An interview with Julian Opie about his exhibition at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai

Q: Congratulations on your first solo exhibition in China – I’m wondering how this exhibition happened, how did you get involved in this whole process?

A: I often feel that artists are like women in old-fashioned balls; they sit on the side and wait for the men to come and ask for a dance. People often ask, ‘why are you exhibiting in China?’ The simple answer is, ‘because I was asked.’ I don't have a plan, I don't think ‘I would now like to exhibit in Brazil, so I will go and find a place to exhibit in Brazil’, it doesn't work like that. I have a number of galleries around the world, and I hope that, if they're good galleries, they will be actively pursuing possibilities for me, but I personally don't seek out exhibitions or commissions myself. In this case, I have a gallery in London called the Lisson Gallery, and they have a lot of interest in China, both in terms of exhibiting Chinese artists but also in terms of showing the work of their non-Chinese artists in China. Part of that move has been to be associated with some local curators on the ground here, in particular David Tung. It was very much part of his initiative to look for possibilities for the Lisson artists; to try to find a good fit between clients and people who wanted to do projects here and the artists. Through that process, I was invited to come here and meet the Fosun representatives, particularly Jenny Wang, who is the Head of the Foundation – so we met and we talked about a number of possibilities, one of them was a small exhibition. The main idea was more along the lines of a public commission, but bit by bit over the next few months, the ideas began to shift and change. We had seen this building in the stages of it being built, and the suggestion of doing an exhibition on the second floor came up. I was quite excited by that because the minute I walked in, I thought it was a great architectural space – I really liked the height, it’s exciting, as well as the views out of the two sides of the building. Very often when architects design museums, they give artists a kind of white box, as if they want to separate the art off from the rest of the world, and give this intense experience that’s not connected to… Chicago or to Rome or wherever the place is, and I don't like that. I like windows, I like the sense of connection with the outside world. These two giant ends of the space which show you on one side: the river and the buildings across the way, and the third tallest building in the world, it’s a very dynamic and exciting view. On the other side we see a little bit of Old Shanghai and the rest of the centre, which is very architectural. For me that worked really well, so I was very excited by that proposal. As things moved along, we started to talk about the third floor. The exhibition expanded greatly, doubled really, which gave me an opportunity to really cover a lot of what I’m working on at the moment. This show represents a great deal of the projects I’m doing. They’re tasters, in a way, of each of those projects – but I’ve got thirteen movies here, which is a rather big taster. There are a lot more jogging paintings, a lot more portraits. But I think, all in all, as a journey through the exhibition, it gives a fairly clear idea of where I’m at after the last two to three years. Something like this exhibition, a similarly structured one, though it would probably be different works, will go onto Seoul in Korea, and then onto Melbourne in Australia in 2018. All exhibitions are a test for the next exhibition. All works are a test for the next artwork, and then that artwork is a test for the next artwork. That’s the way life is, every day is your experience but it’s also a test for tomorrow, and that’s the way with exhibitions. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot making this exhibition, it’s quite a new style of doing them.

Q: Speaking of the local environment and its interaction with your work here, I’ve heard you created site-specific work for this exhibition? By working with some students from Shanghai? Is that the project?

A: That’s a stretch, really. There are works that are made on-site, for example some of my works are painted directly onto the wall so that they exist here and only here. When the exhibitions finish, they will be gone. The works that are most related to Shanghai are the buildings downstairs. Although they relate a lot to work I made in the 90s, they’re also quite new, and I was somewhat conscious of placing them in relation to the tower-block buildings and the office buildings that we see out of the windows on both ends, so there’s a kind of connection/reflection. As you come into the exhibition, you’ve been through Shanghai, you’ve been past all these buildings, and you can take that with you into the exhibition, and continue that feeling of walking amongst these giant structures, and find a similar way through my world that I’ve created here. I’ve divided the space purposefully into four sections, which allows you to rest within one section but to then make a little journey through the sheep sculptures or through the buildings, to give you a sense of having been somewhere, now you walk through a city, as a tourist perhaps, into another area, another concession. Then you’ve got the walking people and you walk back through the city into the jogging area, or the portrait area. It’s an exhibition device in a way, it allows me to make a very large work which I couldn't transport here, and I couldn't really make in my studio, my studio is not big enough. Otherwise you end up in an exhibition in a six-metre-high space with works that are two metres high. Everything is at eye level and then you have this giant space above, which doesn’t feel very successful or satisfactory. By making this work onsite, I could lift the whole exhibition right up to the ceiling and create a real sense of scale. I did have some very nice assistants, both Shanghai-based people that were organised by the Lisson gallery, but also a group of young students who came from all over China – from the west and locally from Shanghai and Beijing, and I’m not quite sure what the process was to find those assistants, you’d have to ask someone else.

