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.

"

In Humanity, Ai Weiwei tells us that because no artist can be self-contained, he feels that refugees are part of him and that he is part of them. He invites us to enter into a circuit of mutuality and empathy that involves a subject, an artist and an audience with consequences that
go beyond the artistic situation.

"---Kosmas Tsokhas, Journal of Contemporary Asia