Ai Weiwei Quotes

213 Sourced Quotes

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
It is as difficult [for Chinese politicians] to get a real smile [from the people] as it is to keep the sky blue and clouds white.

Ai Weiwei
We see plenty of artistic work that reflects superficial social conditions, but very little work that questions fundamental values.

Ai Weiwei
I think I have this responsibility to my father's generation, and especially future generations.

Ai Weiwei
Contemporary art and the [Communist] Party are an impossible situation. It's like oil and water—they can never mix.

Ai Weiwei
Stupidity can win for a moment, but it can never really succeed because the nature of humans is to seek freedom. Rulers can delay that freedom, but they cannot stop it.

Ai Weiwei
They detained me for 81 days, but they never killed me. They clearly told me: 'If we were in the Cultural Revolution, you would have been killed 100 times.' They said: 'We have already improved.' I said: 'I thank you very much. Yes, you have improved. Not because you are really willing to improve yourself, but only because improvement is a matter of surviving.'

Ai Weiwei
Freedom of expression is a very essential condition for me to make any art. Also, it is an essential value for my life. I have to protect this right and also to fight for the possibility.

Ai Weiwei
The world is not changing if you don't shoulder the burden of responsibility.

Ai Weiwei
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
Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.

Ai Weiwei
This is something you can never erase. It leaves a scar on you.

Ai Weiwei
I think we have too much history. It's not so important. I think people should have fun and enjoy their own time. I haven't done much, so why should I waste people's memory?

Ai Weiwei
China has not established the rule of law and thus there is no justice.

Ai Weiwei
It's really life and death [not art]. When they tell you your mother is 80 years old but you cannot see her again, you can never call it performance art. Or when your son is three, and they tell you that when you are released he will be in his teens and can never recognize you as a father. You feel terrible inside, to lose those chances. Each day, they tell you, 'You will spend your life day after day the same, minute after minute the same. You just have to pay [with] your life for this kind of so-called freedom that you are fighting for.' There is no sense of justice there. Why do I have to do this with them? Why do I have to argue or play this game?

Ai Weiwei
I don't know about five years from now. I have no plans for that. Maybe I'll be forgotten by then.

Ai Weiwei
Cover-ups and deception are the nature of this society. Without lies it won't exist.

Ai Weiwei
The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It's as simple as that.

Ai Weiwei
I often think what I'm saying is for the people who never had a chance to be heard.

Ai Weiwei
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.

Ai Weiwei
Before blogging, I was living in the Middle Ages. Now my feelings for time and space are entirely different.

Ai Weiwei
I think China is in a chaos now and it could be more chaos. It's an orderly chaos. It's a party that ruthlessly violates every human's basic rights to serve its own purpose.

Ai Weiwei
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
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.

Ai Weiwei
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