After I came back [to China], there was still a long period of time when I felt I had nothing to do.
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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A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.
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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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The deadly weapon against totalitarian society is openness – doing everything very openly on the Internet, letting people know every detail, any little development. Once it is out there, everybody can make their own judgement.
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As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am.
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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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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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I think U.S. and China is a big opportunity, to be seen as partner or some kind of strategic partner maybe. But those kind of powers have a way of getting too big, then we’ll have competition.
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Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.
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A state like China looks so powerful, but they are so scared of the Internet, so the Internet is more powerful than them.
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China didn’t want to lose the cutting edge of technology. So the idea of having a Sina Weibo was an attempt to compete with Twitter. However, it has no soul – which is freedom of expression. Nevertheless,
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At the moment about 350,000 students return to China from abroad each year – 350,000 young and educated people. I know about them because they know me and often ask me in the street if they can take a selfie with me.
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I’m totally independent. I don’t bear any responsibility to any system.
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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 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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They see how dramatic U.S. has to be put this kind of shame on its own – cannot handle the situation. Or show such a difficulty with this liberal ideas. Men or women created equal. And to defend those very essential ideas.
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