Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
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I have no sense of why I lost my freedom and if you do not know how you lost something, how can you protect it?'
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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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You know, if they can do this to me they can do this to anybody, and they have been doing this for over sixty years . . . . it’s a very strange world.
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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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I don’t feel powerful at all. I am still under this kind of detention, and you know, this is kind of a bail. Even yesterday I realized while trying to take care of the baby, at the park, I had been secretly followed and it’s quite fragile. Maybe being powerful means to be fragile.
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Freedom of speech implies the world isn’t defined. It is meaningful when people are allowed to see the world their way.
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The Olympics are an opportunity to redefine the country, but the message is always wrong.
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I think China is in a chaos now and it could be more chaos. It’s an orderly chaos. It’s a party that ruthlessly violates every human’s basic rights to serve its own purpose.'
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Life is never guaranteed to be safe, so we better use it while we are still in good condition.
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The government computer has one button: delete.
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You see a Party system that crushes down anybody who has different opinions, who has different ideas in their mind. Simply to have different opinions can cost someone their life. They can be put in jail, they can be silenced, and they can disappear. And the other people would take it, not giving support.
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I don’t see myself as a dissident artist. I see them as a dissident government!
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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.
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Antiques exist as evidence of the cultural tracks we made in the past.
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The 81 days of detention were a nightmare. I am not unique; it happened to many people in China. Conditions were extreme, created by a system that thinks it is above the law and has become a kind of monstrous machine. There were so many moments when I felt desperate and hopeless. But still, the next morning, I heard the birds singing.
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The officials want China to be seen as a cultured, creative nation, but in this anti-liberal political society everything outside the direct control of the state is seen as a potential threat.
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Citizens should bear the responsibility to act.
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Not an inch of the land belongs to you, but every inch could easily imprison you.
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It’s hard to recover. You become not so innocent. You become, in a way, more sophisticated, which I think you shouldn’t. We should all have more simple happiness . . . . You become bitter.
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To protect the right of expression is the central part of an artist’s activity. . . . . In China many essential rights are lacking, and I wanted to remind people of this.
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The individual under this kind of life, with no rights, has absolutely no power in this land. How can they even ask you for creativity? Or imagination, or courage or passion?
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We should leave behind discrimination, because it is narrow-minded and ignorant, denies contact and warmth, and corrodes mankind’s belief that we can better ourselves. The only way to avoid misunderstanding, war, and bloodshed is to defend freedom of expression and to communicate with sincerity, concern, and good intentions.
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The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.
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I don’t have this concept that separates my art from my daily life. They are one thing to me. They are always one. How do you find the way to express yourself and how to communicate with others?