For artists and intellectuals today, what is most needed is to be clear about social responsibility, because that is what most people automatically give up. Just to protect yourself as an individual is very political.
AI WEIWEIYou need a purpose to express yourself, but that expression is its own purpose.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.
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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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Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don’t feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.
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The jobs for 7 million university graduates every year, the immense corruption: Even some Western governments would have to scramble to find solutions to such problems.
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There isn’t a single Chinese university that can invite me to give a talk. Even though I know there are many students who would like to hear what I have to say.
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Freedom of expression is a very essential condition for me to make any art. Also, it is an essential value for my life. I have to protect this right and also to fight for the possibility.
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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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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.
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That’s why I always question this sense. The feeling of home really requires a lot of trust. It requires you to identify with it, which I always find myself very contradictory to.
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A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.
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I’m doing quite a few things now. In one day, I will go to Kassel, Germany, for a documentary project I’ve been preparing for half a year.
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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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I am everywhere and I am nowhere. That’s the beauty of the Internet Age.
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We never really see the global situation as a total situation. Today’s political leaders are still lacking of the vision.
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I think by shattering it we can create a new form, a new way to look at what is valuable – how we decide what is valuable.
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