Cai Guo-Qiang Quotes

It doesn't matter if you can't speak the same language. If you have pictures, or better still, if you can draw things, then you can communicate anything to anyone.

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

I have been using polka dots since I was a very young child. Only after that, it seems, have they been used throughout the rest of the art world.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

I had a natural feeling for sculpture, and the nudes are my sculpture.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.

China is important to the world in that they are a force and on the move. Exposing them to figurative art opens up a potential for artistic expression far greater than anyone would ever have dreamed possible until today. It is this very spirit of the struggle and determination to triumph that inspires creative expression.

I wanted to be a painter.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

Films like 'Babel' can transcend the one point-of-view formula that has reigned for so long.

I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.

I always feel like it is a privilege to be able to be an artist and to be able to exhibit my work all over the world.

Sometimes I write what I can't paint, and I paint what I can't write. I use a different part of the brain.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

In a perfect world, I would be a painter. I love working with my hands. I don't get to do it as much as I like, but I am finding a way to make more time as life goes on because it's a really great outlet for me to express myself.

I'm quite arty. I didn't know whether to become an artist or musician but I realised I could paint with music. All my songs have colours.