I don’t like China. Even today, I still feel I have no emotional relations with this place.
AI WEIWEIOf course, most luxury goods in China are for corrupted officials and their relatives. And that made China become the biggest luxury-goods market.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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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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Your own acts tell the world who you are and what kind of society you think it should be.
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China restricts the society’s freedom of speech. The Communist Party imposes these limits because it lacks confidence towards the future and has no ideals.
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You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.
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Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.
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I have always stated I designed the stadium as a toilet seat.
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To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It’s a very complicated process to do large projects.
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I want people to see their own power.
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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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I don’t belong to a working system. They only select people if you belong to one so you can be controlled.
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The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.
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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.
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As a total activity – I practice curating, art, architecture, writing, and publishing all together. I still act as a living creature.
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In China, we don’t have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn’t even have a gallery.
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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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