I love working with younger people. I feel like we need to catch up with them. In South Asian art it's important to address the fact that the majority of what we see is Hindu, and based in Hinduism, and that it has a social and cultural history. Islam and Muslim culture are often now figured as these outside invaders who came into India, and this is in the service of a more right-wing nationalist discourse that is Islamophobic. And that's part of the worldwide Islamophobia moment that we're having right now.

I feel a disparity between my life in India within the home and my life outside the home - my life within public and private space. In terms of here and there, there were some differences, but New York and India were very different when I was growing up in the '80s. Definitely in terms of the visual and popular culture I encountered within my home - that was very different from the complete lack of representation I saw of South Asian culture outside of that space.

The having of the ideas is quite otherworldly. And then the making of the art itself is quite scientific. It's a combination. L Doing figurative work or taking pictures, and looking at how light actually reflects and refracts on bodies, or how your perception of something changes based on distance. But I think the getting of the ideas, and having that space to just have the ideas, is otherworldly, and requires a clear mind.

I'm trying to make sure that the visual connections between the disparate elements are strong enough for the viewer to keep moving through the work. It's in paying attention to those hundreds of details that the flow of the line will guide an audience through the narrative in a way that will make them enter it enough to engage with it, and perhaps construct their own narrative.

I'm interested in representation that falls outside of what would be socially appropriate, or acceptable, or beautiful. The world is going through a very fundamentalist moment. You have right-wing politics and misogyny and religion employed together everywhere - here in the US, with issues like abortion. Religion is a very fraught and complicated topic, but at the same time, like all grand historical narratives, there is a potential for challenging, or rethinking the kinds of subjectivities that these meta-narratives produce.

I love working with younger people. I feel like we need to catch up with them. In South Asian art it's important to address the fact that the majority of what we see is Hindu, and based in Hinduism, and that it has a social and cultural history. Islam and Muslim culture are often now figured as these outside invaders who came into India, and this is in the service of a more right-wing nationalist discourse that is Islamophobic. And that's part of the worldwide Islamophobia moment that we're having right now.

I was working within a figurative representational framework, and there was a sense of reading the painting as a transparency, or truth, or autobiography, which I think is partially the burden of artists of color - or women, or anybody who is representing a so-called minority position. Are you actually telling a true story, or your own story? You don't just get to tell a story. The readings of the work didn't necessarily conform to my own understanding of mythology, where violence and eroticism and the body and all of these different forms coexist all the time.