I'm not a writer, but today I think you have to be everything. As an artist you have an obligation to let people know what is on your mind and why you're doing this.
China hasn't only existed for one day. Now, the whole nation has become richer and it's become a problem. The problem is universal. The factor is big. Everybody has to rethink the balance of the world and the whole landscape.
Many people I know - writers, poets - they have all been sentenced not once but sometimes three times after they come out. They serve five or six years, come out another time, and then nine years. Come out again, 12 years. Only because they have a different opinion. They are innocent people, they have beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.
Man has a tendency to try to give clear reasons to be rational, but often you can see how all those reasons are not convincing and turn out to be a big nonsense.
Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.
China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.
My image of what a city should be - the super-rich and all the poor and desperate and the people who have some kind of a desire. It's a surviving game, people trying to survive on many different levels.