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.
AI WEIWEIIf there’s the right condition, I always want to express the concept or ideas in a very independent way.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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Nowadays, China is experiencing the detrimental effects of such decisions. Its citizens have no creativity.
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This week, the world gathers in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic games. This is the extraordinary moment China has been dreaming of for 100 years.
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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.
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Mass production is nothing new. Weren’t cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids?
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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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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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I believe [the architecture firm] Herzog and de Meuron and our collaboration made the product the best it could be.
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I think it’s more important to show your work to the public.
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Had I to create a name for these times, I’d say it is the age of craziness
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The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.
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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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There’s no single artwork I even want to mention or that I can even really think about it to have any feeling, to be proud of it.
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People who can’t do that don’t get a sense of responsibility. And if you lack a sense of responsibility, you push the blame onto the system.
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I never had secure, belonging feelings with this society [in China].
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I’m totally independent. I don’t bear any responsibility to any system.
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