I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.
Women fail, very simply, if they have no guidance and friendships in art, if they are not perceived as, or permitted to be, artists, and if they have no institutional access.
The work I did with Artists Collective led me to a scholarship at Uconn… It led to me getting a scholarship at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and a scholarship at Trinity Rep in Providence.
I went to a private school in Singapore and they had an incredible arts program. Every day I was doing something artistic.
I grew up in a very small, rural country town, and we didn't really have 'the arts.'
People are getting picked up off the street and getting a show, and it's because we're not using the people that are trying to be entertainers - use more of them.
I get approached to do a lot of commissioned art. Sometimes I do it, but I usually don't, given the day job and everything I've sort of got going on. I'm really passionate about it; there's not that much time left over for the other commissioned projects.
Back in third grade, they used to say, 'Take whatever talent you have and think of something you can do with it.' I liked to draw, but what could I do with it? Maybe I could be an art dealer - nah, can't see myself doing that. Maybe I could do commercial arts?
I think so many great artists are flocking to LA because the downtown art scene is so vibrant, there is cheap living and you can really flourish as an artist there. There is an unbelievably supportive and really smart, talented theatre audience in LA full of young, hungry, vibrant people. It's something that sort of makes me think of what New York must have been like in its downtown theater scene in the 1980s - before my time.
New York is a great place to be fed in the arts. The arts in general are a large part of my life. The city was my postgraduate course.
Whatever the opposite of regret is best describes how I've always felt about that decision - it opened me up to a million creative opportunities I needed to experience away from the bull and distorting mirrors that fame engenders.
Lots of places to hone your skill as an artist and still earn a paycheck while you're waiting to kick the door down.
If you want to be a stand-up comedian or an artist, you move to New York.
Coming out of college with a degree in fine arts and painting isn't worth much any more.
It's just that when you heard hip-hop, no matter where you were, it was a culture that kind of made you want to try to be part of it. Whether you thought you were an artist, whether you thought you could be a DJ, whether you thought you could breakdance, or whether you thought you could rap. It was the kind of culture that had a lot of open doors.
One of the reasons I stay in New York is because you're always around so many other types of arts, and it's easy to just get lost in it.
I don't have this obsessive need to do street art all the time because it's already opened doors for me.
During the Renaissance, women were not allowed to attend art school. Everyone asks, where are the great women painters of the Renaissance?
Undoubtedly there is a difference between people with money having access to the arts that people from working-class backgrounds don't have, but that's not their fault. I'm not taking anything away from these brilliant actors who are doing great stuff in Hollywood. A lot of them are my friends.
I've never been invited to do an exhibition or do a talk in England, except once, about 10 years ago. I've given talks all across Canada, many in the United States, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan - but not England.
A young artist can become popular more quickly with the Internet providing instant access to ones work. That might lead to more opportunity and an accelerated career. But it seems as if funding may be harder to come by and filmmakers are being prompted to give away their work for free in hopes to become part of the conversation.
In art, women could never get training. They couldn't get their work out into the world even when they could get training.
If anything, I hope being an artist opens up more opportunities 'cause I feel there's a lot of things I could do, like musically and stylistic-wise that I can write, but I don't really have an avenue to show it 'cause most of the things I'm writing are in Hip Hop.
Even though everybody who looked at me would call me a Chinese artist, that's the 1980s. New York in the '80s was not so interesting. I think it's quite narrow-minded. There wasn't much encouragement or opportunities for any artist - not just Chinese artists.
There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.
