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 WEIWEII think I’m just a traveler. When you walk across a river and there’s no bridge, you build one. I’m used to having to deal with Chinese Communist ideology.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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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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[Being unique] gives so much privilege to people who can make it, rather than having some moral and aesthetic discussions.
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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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We move so fast that memory is something we can only grasp
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If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.
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You’re still being looked at as somebody who – it’s a very complicated issue.
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Maybe being powerful means to be fragile.
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I think it’s quite narrow-minded. There wasn’t much encouragement or opportunities for any artist – not just Chinese artists.
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Today, we jump into this globalization of the economy and the internet age.
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Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.
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China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here.
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They 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.
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The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.
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If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.
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A nation like China has become one of the biggest production fields for exporting cheap labor, which also re-questions our history and past, re-questions human desire, and the human illusions of the past.
AI WEIWEI