Q: I think they had an open call for young people who were interested in your art?

A: Yes, we had a lot of people come here and a lot of them helped with the wall painting, which was really nice, and some of them helped me with the buildings. I wouldn’t say it was a collaboration, they were here in an assistant role to tidy up bits of the walls and pass things to us. A collaboration would not be the right word, more like really nice assistants who were very enthusiastic and I hope they gained something from being here and seeing how an exhibition gets put together. They seemed to have a good time.

Q: Let’s go back to the most representative aspect of your work: the portraits. How did this idea of creating such simplified portraits with strong colours and the bold outline develop? Did it come to you at the very beginning of your career or was it after some years of research that you found it?

A: A bit of both, I think I've always drawn in a recognisable way, even when I was young. Obviously, when I was young it wasn't so specifically my way, but if I look at drawings that I made, when I was a teenager for instance, they’re very similar. They follow a similar process to how I work now, even if at the time, I didn't have the resources or the knowledge of what to do with that process. I’ve always been interested, not so much in developing skills, but in finding ways of drawing that made sense. For instance when I was a child, bored in the car, I used to imagine that there was a line running along next to the car, and this line would go around everything very fast. If it hit a factory, it would go around the factory, if it hit a tree, it would go around the tree, and it would follow me along in the car. That line, in a way, is drawing. It’s the way that I treat the world, the way that I see the world; I see a line going around things. I think lines are an interesting way that the human brain interprets the world, you can call it simplifying but you can also call it turning something into a usable language. Language then becomes the next thing we can talk about, which is the way that humans use words in order to communicate, describe, to remember and to think. Words are not just something to write with or speak with, they are the way that we learn about the world and understand it. But they are just one aspect of the human ability to navigate the world. I think drawing, imagining, a space is another. Without turning around, if you imagine how you entered this room, you can do it, I think. You can remember the way out. I can hold the entire building in my head, I can describe to you quite carefully, by drawing, how to reach the toilets from here, and how to get out into the lift. That picture that you have in your head is what I’m drawing. It’s not so much sitting in a field doing a sketch for pleasure, it’s more an attempt to locate the navigation system that we hold in our minds. It’s more functional, really, than decorative or entertaining. I collect a lot of art, I like collecting, and one of the things I collect are 19th century silhouette paper-cuts – you probably have a similar tradition here in China, certainly in Japan they have a similar tradition. In Europe and America, in a time just before photography, silhouettes were the main form of portraiture. People would do them for themselves, you just have to put a candle next to your head. You cast the shadow on the wall, you draw a line around the shadow, and then you cut it out with a pair of scissors and you have a portrait. Is this drawing? Anybody can do it. People would do it in the evenings, as a pastime. I really like that way of drawing, it makes sense to me. It’s a natural process; a shadow. Like when early humans in caves would put their hand on the wall and blow natural ochre colour over it, and when they took their hand away, they’d be left with the outline. Is that a drawing or a process? It mirrors our human understanding of reflecting our thoughts and our images into the world, onto the ground. When we draw with a stick in the sand, it’s to project our inner understanding and navigation back into the world. As an artist, I see myself taking in information – like a camera, in a way –  from the outside world, visual information, processing it, and then putting it back out again through technology, whether that’s through LEDs or mosaics or tapestries, LCDs, metal. All of these are ways in which I can reproduce and put back out into the world that imagery that I’ve taken in. There’s the world, there’s me, and then there’s the art, and there’s a triangle going on there. The style of my drawing, however, is just because of me; whatever I do, it always comes out a bit the same, because inside my head, I am the way that I am, and the way that I see is both universal – I’m sure it’s very similar to the way that you see, but it’s also ‘me’ and personal. In the same way that you have a smell, and a way that you walk, and you have a way of approaching things and messing up again and again and again. We are that way as animals. I recognise that all my work has this kind of style. When I came to draw humans, I was quite conscious of looking for a way to draw them, I didn’t just do it. I didn’t draw humans for a long time, maybe 20 years. I wanted to as I felt there was a gap in the work I was making. I looked around for a language that I could use to depict them, and I ended up looking at graphic symbols – you can buy books of them: people digging the road, or a man and a woman going to the lavatory. I specifically chose the male and female symbols (for the lavatory) and I layered them on the computer over a photograph of a friend. I pulled the logo of the man until it fit over the image of my friend. No feet, no neck, with just a circle for the head, but the way that the person stood suddenly meant the logo became my friend. That was exactly how he stood. It changed and became someone specific. This filled me with a lot of excitement and energy, and I went down that route for some years. Then I thought, ‘what if I do the same to the face?’ So, as if I have a camera on the whole body, I zoom into the face and I do the same process; as if there was a logo for someone’s face on a chocolate wrapper, for example. I would find a logo for each face, and use the same kind of rules as for the universal man and woman – I would find a universal face: two eyes, two dots for the nose, two lines for the mouth, one curve for the jaw, and some hair. That’s the universal symbol. And when you move these elements around, you can represent anyone and make it feel recognisable and special for them. It’s a style, it’s a way of drawing that I’ve developed, but it’s also a process that anybody can do; if you go on the internet there are a lot of people that draw in my style. I get a lot of emails from children and schools where they do a project where everybody draws their friends using this system. I think it’s nice, it feels good to see that it’s not just my invention, it’s more like I’ve stumbled across a process and a system that can be used like writing.

