Kehinde Wiley Quotes

People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.

I have had strangers come up to me and attempt to mimic the Chinese language in a derogatory manner. I have been told countless times that I speak 'good' English. I have been asked why someone like me would be interested in watching NFL football. On any given day, if I walk around with a camera, I will be mistaken for a tourist from Asia.

The downside to defining everything Chinese as different than American is that all things Chinese then become exotic.

In the West we are constantly hit with music of Middle Eastern descent signifying terror, intrigue or sorrow.

European authors often write books about the rest of the world that profess a vision of shared humanity but fall far short, casting the other as exotic or dangerous.

There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.

I believe in blues, and I believe that it's been misrepresented.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'

There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.

As an artist, I try and be controversial, and I have been a bit offensive at times. I have a view on the burka, and I'm sure a few of the Muslim girls and their families would have a view of me on stage in next to nothing!

Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

I like the idea of bringing cartoon characters to life... and although the Americans have already attempted this, their culture is not sufficiently humane to make it work.

I feel as if I can take Indian stories, make them mine and take them to the world.

The question is - did Richard Attenborough have a right to make 'Gandhi?' And did Danny Boyle have a right to make 'Slumdog Millionaire?' Quite honestly, if they didn't have the right to make these films, I had no right to make 'Elizabeth.'

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

I think it's a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn't seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that's ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.

The peace treaties of…Western nations…no more fit the Asian governments than a stove pipe hat would fit an African savage.

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

We are - as artists, we are racialized through genre and called black - without being called black - through genre.

All of Vegas is false. There's a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad - in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It's 'Aladdin,' the sands, 'One Thousand and One Nights.'

When a director is remaking a film, he should tweak it, add Bengali sentiments to it and make it look like a regional movie. A copy-paste job is something I don't support at all.

The Asian male has an interesting history as far as Western appropriation. At one point, we were completely sexless Chinamen building the railroads. Then, World War II came around, and it was like, Asian guys are coming after the white women. We became a menace for a second.

I think of Westernized culture as a good visual for my music.