Ai Weiwei Quotes

213 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
I wouldn't say I've become more radical: I was born radical.

Ai Weiwei
My work has always been political, because the choice of being an artist is political in China.

Ai Weiwei
I think the government [will] lose the battle. Because for a nation to develop, the government needs to correct the information, they need to have a space for people to be involved, to discuss, to participate in the change. Otherwise, I don't think they can really last in this kind of development, because economically it goes so fast but politically it stays the same as many, many years ago. I think even the government senses that this is impossible.

Ai Weiwei
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
Three years after the CCTV headquarters fire [in Beijing in February 2009], human skeletons lie forgotten. Is anyone accountable?

Ai Weiwei
But censorship by itself doesn't work. It is, as Mao said, about the pen and the gun.

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

Ai Weiwei
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
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
The language of communication will always need to be renewed.

Ai Weiwei
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.

Ai Weiwei
The Chinese [government] only superficially speaks the language of the international community.

Ai Weiwei
This is a decadent era. Its main characteristic is that it's dependent on lies and cheating. Once it loses this characteristic, it can't survive for even a day.

Ai Weiwei
[With] 140 words in Chinese, you really can write a novel. Most of Confucius's sentences [are] only four words, so 140 words [might] take his whole life to write. And you can discuss the most profound ideas related to democracy, freedom, poetry.

Ai Weiwei
I definitely know people who are shameless enough to give up basic values. I see this kind of art, and when I see it I feel ashamed. In China they treat art as some form of decoration, a self-indulgence. It is pretending to be art. It looks like art. It sells like art. But it is really a piece of shit.

Ai Weiwei
Every day I think, this will be the day I get taken in again....

Ai Weiwei
Writers, artists, and commentators on websites are detained or thrown into jail when they reflect on democracy, opening up, reform and reason. This is the reality of China.

Ai Weiwei
If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.

Ai Weiwei
[People] always tell me, Weiwei, leave the nation, please. Or Live longer and watch them die. Either leave, or be patient and watch how they die. I really don't know what I'm going to do.

Ai Weiwei
Today, the West feels very shy about human rights and the political situation. They're in need of money. But every penny they borrowed or made from China has really come as a result of how this nation sacrificed everybody's rights. With globalization and the Internet, we all know it. Don't pretend you don't know it. The Western politicians—shame on them if they say they're not responsible for this. It's getting worse, and it will keep getting worse.

Ai Weiwei
On the Internet, people do not know each other, they don't have common leaders, sometimes not even a common political goal. But they come together on certain issues. I think that is a miracle. It never happened in the past. Without the Internet, I would not even be Ai Weiwei today. I would just be an artist somewhere doing my shows.

Ai Weiwei
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?

Ai Weiwei
Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what's on his mind. A fairy tale has come true.

Ai Weiwei
Measuring national prestige by gold medals is like using Viagra to judge the potency of a man.

Ai Weiwei
Chairman Mao was the first in the world to use Twitter. All his quotations are within 140 words.

Ai Weiwei
Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.

Ai Weiwei