Ai Weiwei
Leading Chinese artist, curator, architectural designer, cultural and social commentator and activist.
"Behind every political deal in this country, the first casualties are always the ordinary people, who are barely treated as human."
"Because of the economic crisis, China and the United States are bound together. This is a totally new phenomenon, and nobody will fight for ideology anymore. It’s all about business."
"I spend very little time just doing '“art as art.'”
"Art is not an end but a beginning."
"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."
"Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources."
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"In an environment without public platform nor protection, the individual is the most powerful and most responsible."
"Your own acts tell the world who you are and what kind of society you think it should be."
"I lost all connection with the outside world and was immersed in a world of darkness. I was scared that my existence would fade silently. No one knew where I was, and no one would ever know. I was just like a small soybean—once fallen to the ground, it rolls into a crack in the corner. Being unable to make any sounds, it will forever be forgotten."
"My messages are temporary and shouldn’t be our permanent condition. And like the wind it will pass. We’ll have another wind coming."
"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?'”
"I don’t see myself as a dissident artist. I see them as a dissident government!"
"The Chinese [government] only superficially speaks the language of the international community."
"Chairman Mao was the first in the world to use Twitter. All his quotations are within 140 words."
"My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention."
"I think I have this responsibility to my father’s generation, and especially future generations."
"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."