I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.

There is no doubt when one comes from the West to China one understands pop art as having originally developed as part of Western tradition. There is a historical development, in which things find resonance in different places.

I think from an artist's point of view, everything in art, in fact everything in the world is available as material.

I decided I should use the most obvious colours - the basic colours with simple names: red, purple, yellow, pink. I don't distort the objects, I don't change the objects, I draw them exactly as they are. I do the opposite with the colours.

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

If you try to copy something exactly you won't get it correct, because you don't share the same tradition and context.

I had been doing wall drawings, but they were always black and white. Then in 1993 I painted all the walls of a room to make an installation and as soon as I saw the colour on the walls, it changed my whole life.