human crisis, 65 million people being displaced, lost their home, and with such human tragedy, has to make every level of society to be conscious and to be alert about the situation.
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I don’t want the next generation to fight the same fight as I did.
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I was in the most restricted prison in China, the most tough. The design of the prison is modeled for internal crimes of the Communist party, so it’s like a mafia family’s law. It’s independent to the law this nation openly applies.
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Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.
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We are not on – even just a step away from the most brutal and primitive crudity. To be very crude on those issues, which is always challenges and we always have to look at the situation like a mirror, to draw some understanding.
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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.
AI WEIWEI






