Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
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I’m an artist who is always looking for what is possible. I’m always looking to extend the boundaries.
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Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom.
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Very few people know why art sells so high. I don’t even know.
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The biggest crime of a dictatorship is to eradicate human feelings from people.
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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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You can see China still cannot offer any real value to the world except as cheap labor, manufacturer, and its own so-called stability. Besides that, I don’t see any creative values and creative mind or thinking that can be announced from China. So this is the struggle China has to face in the next decades.
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Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.
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Block my blog if you want, but I cannot self-censor, because that is the only reason I have the blog. We both know this is a game. You have to play your part, and I have to play mine.
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Tax crimes should be investigated by the tax bureau, not through secret police detention.
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Measuring national prestige by gold medals is like using Viagra to judge the potency of a man.
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Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don’t feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.
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The population is in a constant state of enforced dislocation. So let us hope that a totally new culture will come out of this.
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The 2008 Olympics has created an illusion of China to the public and to the outside world. It is so fantastic, so unreal, that the entire meaning of the games is being distorted.
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Once again, the facts have been erased.
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Nothing. Jail is about nothing. Completely blank.
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What can they do besides exile me or make me disappear? They have no imagination or creativity.
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The Chinese government only superficially speaks the language of the international community.
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My voice is not for me. Every time I make a sentence I think how many people for how many generations had a voice that no one could hear. At most they will be remembered as numbers; in many cases, even numbers don’t exist.
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I think all aesthetic judgments-all the aesthetic choices we are making-are moral choices. They cannot escape the moral dimension in the broader sense. It has to relate to the philosophical understanding of who we are and how so-called 'art and culture' functions in today’s world.
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It doesn’t matter where I am-China will stay in me. I don’t know how far I can still walk on this road and what is the limit.
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Anyone who cares about truth should avoid not politics, but Olympic lies.
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My favorite word? It’s 'act.'
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The frustration mainly comes from trying to understand what they really want. Also, you cannot understand how can such a large nation maintain its so-called stability by doing something very unlawful. I mean, how can they possibly manage to stabilize the whole social condition by not acting with justice and fairness.
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The Internet changes the structure of society all the time-this massiveness made of individuals.