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.
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.
I think U.S. and China is a big opportunity, to be seen as partner or some kind of strategic partner maybe. But those kind of powers have a way of getting too big, then we'll have competition. And who is going to win the competition if U.S. cannot hold a strong ideology? And even the U.S. would've lost the ground to win.
I was in the most restricted prison in China, the most tough. The design of the prison is modeled for internal crimes of the Communist party, so it's like a mafia family's law. It's independent to the law this nation openly applies. It's the place they take you before they give you over to the judicial system. You stay there for a year or two and they make you really suffer to confess everything.
My mother became much older when I came out (ed's note: of detention). She had problems with her hearing and high blood pressure. But they still support me.
I don't think my father had a direct influence on me, but I do think, more or less, I was influenced by his independent individualism. And the kind of condition he had when he was in this society - the kind of mistreatment society gave him.
My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall.
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.
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.
Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists - or artists from the United States - that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture.