Ai Weiwei:

Snake Ceiling is a product after my deep involvement with one earthquake. 2008, right before Olympics. May 12th, Sichuan had a devastating earthquake, which made about 80,000 people dead. Among them, there's a lot of students. So, I questioning the government, first, how many students are dead? Second, school building are built by government. It should pass a regulation of earthquake.

So, how come so many school building collapsed, but the building next to it, residential are not collapsed, and the hospital not collapse. But just school buildings. So, I really think there's a huge corruption among these contractors and government officials. Because nobody give us clear answers, so we go through a very basic research to go to the location to find out who was killed, and what's their name, birthday and location. Gradually, with a long, very difficult research, we found 5,219 students' name and birthdays. I post it on my blog. The whole nation was surprised, this guy is crazy. Because nobody can ever question the government. So, that really is become a live social, political movement.

This Snake Ceiling we used these kind students' backpacks, because when I visit those locations, I see everywhere is students' backpacks. So, I used that as a symbol, structured snake, which, in China, means unpredictable danger.