I had a hell of a time making this painting, which had been rattling around in my head for years. I adore muralist painters. Obviously, Diego Rivera was the first one I became familiar with, but I find the history of the WPA (Works Progress Administration)—which distributed thousands of paintings and commissioned hundreds of thousands of works in total during the Great Depression in the USA—fascinating. Roosevelt’s government’s idea was to support artists who no longer had commissions. By doing so, he profoundly changed the American landscape, making art more democratic and closer to the people. For example, an artist very dear to my heart, Martin Wong, talks about various paintings he often saw in his youth in a recreation center he frequented—I believe the paintings in the Mother’s House in San Francisco, painted by Helen Katharine Forbes and Dorothy Wagner Puccinelli. He speaks of these paintings as formative and determining in his vocation. Philip Guston also created very committed murals. I started from a photo of Diego Rivera on his scaffolding, photographed while painting. My idea was that this little fiction painted in the picture takes place out West, in a shopping mall. But I wanted to make the image ambiguous by using a communist aesthetic. I looked at many images of socialist realism. The citation in Chinese is one of the pillars of the Chinese Communist Party’s slogans since 1944, when Mao Zedong paid homage to the sacrifice of Comrade Zhang Side: "Serve the People." The three monumental figures are Instagram boys who make motivation videos for the gym.