Ai Weiwei on Knowledge

"Tax crimes should be investigated by the tax bureau, not through secret police detention."

"It doesn’t matter where I am—China will stay in me. I don’t know how far I can still walk on this road and what is the limit."

"A fine line separates Chinese intellectuals and professors from the political gangsters who protect them."

"I don’t know about five years from now. I have no plans for that. Maybe I’ll be forgotten by then."

"They know too many things they should not know and they do not know some things they need to know."

"You know, if they can do this to me they can do this to anybody, and they have been doing this for over sixty years . . . . it’s a very strange world."

"As an artist, I am very familiar with how to show the details, how to transform them into a language people can understand. They know that the Internet is a strong force, unbearable for them."

"Very few people know why art sells so high. I don’t even know."

"From my experience dealing with Sichuan I started to understand very clearly the character of local government. They will do anything. You will never really wrongly accuse them of anything because they do everything."

"My current situation is, I always want to find a new possibility. China is in a changing stage, and that puts me in a very difficult situation, because anytime a new condition is announced there is a lot of struggle between the new and the old. So the establishment really becomes extremely nervous because they are refusing to meet very basic human rights or values. I don’t know how long I can still struggle in China, but I will try my best. Because this is a land I am very familiar with, and we have been in the same kind of struggle for generations. I think it’s a time for change."

"I definitely know people who are shameless enough to give up basic values. I see this kind of art, and when I see it I feel ashamed. In China they treat art as some form of decoration, a self-indulgence. It is pretending to be art. It looks like art. It sells like art. But it is really a piece of shit."

"Today, the West feels very shy about human rights and the political situation. They’re in need of money. But every penny they borrowed or made from China has really come as a result of how this nation sacrificed everybody’s rights. With globalization and the Internet, we all know it. Don’t pretend you don’t know it. The Western politicians—shame on them if they say they’re not responsible for this. It’s getting worse, and it will keep getting worse."