Ai Weiwei Quotes
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My work has always been political, because the choice of being an artist is political in China.
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Do they want me to stay? Do they want me to leave? Do they want me to hang myself? To kill myself? What do they want?
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Any power or structure that seeks to maintain full control and is not open in any way to loosening its power eventually makes itself ridiculous.
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There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change.
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My messages are temporary and shouldn’t be our permanent condition. And like the wind it will pass. We’ll have another wind coming.
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Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.
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A society that has no ideals, that discards the principles of humanitarianism, that abandons the fundamental rights and dignity of humanity, can only survive by denying truth, fairness and justice.
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I always have an attitude. Even if there are no plans, I have an attitude. Perhaps I answered imprecisely before, saying that I am just a person. I am actually a person with an attitude.
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The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China.
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They know too many things they should not know and they do not know some things they need to know.
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Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.
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Nothing can silence me as long as I am alive. I don’t give any kind of excuse. If I cannot come out of China or I cannot go in to China this is not going to change my belief. But when I am there, I am in this condition: I see it, I see people who need help. Then you know, I just want to offer my possibility to help them.
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I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.
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Myself, I try to search for the new way, always trying to set up a new possibility and to find the new tools to express myself. To reach a broader audience.
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I think restrictions are an essential condition in the fight for freedom of expression. It’s also a source for any kind of creativity.
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If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.
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My blog is an extension of my thinking. Why should I deform my thinking simply because I live under a government that espouses an ideology which I believe to be totally against humanity?
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We have to give our opinion, we have to say something, or we are a part of it. As an artist I am forced to say something.
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The government may be made up of clever, sensible people. But if they do not believe in basic human values, the more clever or shrewd they are the greater the tragedy they will create.
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Contemporary art and the Communist Party are an impossible situation. It’s like oil and water-they can never mix.
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To me, to be political means you associate your work with a larger number of people’s living conditions, and that includes both mental and physical conditions. And you try to use your work to affect the situation.
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The Chinese authorities think of artists as prostitutes. And in reality it’s true: in the Communist system artists just represent what the power structure seeks them to represent. It is prostitution.'
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I try to encourage people to look at our past in a critical way because as our education, we have a great, great history. But in reality we are poorest in ethics and philosophy, so I try to raise people’s consciousness on how we deal with our past.
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I think art certainly is the vehicle for us to develop any new ideas, to be creative, to extend our imagination, to change the current conditions.