One of the weirdest things that happened to artists and art criticism was this moment when everyone got cynical and stopped believing in the ability to engage the world in all of its myriad purposes, transformations, and incarnations.

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.

Feudal Europe is over, but it found its way into film culture. It found its way into postmodern painting culture, and we're all here talking about it today. It still lives. I don't believe in ghosts, but these are contemporary ghosts.

There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and how it bounces across the skin. The way that blues and purples come into play. In India and Sri Lanka, it was no different. It became a moment in which I had an opportunity to learn as a painter how to create the body in full form, and that's a very material and aesthetic thing. This is not conceptual. It's all an abstraction.

For me, I wanted to create something that's much more driven by a type of selfishness, a type of decadence.

At age 20 I went to go find my father in Nigeria. And after much toil, I finally figured out exactly where he was. And there's something about seeing your father for the first time - my mother destroyed all pictures of him.

All art is self-portraiture.