“I think the pearls – one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl – really show a kind of [society] condition.”

Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.

China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here.

You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

I think optimism is whether you are still exhilarated by life, whether you are curious, whether you still believe there is possibility.

It [success] is really by mistake.

Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I’m not nostalgic about the old city. I don’t enjoy it that much.

Technology is a liberation. I think the information age probably is the best thing to happen to the human race in human evolution.

Of course, there [in China] has to be chaos. It has to be crazy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it except this government, which is really incapable of doing anything meaningful.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.

I wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical: I was born radical.

I call on people to be ‘obsessed citizens,’ forever questioning and asking for accountability. That’s the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.

What is important is that we actively express our thoughts and wishes, in every realm that we can access.

The [China] government has improved in the last years. Of course, the structure is still the same; there’s still a one-party system and strong censorship.

Now many enterprises are made by individuals, so the attitude has started to change.

The whole Chinese system – not just the political leadership, the military too, the whole power structure, our education system, the whole of society – is suffering from being cut off from the free flow of information.

An excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.

In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

But coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.

Perfect love will never want the preeminence in everything, it will never want to take the place of another, it will always be willing to take the back seat.

Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:

We need to give people another option from 16-18. Not everyone is going to want to become a rocket scientist but that doesn’t mean that maths isn’t extremely useful.

To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.