My name is actually John Young Zerunge. Zerung is my Chinese name and my cultural background, my heritage is is my Chinese name and my cultural background. My heritage is actually Chinese and French. Dutch. And I've been working in the visual arts for about 40 years You know, I grew up sort of up until the age of 11 in Hong Kong. So my mother was a Chinese opera singer. And she also my family also collected a lot of Chinese paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties and antiques.

My great grand uncle was a fairly illustrious poet, and his title was The 13th Literati of the Southern Seas. He went mad at the end of his life. But, you know, he it was an interesting lineage to see that there has been a lot of interest in cultural matters in my family I think culture really is the absolute lifeblood of my practice in a sense that you have to have a sense of cultural resonance in one's work.

It's the resonance of where you are, who you're from, or where you're from, and who you are that really informs the way how you make work. And I think that that sort of level is in an indirect one. You don't go out and start making work. This is I'm going to be cultural, but you do need to have that sense of resonance in in your own being before making work.

I think art is is an absolutely important function in our existence. I think that you know, for those who are just starting in making art, you have to imagine what it's like without art and culture in a society, it would be completely barbaric You know, we're always in a danger of falling into a sort of barbarism because we live in a totally economist's thick and fairly informational sort of world where a sense of culture is actually denigrated in a in a very low sort of area.

And and I think that this danger is always there. Whereas culturally, I think enriches our lives in a lot of different ways, our community and from a very personal point of view. I think the most important thing about culture is in our own individual development, in the balance, for example, between thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition, those four different aspects are very important in our development in our lives and culture really facilitates that.

So so in that sense, I think that having a lot of different cultural values is important in our odd making Of course, there are challenges, there are external challenges and their internal challenges internal challenges is, you know, you sometimes feel first of all, you've got to work your way through in making a work which is clear, which is succinct, which is of interest to yourself, into other people successfully.

That is a very important challenge from an external point of view. It's only a question of acceptance. And, you know, works, works are either accepted immediately or you can be accepted in five years.

50 years, 100 years, 200 years. It doesn't matter. Somewhere along the way, that sense of understanding art has come and go. But the important thing is that the work is actually useful for four people somewhere along the way.

So in that sense, the challenge is always there but it's it's an internal challenge. It's an internal challenge to get a sense of clarity and make sense of your own life.

Diversity within a community. For me, it means a sense of hospitality. It means to our ability to be able to make room so that there are new differences that comes into our lives, that that is how I see diversity and to be able to admit these differences rather than a sort of a defence against differences and against something that is unusual to us is a very important ability which I'm afraid even the highest museum in our land is having trouble in tackling this still I think that diversity also is a important role, plays an important role in our community.

Say, for example, in Britain, Dara, because there are in fact so many diverse communities here. So we have to actually admit our own sense of presence If we deny that these people are here, we're not actually living in the present. We're living in the past. So in that sense, it's good for us to be able to accept this difference and somehow be hospitable to it and make room for it no matter where the differences come from, in a sense.

So that's how that's how it informs my own work. I think that is the sense about plural sort of society that can co-exist. That is one thing. The next thing is, of course, we have to think for ourselves as to how we can have some sort of ethical relationship with all these differences and this moment, of course, in cultures is is we have to think about people's human rights and and different values that they hold. So these are issues the ethics and the differences is the important thing.