I greatly admired him as a teacher I didn't teach the same way as Josef Albers at all.
I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.
I do think I paid a price as an artist, and I am trying to make up for it now - I work six days a week in the studio, and I've never been happier.
It is very important to develop the thing that you are naturally good at, that you are truly interested in.
My idea for every exhibition is we should be able to see every individual work without being distracted by the others, and it doesn't matter if it's quite crowded.
I am personally happy for artists to make as much money as they can while they can to carry them through the times when they can't.
My great grandmother was Chinese .
Today, in British education, we don't have that kind of freedom. Now there are many regulations, many rules, and bureaucracies in the education system. So, it doesn't have the flexibility that it had in the '60s, '70s, '80s.
The person you admire was true to himself. You can only truly honour him by being true to yourself.
When I was a very young student I loved and admired the work of Sam Beckett, who is famously pessimistic, and whose writing is an extraordinary examination of emptiness. I wanted to be like Beckett. I don't have the same attitude toward the world, I'm naturally optimistic, and so of course I could never be like Beckett. You can't force yourself to become like someone you admire.
I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.
I look at the character of the exhibition and I treat it as I would a painting or an installation. When I did the Summer Exhibition at Royal Academy, I did it exactly as I would when making a new work.
Usually when I go to the Summer Exhibition, I think every room is too much the same, and I loose my capacity to look at individual works.
When I look at the objects that I draw, it seems to me so obvious about the contemporary world - these are our world.
I think that cultural influence is very deep, it is not on the surface and this is true in every culture.
I think that the exchange is very important. Before I did the exhibition in Shanghai, I was a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize and that was very interesting for me, because some of the judges are Chinese and some are British, and we look at the work together. It was fascinating that most of the time we were in complete agreement, but some of the time we were not. People send their works from all over China. For a foreigner, this gave me a very good picture about what is happening in China and its art today.
I don't like the idea of nationalism, but on the other hand, I do see that there is a difference between British art, German art and Chinese art. This is because of the history, because each country has different history and each country reads and teaches that history differently.
For many years I hoped to have an exhibition in China, because of my family connection.
When I was invited to go to Wuhan, I didn't know anything about it, so I looked up the Wikipedia about Wuhan. I discovered that part of Wuhan used to be Hankou, and then I realised that my great grandmother came from Hankou. My grandmother and father were both born in Hankou. Of all the places in China, it is the most amazing place to have asked for my exhibition. I needed to go back where my family comes from!
You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.
Often people do not properly value things that they are good at naturally because they find them too easy. That is very problematic.
The first exhibition that I used bright colours in painting the room was at a gallery in Paris, and there were seven rooms in the gallery. It was very nice gallery, not very big rooms, around the courtyard, it was a very French space. So I painted each room in different colour. When people came to the exhibition, I saw they came with a smile. Everybody smiles - this is something I never saw in my work before.
It's just that some things more important for this and less important for that, and this is true regardless the style of the art.
When I go to China I see many artists whose work reflects on aspects of contemporary popular culture but obviously the history of Western art is not part of their own tradition.
In the period of '60s to the '90s, British art schools were small, and the number of student was small. The personal contact was great.
