[Cultural department] understand nothing but bureaucratic daily affairs. They don't care about culture.

My image of what a city should be - the super-rich and all the poor and desperate and the people who have some kind of a desire. It's a surviving game, people trying to survive on many different levels.

To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years. We literally lived underground. We dug a hole and lived there for years. My father cleaned public toilets, even though he was a highly respected poet. Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.

Of course, people will call you an old artist or young artist, which is just a character of you. But personally, I don't think my work and my understanding of art is so much related to being Chinese, but the character of that. Maybe it's beyond my own consciousness.

To give a price to an artwork, no matter how high or low, is always absurd. It's not something that can be measured by money or by certain numbers.

Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom.