Ai Weiwei Talks to David Remnick About Art, Censorship and Twitter
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2017
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Remnick sits down with Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous artist and dissident, as he plans a new major public-art installation in New York. They discuss censorship, human rights, and social media, which Ai finds fantastically liberating. And, if Donald Trump’s tweets ruin an occasional state relationship, Ai thinks that “maybe that relationship should be ruined.”
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Transcript
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| 1:12.2 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks to the artist |
| 1:18.2 | I-Way-Way. As I prepares a new public art installation in New York, they discuss |
| 1:23.9 | censorship, human rights, and Trump's Twitter feed. |
| 1:31.7 | Okay. They discuss censorship, human rights, and Trump's Twitter feed. I feel I arrived this morning, like 2 o'clock, so I feel a little bit strange. |
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| 2:02.7 | I'm Evan Osnows. I'm sitting in for David Remnick today. But a couple of weeks ago, David had the chance to meet with the artist Ai Wei Wei Wei. I is a unique figure in Chinese society. He's the most famous Chinese artist. He's also a dissident who's been interrogated and beaten and jailed and he's been under government surveillance. |
| 2:06.0 | There was a time when the Chinese government was very proud of I Wei Wei. |
| 2:08.7 | He worked on the 2008 Beijing Olympics. |
| 2:19.4 | But he began to challenge the Communist Party after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, where thousands of children died in schools that collapsed. And he's been struggling with the government ever since. I Wei Wei was in New York recently to plan a major public artwork |
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