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" Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation. "

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" We all look at the same object in different ways. "

" What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture. "

" The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside. "

" As a working artist, I became increasingly aware of the patterns we see in the street and in America, becoming globalized in terms of pop culture and global and social outlook. "

" I think it would be really interesting to paint Obama. "

" Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture. "

" My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic. "

" What you have in my work is one person's path as he travels through the world, and there is no limitation of what is conceivable. "

" My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others. "

" I grew up in this weird, educationally elite but economically impoverished environment. Total 'Oprah' story. "

" The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it. "

" It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you're a kid. "

" I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art. "

" If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way. "

" This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures. "

" I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. "

" The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at. "

" Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual. "

" Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement. "

" I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me. "

" I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing! "

" What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body. "

" There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards. "

" Artists have been very good at working for the church and for the state; communicating the aspirations of a society. "

" I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets. "

" Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence. "

" My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you're looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken. "

" Art in the age of the digital image is completely different from experiencing art in physical form. "

" Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography. "

" The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it. "