The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.

The idea to use backpacks came from my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything.

New York was not a romantic city at [80th]. Nobody knows who you are and you don't have to care about anybody else. It's a very cold city, I should say.

Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

We are living in a popular culture where everything is overexposed.

I think I'm just a traveler. When you walk across a river and there's no bridge, you build one. I'm used to having to deal with Chinese Communist ideology - it's not really an ideology, but a method of control. But China's problems are not just China's problems - they're human problems. Humanity has always worked better when you see it as one.

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.