Weiwei Ai > Quotes

“I was in jail 81 days, but after 20 days my brain became completely empty; you need information to stay alive. When there’s no information you’re already dead. It’s a very, very strong test – I think more severe than any physical punishment.
All I wanted was a dictionary, even the simplest one.”
― Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei

“Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.”
― Ai Weiwei

“If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?”
― Ai Weiwei

“An artwork unable to make people feel uncomfortable or to feel different is not one worth creating. This is the difference between the artist and the fool.”
― Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009

“The natural desire to save a cat is what it means to be a citizen.”
― Ai Weiwei

“When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development.”
― Ai Weiwei

“I call on people to be 'obsessed citizens,' forever questioning and asking for accountability. That's the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.”
― Ai Weiwei

“When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.”
― Ai Weiwei

“At different times I've worked in different mediums. For me, the variation is not an artistic judgment, but a necessary choice. It's just as normal to eat with chopsticks, as it is to eat with forks or hands. Different circumstances call for different tools. I try to express ideas with the most appropriate available materials and forms. Very often the medium comes first, and then my reasons for it. Sometimes, I work with a medium I don't like out of curiosity. It is an experiment to challenge my pre-existing concepts and tastes. I've taken hundreds and thousands of photographs, and it's not because I like the medium. I wanted something to parallel my daily activities, and photography is the most logical way of doing that. I filmed documentaries because the medium reflects real conditions the most completely. I don't think artists should only work with what is handiest and most familiar, because the unfamiliar provides a challenge, and it creates another language. It defines the condition for new possibilities.”
― Ai Weiwei

“The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself”
― Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009

“We had better not enjoy the moment, but create the moment.”
― Ai Weiwei, Weiwei-isms

“A name is the first and final marker of individual rights, one fixed part of the ever changing human world. A name is the most basic characteristic of our human rights: no matter how poor or how rich: all living people have a name and it is endowed with good wishes, the expectant blessings of kindness and blessings.”
― Ai Weiwei

“The world is a sphere. There is no East or West.”
― Ai Weiwei, Weiwei-isms

“We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.”
― Ai Weiwei

“the revolution needed to have enemies—without them, people would feel a deep unease.”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—it is present also, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans. It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don’t believe in, simply to fall in line with the prevailing narrative and make a superficial public statement.”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“A poet, he argued, is different from somebody who simply writes poetry. A poet is loyal to his own experience and does not write about things outside his own understanding, whereas somebody who writes poetry simply puts together sentences, whose words he arranges in separate lines. Without fresh colors, without luster, without images, he asked, where is a poem’s artistic life?”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“Tolerating the distortion of history is the first step toward tolerating humiliation in real life.”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“I discovered that I’m an ignorant and shameless person. I’ve used my shameless media sensationalism to achieve shamelessness even greater than the public’s, and I’ve used my individual shamelessness to realize a collective shamelessness. And I don’t see shamelessness as a disgrace, but instead shamelessly believe in shamelessness, and this has led to my shameless state that you see today.”
― Weiwei Ai, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009

“Art has to be involved with moral, philosophical, and intellectual conversations. If you call yourself an artist, this is your responsibility.”
― Weiwei Ai, Humanity

“Take one glance, people are everywhere- going to work, shopping, standing around, strolling, earning money, suffering losses- there’s truly an abundance of people.

But I’ve never seen ‘the People’.”
― Weiwei Ai, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009

“Everything under the sun can be settled or worked out with discussion, but the one thing that can’t be changed is stupidity.”
― Weiwei Ai, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009