Quotes About Chinese Art

#1. I don't think it's worth discussing new directions in the context of Chinese art - there were no old directions, either. Chinese art has never had any clear orientation.

Ai Weiwei

#2. I'm getting more and more into Chinese art and Japanese, some of those scroll paintings are amazing. You follow the change of the seasons. It's really something. These guys were great masters and of course the use of space.

Robert Barry

#3. Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the 'China thing.'

Arne Glimcher

#4. The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

Ai Weiwei

#5. I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

Madeleine L'Engle

#6. Never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.

Winston Churchill

#7. I feel like everything I wear is a favorite thing. I wouldn't wear something if I didn't love it, and I wouldn't just wear something because someone put me in it.

Dakota Johnson

#8. I'm very much involved with Asian art and its theory and practice, mainly Chinese because that was quite sophisticated. I tend to look at that more than I look the Western.

Brice Marden

#9. Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do. You can both go to two Chinese restaurants, but both can have different kinds of food.

Jet Li

#10. Wushu is a move in Chinese, a physical move. An attack. Wushu is like an art.

Jet Li

#11. The question is, would you rather keep your secrets or keep her?

Penelope Douglas

#12. Making a martial arts film in English to me is the same as John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western

Ang Lee

#13. I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

Ad Reinhardt

#14. Ancient tradition always depicts a true Chinese musician as blind. Esoterically, this implies that his gift of the divine art is so completely guided by, and dedicated to, hosts of the celestial guardians, that both his sight and consciousness are focused above and beyond the objective world.

Corinne Heline

#15. When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.

Arne Glimcher

#16. I don't mind 800 million Chinese drinking a bottle [of Coca-Cola] a day, but I don't want them to bring back the empties.

Art Buchwald

#17. Art history is a global version of that old children's game Chinese whispers.

Grayson Perry

#18. Do not set out to make Mexican art, or American, Chinese, or Russian art. Think in terms of universality.

Rufino Tamayo

#19. Her life was like a burst of wild, flowing Chinese calligraphy, written under the influence of alcohol.

Zhou Weihui

#20. We recognize the distinctness of Asian art when we turn to its traditional forms, recognize it as Japanese, Chinese and Indian, even Balinese or Thai.

F. Sionil Jose

#21. Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.

Philip Yancey

#22. Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might.

Amy Tan

#23. The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.

Tom Carter

#24. This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

Philip Roth

#25. One of my inspirations, Harry Houdini, remains an icon of the art because he defied our primal fears. His demonstrations in the early 20th century, especially his escape from the Chinese water torture cell, represented triumph over suffocation, drowning, disorientation and helplessness.

Criss Angel

#26. I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection.

Agnes Martin

#27. There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.

David Hockney

#28. For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.

Octavio Paz

#29. If we turn our back on the people of this country who need to work for a living, we shouldn't be here, to be honest, because that has to be an essential part of what we do to protect the country, from the standpoint of defense, protect workers and make sure they have jobs.

Barbara Boxer

#30. A slave that acknowledges its enslavement is halfway to its liberation.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#31. Our human population continues to expand at such a scary rate - it's unbelievable.

Bindi Irwin

#32. Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#33. The greatest misfortune that can come to a human being is to lose his inner peace. No outer force can rob him of it. It is his own thoughts, his own actions, that rob him of it.

Sri Chinmoy

#34. The only real valuable thing is intuition.

Albert Einstein

#35. Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

David Hockney