“When living honorably is more important than staying alive, you’re ready to fight effectively for what you believe in.”

“The essential antagonism is not between the workers and bosses but between the Humans and the Blacks.”

“The paradigmatic Hongkonger, especially from the generations between 1949 and 1997, is transnational and neoliberal.”

“Historically, queer women have been on the front lines of every progressive movement, but not always openly.”

“Things improving for old women artists is like things improving for Black Americans. Things improve. But things stay shitty.”

“The modern manifestation of the museum has its origins as a colonial and disciplining institution.”

“One mantra in particular strikes me in this moment—and it is from John Waters's Female Trouble—‘crime is beauty.’”

“Architecture is not about the wellbeing of humans at all. It doesn't simply house the human, it remakes the human.”

“There will be gradual changes in the art world, but the arts are often the last to change.”

“Even though I don't see criticism as art, I don't see it as secondary to art. I see it as a practice parallel to it.”

“We don't need to go beyond blackness. It's not a before and after question.”

“The idea of three-act structure is in my head a lot, destroying my stories before they really begin.”

“I experienced my transness as a shape the Internet made when it looked at me.”

"Rethinking contemporary aspects of the informe—related to technology, gender, disease, and race—in a Bataillean key."

“It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.”

“L’informe comes out of WWII, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust.”

“Sacrifice is a pointed instance of dépense, an exquisitely sacred combustion, and one that runs throughout Bataille’s economics.”

"I've never understood catharsis."

“Blackness presents the possibility of a thoroughly anti-Idealist aesthetic and theory of objects.”

“I can’t think of architecture as anything other than a performative art form.”

"I decided to schmear my queer Jewish pinko self in schmaltz and go out and grease up the stage."

“The store was about conversations between worlds and how those conversations meshed together and only Sara could do that.”

“My attention tends to focus on the micro, on what’s right in front of my face—be it a memory or on a screen or some fragile blip of the ‘real’—and I let associations spiral out from there.”

“‘Asian American’ identity may be a construction but the social and psychic life of racialized people in America is very real.”

"We could say that the entire enterprise of art has a gimmick problem."

“If I ever reached a milestone I would run away in horror.”

"They stood around, laughing, while drugs crumbled in their blood."

“I was already the enemy to a lot of the activists, because I wasn't representing gays in a positive way.”

“Not having moments to grieve is a combination of raced, classed, and gendered positionality.”

"People sometimes thought I cared more about myself than I did."

"At this edge of legibility, we can find new language, frameworks, and tools."

"There's something freeing about not owning every word."

“We are forever circling the drain.”

"Simulation faced the same unceremonious end as its referent."

"Torture and therapy here are not antipodal."

"It’s too easy to be curious, but not optimistic; or optimistic, but not curious."

“The ecological is a sensibility.”

"I like to be both inside and outside."

"My work is about staging and confronting our reality with fiction."

"Trans women have never really had a consolidated, ongoing, well-documented, accessible, aesthetically varied, intergenerational, interracial culture."

"I'm interested in all the forces that liberate and constrict sound."

"All my life I’d been having arguments with myself that I couldn't properly solve within the jurisdiction of myself."

“What matters is not only the writing of time as history but the writing processes of technologies.”

"I spent my youth in a world of women who were, and who insisted to be, witnesses to the fate of women."

"I think we need to de-frame art and let it be free."

"I like a kind of writing that's irreducible—just itself and nothing else."

"There is this moment when you have to reject everything in order to push yourself forward."

"I’m writing to anyone with a political imagination."

"I had the most boring job of all of my friends who were working in the early days of hip-hop."

"Painting can only live if it wants to die."

"My body, your body, was already implicated in the zero degree of painting from day one."

"What does it mean to problematize your own memory or your own sense of self?"

"I've only lived my gay sex life in English."

"I have always wanted to fight cultural amnesia, and I don't know how we do that without museums."

"I'm always cognizant of life being the most interesting thing, and writing coming out of that."

"I've never been someone who could be influenced very easily."

"The futurist California never happened—it was never tried."

"The ability to self-represent is crucial; it is the first condition of possibility for any kind of representation."

"I’m not interested in just looking but in having an experience and then expanding from there."