The IT people who have made such an effort to know and understand computer technology. They are frustrated that you cannot use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China. They are the first to recognize that the situation is terrible.
AI WEIWEII deal with students every day – from China, Germany, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And I’ve noticed that the Chinese students are the least trained in having a sense of aesthetics.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
-
-
By participating in the society we live in, we understand our conditions and the way we relate to the world.
AI WEIWEI -
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 -
If there is no free speech, every single life has lived in vain
AI WEIWEI -
[Cultural departments] don’t care about culture. Maybe they’re the furthest from the people who understand culture.
AI WEIWEI -
The Internet changes the structure of society all the time — this massiveness made of individuals.
AI WEIWEI -
It’s like the mountains, the ocean and the rivers. It has its own geological forms. Societies cannot be flat. But during change, human rights, human dignity and free speech have to be protected. Otherwise, we’ll be going backward.
AI WEIWEI -
Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.
AI WEIWEI -
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 WEIWEI -
I’m totally independent. I don’t bear any responsibility to any system.
AI WEIWEI -
A lot of the time [in the U.S.], I was thinking about how spending time is always questionable or is always the biggest obstacle in my life.
AI WEIWEI -
I saw [Allen Ginsberg] more as an old man who liked poetry and who had a lot of physical and emotional problems. We liked our time together.
AI WEIWEI -
If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.
AI WEIWEI -
As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am.
AI WEIWEI -
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.
AI WEIWEI -
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