Just look at the statistics: Each university has tens of thousands of applications for students who want to be in art school, but they can only accept a few hundred.

It [success] is really by mistake.

Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.

Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.

I am very much interested in the so-called useless object. I mean, it takes perfect craftsmanship, beautiful material carefully measured and crafted, but at the same time it’s really useless.

Maybe being powerful means to be fragile.

The people who control culture in China have no culture.