Just look at the statistics: Each university has tens of thousands of applications for students who want to be in art school, but they can only accept a few hundred.
China partially wants to become part of the world. By hosting the Olympics and the Expo, they made a big effort to tell people: Look, we are the same. They want to be accepted by the international community.
I suddenly realized I was getting ten opening notes a day on my mobile phone, more than when I was in New York. But this is China, where nothing is surprising.
I remember one little rainy day I went searching for this apartment and I saw so many people standing on a stoop on the corner in the rain. Later I realized, that was drug traffic. They were all buying drugs.
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.
Even though everybody who looked at me would call me a Chinese artist, that's the 1980s. New York in the '80s was not so interesting. I think it's quite narrow-minded. There wasn't much encouragement or opportunities for any artist - not just Chinese artists.
China's culture and history are closely related to my living environment. This country is my birthplace. It is also where I grew up. Its culture and history shape my relations with family, friends, society, and daily life.
Of course, most luxury goods in China are for corrupted officials and their relatives. And that made China become the biggest luxury-goods market. In this kind of dictatorship, in this kind of totalitarian society, it is easy to make deals that you cannot make in a democratic society.
The museums used to be exhibition halls for government propaganda, and now every city wants to build a museum. A few thousand are to be built in the next few years, all using taxpayer money. But there is no system, no research, no content, no good programs, no good managers.
When I first got into the first-year study after the Cultural Revolution, got into the same school with this group, I wasn't conscious of the so-called "Fifth Generation." I didn't like that kind of study condition because there's no real, true education there.