Ai Weiwei Quotes

Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?

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.

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.

The natural desire to save a cat is what it means to be a citizen.

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.

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.

When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

We had better not enjoy the moment, but create the moment.

We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.

The world is a sphere. There is no East or West.

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.

He wrote of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky and witless gluttons” who “spend two hundred billion yuan on drinking and dining and an equal amount on the military budget every year.” Unlike journalists who had to heed the directives from the Department, Ai Weiwei was something new; he had no job from which to be fired for speaking out.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

the revolution needed to have enemies—without them, people would feel a deep unease.

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.

Activist lawyer who defended Ai Weiwei charged with 'provoking trouble

Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei

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?

People asked me, how do you dare say those things on your blog? My answer was: If I don’t say them, it will put me in an even more dangerous situation. But if I say them, change might occur. To speak is better than not to speak: if everyone spoke, this society would have transformed itself long ago. Change happens when every citizen says what he or she wants to say; one person’s silence exposes another to danger.

Tolerating the distortion of history is the first step toward tolerating humiliation in real life.

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.