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People have said, if you leave, you may never come back. Or they may not even let you leave. So this is always a cost you may have to pay. But I don't want to restrict myself: When it happens, it happens. I have to deal with it, but not to prepare for it, because it is a kind of stupidity. If you prepare for it too much, you become a part of it.
Ai Weiwei
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It is better to have a retarded president who respects human values than a clever government without human values.
Ai Weiwei
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I often ask myself if I am afraid of being detained again. I love freedom as much as anybody else, maybe more than most. But it is a tragedy to live your life in fear. It is worse than actually losing your freedom.
Ai Weiwei
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I try to encourage people to look at our past in a critical way because as our education, we have a great, great history. But in reality we are poorest in ethics and philosophy, so I try to raise people's consciousness on how we deal with our past.
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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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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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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I wouldn't say I've become more radical: I was born radical.
Ai Weiwei
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My work has always been political, because the choice of being an artist is political in China.
Ai Weiwei
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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
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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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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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But censorship by itself doesn't work. It is, as Mao said, about the pen and the gun.
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China has not established the rule of law and thus there is no justice.
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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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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The language of communication will always need to be renewed.
Ai Weiwei
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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
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The Chinese [government] only superficially speaks the language of the international community.
Ai Weiwei
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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
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[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.
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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
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Every day I think, this will be the day I get taken in again....
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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