It’s the place they take you before they give you over to the judicial system. You stay there for a year or two and they make you really suffer to confess everything.
AI WEIWEIMy angst and my insecurity reflect the state’s angst and insecurity. The state is scared too.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
-
-
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.
AI WEIWEI -
It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that.
AI WEIWEI -
If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
Imagine one day, the hateful world around you collapses. And it is your attitude, words and actions that put an end to it. Will you be excited?
AI WEIWEI -
I don’t want the next generation to fight the same fight as I did.
AI WEIWEI -
A few thousand are to be built in the next few years, all using taxpayer money. But there is no system, no research, no content, no good programs, no good managers.
AI WEIWEI -
We are living in a popular culture where everything is overexposed.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
The so-called culture nowadays is only a fake one with a superficial front. It is an empty lie.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
I think by not letting young people be fully informed, how can they have energy and passion and the right picture of the world? I think that’s the true crime.
AI WEIWEI -
They lack any ability to sense what is beautiful or what is proper. They can be learned and skillful, but they lack the ability to make their own free judgment. It is really sad to see young adults of 20, 25 years who were never taught to make their own decisions.
AI WEIWEI