After his own New York show in 1988, his work dried up. He moved many times and every time he moved he dumped what little work he had produced. But he didn’t stop thinking of himself as an artist. The abiding lesson he took from Duchamp was that being an artist was about living as an artist, rather than producing some product, some work of art for a gallery, or even for oneself.
–Barnaby Martin, Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
