[Cultural department] understand nothing but bureaucratic daily affairs. They don’t care about culture.
AI WEIWEIIn this kind of dictatorship, in this kind of totalitarian society, it is easy to make deals that you cannot make in a democratic society.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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A clear understanding of such differences will help the rest of the world understand China and all that is happening to the nation.
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I don’t think there is a distinct change, because in the West I’m not a person who can serve his purpose.
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Creativity is the power to act.
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We move so fast that memory is something we can only grasp
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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.
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I don’t think China should care if this crazy old guy should have a show here or not.
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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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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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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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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.
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The IT people who have made such an effort to know and understand computer technology. They are frustrated that you cannot use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China. They are the first to recognize that the situation is terrible.
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Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.
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As long as I can communicate, I’m not so lonely. If I cannot travel, or do art, or have company, if they take away all my belongings, it doesn’t matter at all.
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We have to give our opinion, we have to say something, or we are a part of it. As an artist I am forced to say 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 spend a lot of time talking to journalists.
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Choices after waking up: To be true or to lie? To take action or be brainwashed? To be free or be jailed?
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Many people are going to use [Beijing National Stadium], which makes it more meaningful. If we don’t design it, somebody else has to design it.
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I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression and to use any way to extend this power.
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Politics is like air and water. And you know if there is bad politics. Everyone is polluted. Everyone is unhealthy. See the people walking on the street: how they act.
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I think the pearls – one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl – really show a kind of [society] condition.
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Liberty is about our rights to question everything.
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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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Maybe being powerful means to be fragile.
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When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That’s dangerous for human development.
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It’s not really an ideology, but a method of control. But China’s problems are not just China’s problems – they’re human problems. Humanity has always worked better when you see it as one.
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