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I became a fashion designer by accident. I loved to make portrait drawings when I was a teenager, and from that came the interest in what people were wearing and why they were wearing it.

I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.

I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.

In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

As a fashion designer, I was always aware that I was not an artist, because I was creating something that was made to be sold, marketed, used, and ultimately discarded.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

I'm not an artist. I'm a fashion designer of clothes.

I was an art student at the time, like thousands of others.

I've been working in sculpture and painting since 1920.