Ai Weiwei
212 quotes
Biography
"If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?"
"A fine line separates Chinese intellectuals and professors from the political gangsters who protect them."
"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."
"Modernism represents a true kind of living. Modernism is not about form or method or the works of a few artists, but rather about a necessary way of living. And only this kind of lifestyle can save China, because if we don’t have modernism, then we will die under the grasp of one or another ideology. Modernism at least says that every person is free and needs to honestly encounter his own life."
"No autocracy can lead people to believe that they are living in harmony and happiness."
"The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China."
"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."
"Today China and the world will meet again. People will see that the planet is now smaller than at any time in history, that mankind should bid farewell to arrogance and indifference, to ignorance and discrimination, and understand that we share the same small piece of land. It will be a time to rediscover each other, to share what is good in life, to look each other in the eye and link all ten fingers."
"Measuring national prestige by gold medals is like using Viagra to judge the potency of a man."
"Consider why the quality of school dinners is declining, even as more and more golf courses are opened."
"I’m not sure I’m good at art, but I find an escape in it."
"Living in a system under the Communist ideology, an artist cannot avoid fighting for freedom of expression. You always have to be aware that art is not only a self-expression but a demonstration of human rights and dignity. To express yourself freely, a right as personal as it is, has always been difficult, given the political situation."
"Art is not an end but a beginning."
"I don’t know about five years from now. I have no plans for that. Maybe I’ll be forgotten by then."
"Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward."
"The fundamental problem is not that there are limits on voicing different opinions here. The problem is that the whole society is dying through lack of responsibility or involvement."
"[The Olympics are] an event manipulated into misleading people into believing that we have entered a new, successful and harmonious period in our history. This is not true."
"The 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."
"Contemporary art and the [Communist] Party are an impossible situation. It’s like oil and water—they can never mix."
"We see plenty of artistic work that reflects superficial social conditions, but very little work that questions fundamental values."
"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."
"The great success of this system is that it makes the general public afraid of taking responsibility, afraid of taking a position or giving a definite answer, or even of making mistakes."
"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."
"It is better to have a retarded president who respects human values than a clever government without human values."
"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."