“Hopefully, other successes aren’t like me. It carries much more meaning to other people; my success story is irrelevant. It doesn’t make any sense.”

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.

I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.

As a total activity – I practice curating, art, architecture, writing, and publishing all together. I still act as a living creature.

For artists and intellectuals today, what is most needed is to be clear about social responsibility, because that is what most people automatically give up. Just to protect yourself as an individual is very political.

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.

General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechanic. General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.

Im not really sure what social message my art carries, if any.

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.

The media is the message. It carries the full intention and the meaning. Once you change it…it’s very disturbing.

A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It’s a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer.