Julian Opie writes about his recent portraits for Corriere della Sera newspaper.

I have been drawing portraits for nearly 30 years, but recently, after a long break, I found a new way to depict people’s faces. Inspired by face recognition techniques as much as historical portraiture, I have come up with a system whereby I can draw everyone using a simple set of shapes that only need to be slightly rearranged to indicate each new person. The faces are symmetrical (unlike reality) giving them a more machine-like quality.

Despite my rigid rules, I feel that the presence of the individual is evoked as much as, or even more than, a photograph. Faces are the first thing we learn to recognise as babies, and as adults we have a huge mental database of faces, allowing us to interpret and react to very slight differences. We read features like a language, like hieroglyphics.

On a recent trip to China, I attended a formal dinner in Zhengzhou. The rice wine was flowing and as I looked around the table at all the very varied types of faces, I had an urge to revisit my portrait project. I asked all the diners, even the waitress, to pose for me against the restaurant wall and the resulting images made an overall portrait of many different Chinese faces and of the event itself. Since then I have applied the same system to other models - family, people passing through the studio, a group of Olympic sprinters, and a class of primary school children. They are all on my website. Bing works for an art design agency, a sort of middleman company that links artists with museums and companies. As yet, he is unaware of this newspaper cover project.

To make a drawing you need at least two different tones or colours. I have chosen two colours for each portrait in a fairly arbitrary fashion, but using colours based on available plastics. I feel this gives a commercial shopping mall type of feel - as if Bing were a logo for a high street chain or supermarket.