Ai Weiwei Quotes

I’m an artist who is always looking for what is possible. I’m always looking to extend the boundaries.

Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

'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.'

In an environment without public platform nor protection, the individual is the most powerful and most responsible.

I think art certainly is the vehicle for us to develop any new ideas, to be creative, to extend our imagination, to change the current conditions.

[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 most unfair things that could have happened in a society fell upon a blind man. This is something that no one can accept or explain away with any excuse. Everyone will ask: 'Do we actually have to exist in a society like this?'

They know too many things they should not know and they do not know some things they need to know.

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.

Behind every political deal in this country, the first casualties are always the ordinary people, who are barely treated as human.

To me, to be political means you associate your work with a larger number of people’s living conditions, and that includes both mental and physical conditions. And you try to use your work to affect the situation.

Block [my blog] if you want, but I cannot self-censor, because that is the only reason I have the blog. We both know this is a game. You have to play your part, and I have to play mine.

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."

Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don’t feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.

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