I came back [to Beijing ] because that’s the only time I had an excuse to come back, or otherwise I would never have a reason to come back.
AI WEIWEIThey 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.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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I never had a sense of home.
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In this kind of dictatorship, in this kind of totalitarian society, it is easy to make deals that you cannot make in a democratic society.
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There’s no such thing as “fixed” culture. China is also becoming more global. Its problems are becoming international problems, becoming German problems, becoming American problems.
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We should use this public sphere and redefine – beyond China’s borders – what a government is allowed to do, where its powers end and where the realm of a citizen’s privacy begins.
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A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.
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He will still mean danger. Modern technology requires calm. You shouldn’t trust anyone with a car who has no knowledge about vehicles or roads.
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The people will always have the last word – even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.
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[Museums] all belongs to the cultural department, which is the biggest cultural department in the world.
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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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The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself
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Even if I have hundreds of things to do, the disconnected feeling is still there because it is very hard to find a real purpose of life.
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I think you can give meaning to any condition; you can be poor or unsuccessful or be so-called successful. But I don’t think that it would give an individual human being a better condition.
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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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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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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