I've taken away everything I could think of, and yet what remains is enough. These days many more people come to my work, and once they see my work they will always recognize it.

When I was in Wuhan, I went to the art school, which was one of the most important art schools in China, an enormous art school. One of the things that I saw is that the schools are very big and there are so many students. It is very difficult to me to teach creative activity to great numbers of people, because I think you need personal contact with students, you need to speak individually, you need individual contact between teachers and students, you need continuity. To me this is a problem in mass education in every society now.

In my early work I didn't use much colour. I had no confidence about how I could do this.

When I started teaching in the late 60s, in a time of student revolutions and changes, they changed in question of society and authority.

The art world, of all worlds, has room for everyone.

If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.

You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.