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I spend a lot of time talking to journalists.
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
Journalist
Spend
Talking
Time
Journalists
More quotes by Ai Weiwei
Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don't think art is elite or mysterious.
Ai Weiwei
New York is a city where you're so alone, you're an individual, you can disappear. You can make something happen. But it's very different to make something happen in the art world.
Ai Weiwei
If a society cannot even support somebody like me, then people ask: Who is under protection then? That's why there is such support for me. It is not because I am so beautiful or I am so charming. People feel: This guy is fighting for us.
Ai Weiwei
Maybe [success] is because I'm in China and I'm more open. Maybe it's my independent behavior, or because I participated in certain projects. I have no idea.
Ai Weiwei
Recently I danced in a video spoof of the song 'Gangnam Style,' and it was quickly banned across multiple Chinese online video platforms. But the story still traveled all over the world, carried in hundreds of international media reports.
Ai Weiwei
People have a tendency to become elite rather than to care about the general conditions of the society, which makes me sick. It's an unbearable condition.
Ai Weiwei
Measuring national prestige by gold medals is like using Viagra to judge the potency of a man.
Ai Weiwei
To the media, I have become a symbolic figure, critical of China. According to the government, I am a dangerous threat.
Ai Weiwei
As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am. As long as I can communicate, I'm not so lonely. If I cannot travel, or do art, or have company, if they take away all my belongings, it doesn't matter at all.
Ai Weiwei
Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists - or artists from the United States - that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture.
Ai Weiwei
Selling high or low doesn't mean anything. It has to do purely with the market.
Ai Weiwei
You need a purpose to express yourself, but that expression is its own purpose.
Ai Weiwei
The whole Chinese system - not just the political leadership, the military too, the whole power structure, our education system, the whole of society - is suffering from being cut off from the free flow of information. That's why the country can't face up to open competition - unless it resorts to measures like North Korea.
Ai Weiwei
The rest of the world understands little about China's changes and the possibilities and crises that come with them.
Ai Weiwei
I always want people to be confused, to be shocked or realize something later.
Ai Weiwei
My typical day is I wake up and appreciate that I can still wake up.
Ai Weiwei
The people who control culture in China have no culture.
Ai Weiwei
You can never know what is and what is not powerful, but you can always find out what the powerful people are scared of. A state like China looks so powerful, but they are so scared of the Internet, so the Internet is more powerful than them.
Ai Weiwei
Of course, people will call you an old artist or young artist, which is just a character of you. But personally, I don't think my work and my understanding of art is so much related to being Chinese, but the character of that. Maybe it's beyond my own consciousness.
Ai Weiwei
Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.
Ai Weiwei