Hans Werner Holzwarth

“In his texts and overall speech, one word stands out with significant frequeney: argue, argument. Ai says that he lives, quite simply, to argue. A blade of grass, a tree, everything has its form of existence. And his is to argue. More specifically, he is all about the rational argument and the better argument. Even in his art: it is the site of an unintelligible process of transtiguration we may loosely describe as a sort of short circuit in the apparatus of creative thought; yet where art succeeds, it will always entail an argument. This argument, however, can only assert itself in a specific climate, where freedom of opinion prevails.”
― Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ai Weiwei