Selling high or low doesn’t mean anything. It has to do purely with the market.
AI WEIWEINow I’ve come to such a mixed culture: America, Europe, South America, Africa. And the politics are changing everywhere all the time and becoming even more unpredictable.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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We literally lived underground. We dug a hole and lived there for years. My father cleaned public toilets, even though he was a highly respected poet.
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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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Liberty is about our rights to question everything.
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[Cultural department] understand nothing but bureaucratic daily affairs. They don’t care about culture.
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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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If human rights are supposed to have any meaning, then they have to be discussed openly.
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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.
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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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Overturning police cars is a super-intense workout. It’s probably the only sport I enjoy.
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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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I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom
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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 never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years.
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Politics is like air and water. And you know if there is bad politics. Everyone is polluted. Everyone is unhealthy. See the people walking on the street: how they act.
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Everyone thinks the Chinese government selected me. Never ever. I was selected by Herzog and de Meuron.
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