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.

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.

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

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 person you admire was true to himself. You can only truly honour him by being true to yourself.

Art is more to do with observation than invention.

In a sense [Joseph] Albers was an authoritarian teacher. He had rules about most things and very definite ideas.