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.
AI WEIWEII 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.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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Even today the borders they’re seeing the physical borders are very different from the political borders. Because all those powers are so connected, and you cannot even see whose interest in what move.
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It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that.
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I am very much interested in the so-called useless object. I mean, it takes perfect craftsmanship, beautiful material carefully measured and crafted, but at the same time it’s really useless.
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It’s not really an ideology, but a method of control. But China’s problems are not just China’s problems – they’re human problems. Humanity has always worked better when you see it as one.
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The fantasy we had with pearls was always so luxurious and unique with a kind of rareness.
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I don’t believe in a sense of home.
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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.
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I think Allen [Ginsberg] was a person who’s like a child.
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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 don’t think my father had a direct influence on me, but I do think, more or less, I was influenced by his independent individualism.
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The so-called culture nowadays is only a fake one with a superficial front. It is an empty lie.
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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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China restricts the society’s freedom of speech. The Communist Party imposes these limits because it lacks confidence towards the future and has no ideals.
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I think China is laughing about the results of the presidential elections. China, Russia, they all laugh about it.
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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