10 Brilliant Quotes From "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"

Image via Complex Original

"I think there is a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression."

While this quote appears in the end of the documentary as part of an interview with BBC Radio 1 in 2011, it perfectly encapsulates Ai Weiwei's philosophy. 

A Study in Perspective is one of Ai's most controversial series, where he photographed himself flipping off Tiananmen Square, The White House, The Eiffel Tower, and other important monuments. The documentary explains it as his way of rebelling against government authority that disregards the freedoms of its citizens. 

The photograph of Ai Weiwei's wife holding up her skirt in Tiananmen Square is equally controversial, and was included in The Black Cover Book of 1994. Ai created and secretly distributed The White Cover Book and The Grey Cover Book upon his return from New York to Beijing in 1993 to collectively demonstrate contemporary, avant-garde art and artists in China. The books also introduced the work of Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and Marcel Duchamp to the community who "had to know someone" to get one of the books. Following these books, Ai organized a group show in 2000 called FUCK OFF that included experimental and performance art, displaying a multitude of issues concerning the art world. 

In both his individual projects and collective curation, Ai Weiwei has demonstrated his passion for contemporary Chinese art and its power to be politically and socially important.

“Actually, I have very little involvement in the production of my works. I mainly make the decisions. I prefer to have other people implement my ideas. Or maybe I just have an idea, and someone else can use it.”

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds were installed at the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2010. The installation included 100 million porcelain seeds, hand-painted in the town of Jingdezhen by 1,600 Chinese artisans, challenging the ideas of "Made in China" and mass consumption. It encouraged audience participation and imagined new ways that attendees could experience the work, as shown in the documentary.

Ai's openness about his involvement in the production of his work is shameless. It's no secret that many contemporary artists hardly create any of their own work outside of conceptualizing their construction and meaning. However, this is unimportant to Ai Weiwei's influence and statement with Sunflower Seeds. In the film, while building the 2007 Grapes, one of this workers poignantly says, “I’m just his hands. I’m like an assassin! He tells me, ‘Here’s some money, go kill this person.’ I wouldn’t ask him, ‘Why do you want him killed?’ That’s silly. You just get it done! We’re just hired assassins."

“I am not for a kind of Olympics that forces the migrants out of the city, to tell the ordinary citizens they should not participate.”

In 2008, Ai Weiwei famously collaborated on the construction of the Bird's Nest Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics with Herzog and de Meuron.

While this was a huge moment in his career as both an artist and architect, he did not withhold his opinion of China's unfair displacement of Beijing's migrants, as he shared with The Guardian on August 9, 2007. He denounced the Stadium and the Beijing Olympics as political propaganda, saying, "I very openly criticise the tendency to use culture for the purpose of propaganda, to dismiss the true function of art and the intellect."

On July 26, 2012, he wrote an article in The Guardian about China's exclusion of its people in the Olympics, expressing hope that the London games will be different.

“Blogs and the Internet are great inventions for our time, because they give regular people an opportunity to change public opinion.”

As previously mentioned, Ai Weiwei possesses a clear understanding of how the Internet can be used to galvanize and create social change. In a 2011 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, he said, "Life in blog is real because it's your own life, and life is about using time up. It's about how you use it. When I am using it, these one hundred thousand people are also looking at my blog...If I don't update my blog they will wait the whole night so that they can be the first one to see the new content." 

On May 29, 2009, Ai's blog was shut down by authorities, after he posted incidents of police surveillance against him and a list of the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake.

On May 31, 2009, Ai joined Twitter using the handle @aiww. He now has 156,519 followers and tweets nearly every few minutes, organizing gatherings, having dialogue with followers, updating his following with current events, and more.

“It’s about communicating. It’s about how we use the language which can be part of our history or part of other history, and how we transform it into today’s language."

Ai Weiwei has used his Twitter graphically, as he did his blog, posting Twitpics of moments that have now become major parts of his life. One such moment is when he was beat by local police on August 12, 2009, in a hotel room in Chengdu. The image he posted is from the Munich University Hospital, where he learned he was suffering from a brain hemorrhage. He was there to install his landmark exhibition, So Sorry, at the Haus der Kunst, which included a large selection of his work, including the 1994 Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo.

The injury prevented him from being a witness on behalf of the activist, Tan Zuoren. Ai Weiwei recorded (as shown in the documentary) his many attempts to file reports against the officer who hit him.

“There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.”

The film has an incredible scene, where, after tweeting that he was going to the restaurant he dined at the night before being hit by the officer, fans showed up to eat with him, calling him "Teacher Ai." Police tried to force their dinner inside, going so far as to film them at the restaurant, to which one of Ai's assistant began filming back. At this point in the documentary, Ai said the quote above.

“The world is not changing if you don’t shoulder the burden of responsibility.”

On May 12, 2008, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake hit the Sichuan region of China at a magnitude of 8.0. It is believed that over 68,712 people died, and over 18,500 were announced missing. These figures were not immediately released, causing Ai Weiwei to do a search on his own with volunteers, who asked parents to provide the name, birthday, and school of what they found were 5,212 student earthquake victims.

In the documentary, Ai says, “I write blog every day. Sometimes two articles a day. But for seven days during the earthquake I couldn’t write one blog. I just simply could not write. It is devastating. I’m speechless.”

Ai installed 9,000 backpacks at his 2009-2010 So Sorry exhibition at Haus der Kunst in memory of the children who were lost. 

“Freedom is a pretty strange thing. Once you’ve experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away. Then, as an individual, you can be more powerful than a whole country.”

Ai Weiwei's work has championed individualism from the start. He created the 1985 Hanging Man while he was living in New York City and showed it at his first gallery show at Ethan Cohen Gallery titled Old Shoes Safe Sex.

"Maybe to be powerful is to be fragile."

On April 3, 2011, Ai Weiwei disappeared. He was arrested for supposed tax evasion for 81 days, where he was tortured psychologically and had two guards at his side 24 hours a day. His bail condition included that he couldn't be active on social media, give interviews about being jailed, or travel outside of Beijing for a year.

In October 2011, Ai Weiwei was named "The Most Powerful Artist" on ArtReview's Power 100.

He said the quote above in an interview with BBC Radio 1 on October 13, 2011.

"Never retreat, re-tweet!"

In the photo above, Ai Weiwei holds the camera he carries with him at all times and uses often in the film.

His quote is on a wall at the Twitter offices in New York City.