The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.
My paintings are loosely based on meta narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still life's become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.
Each painting, I feel like I kind of might have gotten something. If I feel like I totally got it, there's probably something wrong and it's not finished. And if I really feel like I understand it then I'm done with these paintings and I'll have to do something else.
I worked like a crazyman. I worked day and night, often days and nights at a time - without sleep. Gallons of coffee kept me awake; the paintings kept me fired up.
I'm passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle.
If I had money, I would like to get an old building, have music performances, do lithographs, have shows of paintings, and do those things that I'm interested in doing.
I had my exhibition of paintings first in Shanghai, and then recently in Wuhan. Wuhan particularly interested me, because I am 18 Chinese.
I think about my art works as paintings, because they refer to the history of painting. I also have to think about them as sculptures, because every part of the process is part of the project. They're sculptures because they play on the idea of what should be hanging in a gallery. In that sense they're also kind of ready-mades.
I pay my models to work with me, so there becomes this weird sort of economic bartering thing, which made me feel really sort of uncomfortable, almost as though you were buying into a situation - which, again, is another way of looking at those paintings. The body language in those paintings is a lot more stiff.
I have no way of knowing what you are going to feel when you look at one of my paintings; I only know what I feel.
I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.
Paintings helped to change my life. I'd still be living a life of disaster without it.
How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
You're trying to make your painting too complicated. Paintings get complicated all by themselves.
You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.
Every painting I've ever done has like 100 paintings under it.
I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.
It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.
I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.
I think the films and the paintings erase each other. The paintings are extremely slow and constantly going on in the studio - they're constantly regenerating themselves in this slow, monotonous way that's a physical struggle and can be a pain in the ass. They're all based on very specific math and diagrams. And the films, when I'm making them, are very fast, very collaborative, with a lot of improvisation.