Q: Thank you. So, last question… I’m curious about the use of technology in your works. Like you said, you usually just paint landscapes or portraits, which are very classic subjects in traditional art. What do you think is the role of technology in your art? Is there anything new that has been brought to your art by using technology? When I was watching your moving images, it just makes the frames and the borders of your artworks disappear, and it makes me feel calm, like I can keep looking at it forever.

A: That’s nice. I like the idea of things that one can look at forever. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but instead of music, I often listen to soundtracks, like the soundtrack of rain, or of trains passing by. Simply because, unlike songs, it has no beginning or end, it’s just sound. But it makes me feel the same – there’s a kind of calmness in that sense of continuity. In terms of the technology, that just means the manipulation of materials in order to produce something else, which is an ancient human thing, ever since we made stone knives to cut the hides of animals. Now, I think technology in people’s minds just means ‘electronics’, which is just one specific type of technology. I use mosaics and weaving, both of which are ancient technologies which have a very strong material presence and reference, culturally. If you make a contemporary image out of mosaic, there is immediately a dynamic between the contemporary (someone with headphones, for instance, which we relate to now) and mosaics, which is a very historical and heavy form of drawing. When you put the two together, as I have downstairs with the jogging people done with mosaic, there is a dynamic and a tension, which I find to be useful in terms of making a picture. If you think about mosaic squares, they’re a lot like pixels, like LEDs, so there’s a sort of continuation of that idea that in technology you need to use elements, unlike reality. Reality isn’t really built like that, it’s more of an endless thing. But photography, LED, LCD, mosaic, tapestry, it’s all made by the putting together of many little elements; this is the way we create and build images. The great thing about electronic technology is that it allows me to make things move. Movement is a very important element of artwork to me, and I’ve always tried to use it. It was difficult to use movement before computer technology, or at least difficult to present, very clunky; you couldn’t put paintings that moved on the wall until fifteen, twenty years ago, and even then it was really difficult. It’s only pretty recently that you can make a clean, flat screen with flat colour, with no wires or cables connected, and present it like a painting. This has been a kind of revelation for me and I produce a lot of work using this method. But I also, as you said, use traditional methods like hand-painting on the wall, and I use metal fabrication which is relatively traditional. The way I use technology is not so much that I go out to trade fairs and find out what the new technologies are, it’s more that I see it in the world. When I see something made in a way that is interesting for me, then I borrow it: I find out how it’s done, I bring it into the studio, and I get things made using that method, in the same way that the imagery itself is taken from the world, from observation. The imagery of seeing sheep in a field is then combined, like in cooking, with another ingredient; which is that they’re made in the same way as the Hollywood sign, for example. The letters are objects that are cut out, and that similar strategy is used for the sheep. The drawing is cut out so thick that it can stand on the floor like a real animal. I often use that combination of technologies in my work.