“We always think of sewing as the act of decorating, or of joining two cloths together. In fact, sewing actually involves piercing the cloth with a needle. Sewing is destructive. It leaves scars, and it changes the cloth.”

“As both an art collector and an artist, I’m drawn to high quality craftsmanship. Great art is as much about a thought-provoking concept as it is about its execution.”

“It is time to take a closer look at the variety of experimental artistic movements that were based here in Asia. We can create a cultural map of Asia by tracing the emergence of these movements and the resonances they had.”

Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 1999, Art for the People is a work that draws upon a speech by Mao Zedong. The banner is written in Square Word Calligraphy, a writing system invented by Xu. If art is for the people, who exactly are these people and how have they responded to Xu’s transformative ideas of language and history?