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They [the government] really want to maintain power. At the same time, they refuse to communicate. They refuse to have good intentions. They refuse to be sincere. How can that last?
Ai Weiwei
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I think restrictions are an essential condition in the fight for freedom of expression. It's also a source for any kind of creativity.
Ai Weiwei
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China has not established the rule of law and thus there is no justice.
Ai Weiwei
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But censorship by itself doesn't work. It is, as Mao said, about the pen and the gun.
Ai Weiwei
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Three years after the CCTV headquarters fire [in Beijing in February 2009], human skeletons lie forgotten. Is anyone accountable?
Ai Weiwei
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Once you've tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country.
Ai Weiwei
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It's never about me. [My supporters] use me as a mark for themselves to recognize their own form of life: I become their medium. I am always very clear about that.
Ai Weiwei
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Maybe there is something I got from it. Maybe you also start to be clear on certain things.
Ai Weiwei
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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.
Ai Weiwei
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If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it's a human need.
Ai Weiwei
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Expressing oneself is like a drug. I'm so addicted to it.
Ai Weiwei
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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.
Ai Weiwei
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A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it's incomplete.
Ai Weiwei
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My activism is a part of me. If my art has anything to do with me, then my activism is part of my art.
Ai Weiwei
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Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.
Ai Weiwei
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I don't want the next generation to fight the same fight as I did.
Ai Weiwei
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The Internet changes the structure of society all the time—this massiveness made of individuals.
Ai Weiwei
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They have to have an enemy. They have to create you as their enemy in order for them to continue their existence. It's very ironic.
Ai Weiwei
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A fine line separates Chinese intellectuals and professors from the political gangsters who protect them.
Ai Weiwei
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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.
Ai Weiwei
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The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it's like a sandstorm. You don't see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else's will, somebody else's power.
Ai Weiwei
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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.
Ai Weiwei
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I always have an attitude. Even if there are no plans, I have an attitude. Perhaps I answered imprecisely before, saying that I am just a person. I am actually a person with an attitude.
Ai Weiwei
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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.
Ai Weiwei
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I wouldn't say I've become more radical: I was born radical.
Ai Weiwei
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Ai Weiwei
Creative Commons
Born:
August 28, 1957
(age 66)
Bio:
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese Contemporary artist and activist. Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics.
Known for:
Sunflower Seeds (2010)
Coca-Cola vase
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2011)
Cube Light (2008)
Map of China (2008)
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