I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don't want to supply too much context.

My idea for every exhibition is we should be able to see every individual work without being distracted by the others, and it doesn't matter if it's quite crowded.

I look at the character of the exhibition and I treat it as I would a painting or an installation. When I did the Summer Exhibition at Royal Academy, I did it exactly as I would when making a new work.

When I go to China I see many artists whose work reflects on aspects of contemporary popular culture but obviously the history of Western art is not part of their own tradition.

If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.

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

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.