But personally, I don’t think my work and my understanding of art is so much related to being Chinese, but the character of that. Maybe it’s beyond my own consciousness.
AI WEIWEIMan has a tendency to try to give clear reasons to be rational, but often you can see how all those reasons are not convincing and turn out to be a big nonsense.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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There’s no single artwork I even want to mention or that I can even really think about it to have any feeling, to be proud of it.
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The whole attitude of society has become much more open and realistic. They realize that the only way to make a more democratic and free society is to let different opinions come out.
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I don’t care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me. It deals with the city.
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I curated this show [Shanghai Biennale ], I was by no means trying to shock people or be controversial.
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I call on people to be ‘obsessed citizens,’ forever questioning and asking for accountability. That’s the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.
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Your own acts tell the world who you are and what kind of society you think it should be.
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A nation like China has become one of the biggest production fields for exporting cheap labor, which also re-questions our history and past, re-questions human desire, and the human illusions of the past.
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Of course, there [in China] has to be chaos. It has to be crazy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it except this government, which is really incapable of doing anything meaningful.
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You need a purpose to express yourself, but that expression is its own purpose.
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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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If there’s the right condition, I always want to express the concept or ideas in a very independent way.
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Life is never guaranteed to be safe, so we better use it while we are still in good condition.
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If there is no free speech, every single life has lived in vain
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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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It’s like the mountains, the ocean and the rivers. It has its own geological forms. Societies cannot be flat. But during change, human rights, human dignity and free speech have to be protected. Otherwise, we’ll be going backward.
AI WEIWEI