Growing up, my family was an enemy of the state. I have experienced more disappointment than joy, much more sad stories or desperate conditions.
I don't personally feel any association with a kind of culture related to state, or culture related to power, which I think is always disgusting.
I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.
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.
I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me.
[Shanghai Biennale] has been my attitude for as long as I've been practicing art and other cultural-related activities.
I never think any place is better than others.
I never saw [Allen Ginsberg] as some kind of crazy figure.
I never had a sense of home.
I think Allen [Ginsberg] was a person who's like a child.
[Being unique] gives so much privilege to people who can make it, rather than having some moral and aesthetic discussions.
Society becomes very destructive.
New York was not a romantic city at [80th]. Nobody knows who you are and you don't have to care about anybody else. It's a very cold city, I should say.
In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.
I never had secure, belonging feelings with this society [in China].
For those actors and directors who produce films which are always about the old kingdom or about heroes, you know about the fantasies related to the classics, but there is no real discussion about today's life and no discussion of the real conditions - which is really sickening. They've become part of a conspiracy, collaborators of the crime, which is lying to the general public and trying to hide the kind of criminal acts happening in many cases.
That's why I always question this sense. The feeling of home really requires a lot of trust. It requires you to identify with it, which I always find myself very contradictory to.
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.
I never regret anything.
It's always the rich and there's plenty to waste, yet still China has a lot of people living in very spare, poor conditions.
We grew up in a very material-lacking socialist society, but today China is a capitalist society. It's very materialistic. It's full of desire and luxury goods.
Even if I have hundreds of things to do, the disconnected feeling is still there because it is very hard to find a real purpose of life.
Because Chinese art is booming, it legitimizes this profession.
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.
All the rich people collect traditional Chinese art. So it's very natural for Chinese families to still see art as the highest human performance and send their children to this field.
