I’m a realistic cynic. The way my subjects laugh evokes that fatalism – poor or rich, famous or unknown, good or bad, noone can change anything. We are living in a perpetual tension between the yin and the yang. Light and shadow. Peace and war. Good and evil. The world is in constant movement between all these opposites. So I decided to laugh at it all. That’s my philosophy, my freedom of thought. I don’t care about anything – at least I try not to: religion, the State, business, money… If God or a Martian saw my work they might understand a bit better the way we work. Everything in human beings is permanently mixed up: sadness, joy, hope, despair, happiness, misery… Human nature is in between everything.

Right from birth we are determined by a gene that we can’t modify. All we can do is learn to control it.

My gene is the rebellion gene. I don’t have happy memories of my freezing cold childhood in the province of Heilongjiang, in the north of China. My parents worked at Daqing, in a petrol village. My father was a driver; he was very strict. My mother, a hard worker, was in accounts.  I was the oldest of three boys. I always felt apart, different to the others. I had wierd ideas. No one impressed me really. Even when I was small I was suspicious of authority. I hadn’t yet learned the subtle art of compromise.

School was boring. When I was ten I used to cover entire exercise books with my cartoons. I imagined epic battles between the People’s Army and a series of unlikely enemies. At school I would sketch the face of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai  with remarkable precision. I wasn’t really mature enough to tell. That would come later, in the mess of the Cultural Revolution when I wrote the impassioned Dazibao.

It’s just over twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic student at the University of Hebei, that I encountered the world of large scale painting. I discovered the great painters. Leonardo da Vinci and his ability to divide the world into shadow and light, Michelangelo and the oppressive power of his subjects, Manet and his genius with light…If I could choose the spirit of any great man, without hesitation I would choose Marcel Duchamp. This great artist broke down boundaries with his found objects, revolutionised consciousness. That’s what I try to do in my paintings. Armed with a fine-tuned humour, the weapon of mockery…

It was Tian’anmen and the definitive break with politics which decided my fate. I chose art as the only possible language. Long-haired, free-spirited, I left in 1990 to go and live in Yuanmingyuan, an artists’ village, not too far from Beijing. We lived a bohemian existence, closed off from the world. With 100 yuan a month, we ruled the world. In the day I painted portraits of my friends. In the evening we’d forget about everything and down innumberable bottles of erguotou, a Chinese spirit that is 60% proof. Artists like Fan Lijun or Liu Xiaodong started doing self-portraits. Naturally, I followed the fashion… Foreigners came to see us, some bought work for hardly anything, canvases that today are worth a fortune. Gradually business became a part of our lives…

Today my paintings sell for millions, which is great, it’s the system. No one can change it. What I like to do is to watch the way that human beings evolve. Each painting corresponds to a part of me, one aspect.

To be a popular artist, that’s my one real desire. And after that ? Who can guarantee eternity?