I don’t think I was very structured in that society and I don’t really believe in personal success, which most Americans believe in.
AI WEIWEI
Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
-
-
I grew up in a desert, which has no kind of imagination.
AI WEIWEI -
If it’s possible, I will have some noodles in the morning and start talking to people, start to think about a few things in my head.
AI WEIWEI -
The importance of elections, transparency, legal procedures, an independent army, and the judicial system is not regarded as highly in China. These core values are the most important evidence of the health of a society, quality of life, and security.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
Maybe [success] is because I’m in China and I’m more open. Maybe it’s my independent behavior, or because I participated in certain projects. I have no idea.
AI WEIWEI -
In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want — not only you, your whole family and all people like you.
AI WEIWEI -
How to become a really modern society when today we are so – as a human being, we feel so powerful. We have high technology and a superb way of controlling our life. And at the same time, in many ways we are so primitive.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
A society is healthy only when it allows its members to discuss their thoughts openly. This is also the only way that a society can gather consensus, let everyone express his or her wish, and foster creativity.
AI WEIWEI -
Liberty is about our rights to question everything.
AI WEIWEI -
The whole Chinese system – not just the political leadership, the military too, the whole power structure, our education system, the whole of society – is suffering from being cut off from the free flow of information.
AI WEIWEI -
Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.
AI WEIWEI -
I have to find a place for my own. I have to search for my own happiness.
AI WEIWEI -
The media is the message. It carries the full intention and the meaning. Once you change it…it’s very disturbing.
AI WEIWEI -
[Museums] all belongs to the cultural department, which is the biggest cultural department in the world.
AI WEIWEI