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.

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.

When I was teaching I often said to students that you are trying to be too creative, don't be too creative, because there is so much already in what you are making, you don't need to do very much. You just need to do a little bit, and that is a lot.

I think that cultural influence is very deep, it is not on the surface and this is true in every culture.

At the Summer Exhibition, I didn't really change anything; it's the same exhibition. All I changed is the presentation. I didn't really change the rules.

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.

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