When some people were going around being surf bums and tennis bums, I was being a gallery bum. I really liked galleries.
I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.
I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.
I haven't been to Berlin Fashion Week before, but it's really on the up. Being an artist as well as a model, I know that the art world is booming here, so it makes sense that fashion would feel that effect, too.
An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
Chicago is a wonderful, vibrant city with wonderful food cultures to it, wonderful talent downtown.
I have friends in France who are artists. I go to gallery openings and things like that.
I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists who were doing interesting thing, but I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists.
I love Kansas City.
I was looking at the work of the New York street artists and then discovering Basquiat and Haring after that and seeing how the contemporary art scene was, and then going back into Warhol and all that was happening in the 60s.
I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.
The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.
In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.
The British are so funny. It's like they can't believe I lived in Hackney. 'You could live in Bondi Beach. Why would you want to live in 'Ackney?' But Hackney's fantastic. I'm serious. There are so many artists there. I loved the markets, the parks, the pubs, the diversity. It was a cultural melting-pot.
A lot of my work involves criss-crossing London to visit the many hundreds of projects, theaters, galleries, museums and groups that comprise the capital's astonishingly rich cultural life.
I've become convinced that Los Angeles is going to become the next contemporary art capital - no other city has more contemporary gallery space than Los Angeles. We've come into our own, finally.
I think the whole, like, cultural diversity and the arty side of London is really, really great. And how it's so historic as well.
The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.
Physically, it's getting impossible for me to travel that much. I want to support my artists by showing up at their openings, but I can't always be in Hong Kong one minute and Geneva the next.
New York always has a lot of creativity going on.
When you're in New York, people don't say, 'We're happy you came to New York.' In D.C., people thank you for coming here and bringing art here.
My connection with Basquiat was really in Los Angeles, which really was a whole different world to what he was experiencing in New York.
When I first started coming to New York in the early Nineties and seeing the vitality of the programme compared to what was going on back in London or Paris, it was just in a different league. It's like a 16th-century court.
The New York gallery scene being as incredibly overpopulated and overmoneyed as it is, deep conflicts and contradictions aren't hard to find.
I love New York, it's always been my home. It has everything - music, fashion, entertainment, impressive buildings, huge parks, street cafes. And it's very international, with people from all over the world.
