Humanity
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale.
This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless.
Select quotations from the book:
"This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment."
"Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era."
"Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art."
"I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art collector Warsh assembles a collection of impassioned quotations from Chinese artist and activist Ai that urge the developed world to assume a more charitable response to the global refugee crisis, the largest displacement of people since WWII. Ai takes particular aim at the United States, which, since 2013, has taken in a total of 2,500 Syrian refugees, the same number that arrived in Greece every day at the height of the crisis. On the proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall, he writes, "This solution has never worked and it testifies to the notion that we have become less courageous." Gleaned from news articles and interviews, these brief passages are informed by Ai's time spent interviewing and filming refugees in over 40 refugee camps across 23 countries. Some of Ai's witticisms have the airy, abstract tone of an aphorism: "History teaches us that at the beginning of the greatest tragedies was ignorance." His recollections of time among refugees are as arresting as they are brief: "I saw thousands come daily, children, babies, pregnant women, old ladies, a young boy with one arm. They come with nothing, barefoot, in such cold, and they have to walk across the rocky beach." This is not an analysis of the refugee crisis, but rather an anecdote-heavy collection of field notes from the front lines. The result is a powerful and timely account of the refugee crisis that posits no easy solutions.
