Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
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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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If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.
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'It became like a symbolic thing, to be 'an artist.' After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.'
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I don’t know about five years from now. I have no plans for that. Maybe I’ll be forgotten by then.
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They have to have an enemy. They have to create you as their enemy in order for them to continue their existence. It’s very ironic.
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I think we have too much history. It’s not so important. I think people should have fun and enjoy their own time. I haven’t done much, so why should I waste people’s memory?'
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They don’t believe in liberty. They don’t believe in China before the Communists. There is only one simple, clear task: to protect their control, to maintain their governing. Which is such a pity.
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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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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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Tradition is only a readymade. It’s for us to make a new gesture-to use it as a reference, more as a starting point than conclusion. Of course, there are very different attitudes and interpretations about our past and our memory of it. And ours is never a complete one, but is broken. In China, but also in my practice.
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This is something you can never erase. It leaves a scar on you.
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When I checked into a hospital in Germany, after having been beaten by police in Sichuan, I was told there was bleeding in my brain and I was near fatal collapse. I was rushed into surgery. When I awoke I felt like a normal person again. But I will not feel whole until I and my fellow Chinese can live freely.
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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 wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical: I was born radical.
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The most unfair things that could have happened in a society fell upon a blind man. This is something that no one can accept or explain away with any excuse. Everyone will ask: 'Do we actually have to exist in a society like this?'
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Later I became very involved in writing. I really enjoyed that moment of writing. People would pass around my sentences. That was a feeling I never had before. It was like a bullet out of the gun.
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I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression and to use any way to extend this power.
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They tell us it will be about 'emotions' and 'friendship,' that it will be a night of joy. Who are they kidding?
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A land that rejects the truth, barricades itself against change and lacks the spirit of freedom is hopeless.
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In talking about memory and our history, I think our humanity, especially in China, is cut. Cut, broken, separated. If we have a character from our history and memory, the character is broken, it’s shattered.
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The disaster-makers always get away, while the innocent are always punished.
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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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I see myself not as a leader but as somebody who initiates things or finds the problem or provokes a discussion. You have to be always ready to engage, willing to participate. When events or history happen, you just have to be aware and respond.
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Writers, artists, and commentators on websites are detained or thrown into jail when they reflect on democracy, opening up, reform and reason. This is the reality of China.