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I was an illegal alien for many, many years. I couldn't move. If I moved I could not even get a visa back.

Ai Weiwei

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Ai Weiwei
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 18
Architect
Consultant
Contemporary Artist
Designer
Film Director
Human Rights Activist
Painter
Photographer
Sculptor
Social Activist
Peking
Wei-wei Ai
Weiwei Ai
Ai Wei Wei
Even
Aliens
Years
Illegal
Moved
Couldn
Move
Moving
Back
Visa
Many
Alien

More quotes by Ai Weiwei

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As a total activity - I practice curating, art, architecture, writing, and publishing all together. I still act as a living creature.
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We are living in a popular culture where everything is overexposed.
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My musician friends are banned from playing concerts in China because they share the same views as I do. My name cannot appear on the web, because my opinion is different from the Party.
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Just look at the statistics: Each university has tens of thousands of applications for students who want to be in art school, but they can only accept a few hundred.
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All the rich people collect traditional Chinese art. So it's very natural for Chinese families to still see art as the highest human performance and send their children to this field.
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I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom
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Each year, more people want to become artists.
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The whole attitude of society has become much more open and realistic. They realize that the only way to make a more democratic and free society is to let different opinions come out.
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A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.
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To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.
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Chinese citizens have never had the right to really express their opinions in the constitution it says you can, but in the real world it is more dangerous. In the west people think it's a right they're born with. Here it's a right given by the government, and one that's not really practised.
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We move so fast that memory is something we can only grasp
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Because Chinese art is booming, it legitimizes this profession.
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I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me.
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It's always the rich and there's plenty to waste, yet still China has a lot of people living in very spare, poor conditions.
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Civilization has evolved toward more acceptance, understanding and tolerance of global thinking. If we accept differences, our creativity booms. It makes life much more colorful. It also makes humanity much more safe. If we see pureness somewhere as something to be desired, the trouble starts.
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It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.
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We see the tendency in the world to criticise democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about.
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China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.
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Art needs to stand for something.
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