Ai Weiwei
Leading Chinese artist, curator, architectural designer, cultural and social commentator and activist.
"They tell us it will be about “emotions” and “friendship,” that it will be a night of joy. Who are they kidding?"
"Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught."
"Say what you say plainly, and then take responsibility for it."
"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."
"[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 state is taking action against people who have peacefully demonstrated their ideas. They are writers—all they did is to express their minds through the Internet. So the pattern is very clear. The state tries to maintain stability by crushing any thought of making change. It could happen to me, because I did the same thing and in many cases I went much further and deeper. But I always think the government can learn from their mistakes—they should learn and understand; they should be just as intelligent as anyone else."
"If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future."
"To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason."
“'Why are you so concerned about society?' That is always the question. And my answer is simple: 'Because you are an artist, you have to associate yourself with freedom of expression.'”
"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."
"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?"
"I call on people to be “obsessed citizens,” forever questioning and asking for accountability. That’s the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life."
"A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete."
"When the mayor of Nagoya denies the Nanjing Massacre, he gets blacklisted by the city of Nanjing. When the government of Sichuan denies “tofu dregs” construction [which caused the collapse of several schools], they get blacklisted by me."
"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?"
"The government computer has one button: delete."
"I am always trying to find how to get the message through. [In Munich] we custom-made five thousand backpacks like the ones of those students [who died in Sichuan] to construct a simple sentence [spoken by the] mother of a dead student. It was: 'She has been happily living in this world for seven years.'”
"To what degree does it help us to change our life, or even to sense our existence, to really evaluate “why?” I think those questions cannot be escaped. Sometimes in history it’s more hidden; somewhere these can be very personal and individual questions. But in certain times and certain places, your existence has to be associated with other people’s situations. You have to make a reaction to the living conditions. It’s not avoidable. You cannot just be blind about what is happening there. Such is the case in China."
"The biggest crime of a dictatorship is to eradicate human feelings from people."
"At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you’re doing. They threaten people, your family, saying: 'Your children won’t find jobs.'”