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.
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.
Nationality started as something natural, but we should not be restrained by the old politics that make up these clear lines. It should have its own way of evolving. In some places, it will evolve slower and in others, faster. It's like the mountains, the ocean and the rivers. It has its own geological forms. Societies cannot be flat. But during change, human rights, human dignity and free speech have to be protected. Otherwise, we'll be going backward.
The whole attitude of society has become much more open and realistic. They realize that the only way to make a more democratic and free society is to let different opinions come out.
Politics is like air and water. And you know if there is bad politics. Everyone is polluted. Everyone is unhealthy. See the people walking on the street: how they act.
I don't think China should care if this crazy old guy should have a show here or not. You have so many museums in the West, and so many shows, you need somebody to show the work, otherwise it's empty.
New York is a city where you're so alone, you're an individual, you can disappear. You can make something happen. But it's very different to make something happen in the art world.
At the moment about 350,000 students return to China from abroad each year - 350,000 young and educated people. I know about them because they know me and often ask me in the street if they can take a selfie with me. These folks are creative and ironic, and the government can ultimately not control what is going on in their heads.
A nation like China has become one of the biggest production fields for exporting cheap labor, which also re-questions our history and past, re-questions human desire, and the human illusions of the past.
I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years. We literally lived underground. We dug a hole and lived there for years. My father cleaned public toilets, even though he was a highly respected poet. Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.
It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that. There are crises and emergencies all the time, we might not even be aware of some. But I am afraid we'll have to wait and observe precisely what the government is up to.