All religions undergo historical face lifts.
I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.
As society evolves, people are interested in a new take on an old beloved story.
I used to be like "Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?" But then, we do that all the time in the theater. Retelling stories is what we've done since we were sitting around campfires. It's a part of the human spirit. It doesn't have to be negative to creativity. It can be completely opposite.
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.
Culture is that which falsifies.
You can do so much crazy stuff with books that isn't necessarily being done. That's how culture stays alive - by doing new things with it.
The idea of taking classic American stories and reinterpreting them for a time and place is not just commercially viable. These stories also carry a sensual nature of what it meant to be an American, and they deserve to be reinterpreted.
In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
My whole purpose of taking on miniature painting was to break the tradition, to experiment with it, to find new ways of making meaning, to question the relevance of it.
A song stylist is, like, to take an old folk song like "Delia's Gone" and do a modern white man's version of it.
I'm the black dude that loves old black culture. I also love old white culture. I just love history, but I'm the guy that wants to bring things back and push them forward.
Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends.
The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.
In Asia, I didn't feel like I was Chloe. I felt like I was acting like someone in Asia. I was acting like Chloe Wang, a pop star, that was like a character for me, if anything.
One of my mom's favorite movies growing up was 'Big' with Tom Hanks. I thought, 'Oh, OK, what if we do something like that but not like that. Something more modern, with a different perspective, and maybe with an all-black cast.'
The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important. It's about making a work that is inspired by something preexisting but changes it to have a new value and meaning that doesn't in any way take away from the original - and, in fact, might provide the original with a second life or a new audience.
I'm totally in love with Jane Austen and have always been in love with Jane Austen. I did my dissertation at university on black people in eighteenth-century Britain - so I'd love to do a Jane Austen-esque film but with black people.
Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.
We live in an era of reinvention: Madonna and everybody desperately trying to change their persona.
