On the occasion of his exhibition at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, an interview with Julian Opie for the 21st Century Business Herald.

Q: So you were born in London, grew up in Oxford, and then moved back to London to work there. Would you say London is a part of your work or exists as something separate?

A: I do feel strongly that since I was born there, the way London feels and looks is sort of in my brain. A lot of my work does reflect my surroundings, but I suppose if I was born in Dusseldorf, then I would be making work related to there. I also spend a lot of time outside of London, in fact I have a whole floor of this exhibition about travelling elsewhere, in the countryside. I like to escape from the city, but London is a good place to work.

Q: Over the past decade, Shanghai has changed a lot. Do you think there is something in London that has never changed?

A: I’m not sure anywhere is changing as fast as Shanghai. When I come back to London after visiting here, I feel like it’s really quaint; little houses, metal railings with black paint, little shops… Those are all things that, except maybe in the French concession here, you don't really see in Shanghai; there isn’t that kind of intimacy. I’d never thought of London as intimate, it’s only by comparison to here. But, yes, London is changing quite a lot. I’ve been in my studio building now for over 30 years – I think I moved there in 1987. It’s in an industrial area near the river Thames and the City, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, and when I moved there it was very quiet and dusty, many of the buildings were broken and cheap. Now, it’s London’s party-central place, and every night there are throngs of young people all drinking and having a good time, which is nice. All the buildings around me are now new and fresh and full. There is a strong sense of rebuilding in London – gentrification is a complicated issue there. In some ways, you can see a loss, but in many ways I like to see buildings looked after, areas becoming more functioning, so for me it feels like a good thing, but I’m not a political commentator, nor an architect.

Q: I see a lot of your work from the early 90s that are of buildings, offices, and public spaces. But in this new exhibition there are a lot of new beauties you’re depicting. So, over the past 20-30 years, is there something different about what you consider beautiful to make work of?

A: When you’re making work, it’s not so much of a choice. It’s more like a journey or a thread that you follow. It’s not like I can make buildings at any time. There was a time in the 90s where it really made sense with the work I was making. I was trying to make an environment with the exhibition, with every sculpture creating this huge walk-in model, like a computer game. There would be a cow, a tree, a building, a car, and I would paint the landscape as a generalised computer landscape on the walls. That became a walk-through environment, like in Tomb Raider or something. I moved away from that slightly in the 2000s, but for this exhibition and a couple of others I’m working on – one in Seoul and one in Melbourne, Australia – I wanted to affect the space. They're all big, high spaces, and I wanted to make more of an impact on the actual architecture, which is harder to do with small works from my studio. So I looked to this work from the 90s to build some work on-site. Here, in Shanghai, you look out of the window and you see this amazing array of solid tower-block buildings that stretch into the distance and completely close the skyline. Things fell together in the way they can sometimes, and I ended up making this project where I build the buildings on-site. I think the drawings for the buildings downstairs are a mix of London and some cities in Asia. I seem to be travelling quite a lot in Asia recently: I did a show in Japan late last year, I went to Hong Kong and Taiwan, I’m doing this show here, and a few shows in Korea. I’m in this part of the world a lot where there’s a very dynamic building programme. I was in a hotel in Hong Kong, and when I looked out of the window, I saw nothing but buildings. It was a solid wall of buildings. I drew some of those with the patterns in the windows. The way buildings are, you can put windows in many different ways and it looks real. There are so many buildings out there, so my work isn’t replicating all of them exactly, they’re more like beginning with a real one and then mixing in my idea of a building.

Q: I didn’t see your work in person in the 90s, I only saw pictures, but I noticed a lot of colours. In this current exhibition though, the buildings seem more modern – would you agree?

A: I think the new ones here are more based on reality, and that’s also true of the landscapes. The landscapes I made in the 90s were more based on an abstraction of a generalised idea of a landscape. At the time, I was living in the middle of France, and so the landscapes were based a bit on those views in the Loire Valley. I was there on a scholarship for a year and it affected me a lot. I was also playing a lot of flight simulation games on my computer – the 90s were the beginning, in a way, of the general use of computer imagery. Screensavers and computer games like flight simulation or driving games were all new, and their imagery was affecting me so I found ways of using it. I also began drawing on the computer. The animals I drew at the time were children’s toys, they were generalised images, as were the buildings and the landscapes. It was as if they could be a landscape anywhere. For many artists, I think the way that art works is that you circle the same ideas, year after year. I’m drawing the same things now as I was when I was a teenager. But I approach them differently because I’m different; I have more experience and resources, a bigger studio and more assistants, and I’m older and have more life behind me. Every time I approach something, it’s with a different view – maybe not a particularly better view, I would like to think they were better in some ways, but probably not – just different. The way I’m approaching things now is closer to observed reality. The landscapes I do now feel quite generalised but in fact it’s quite specific, from the south of France. They are quite specific to where they truly are. Even though looking at fields from the window of a plane is quite a general experience for people in the world now, it’s in fact only in one area that you can see this particular colour and layout of fields, and that’s true of all of these landscapes. I’ve made the tower blocks much more realistic than the ones from the 90s, it’s true. They have the reflections in the windows, and I’m quite excited by that; it makes them feel more alive than just the black and white and the bright colours. For me, these recent works feel a little bit more realistic.

Q: When I see your work depicting cars and motorways, my personal feeling is that it reflects our life. We are always driving like in your work, we are always working like in your work and we do that our whole life and then we pass away. Is that how you feel too, or not?

A: I think I recognise that feeling and that thought. There are a number of ways to answer that question. I spend a lot of time looking at the art of the past and in my mind, in terms of landscapes, there are two great examples, or schools, of approach. There is the Chinese, Korean, Japanese way, which is more vertical and tells a story through the picture, and generally there is a path that goes through the picture. Maybe someone is walking through the mountains, they come to a little stream, and then that flows down the painting and maybe some birds are flying back up again. It’s a kind of classic approach. Sometimes the clouds in the sky are quite vague and gentle. Someone who did this a lot was Hiroshige, the great Japanese Ukiyo-e artist of landscapes. But all of my landscapes are horizontal pictures, which is more of a European approach – to see the landscape as a vista. For me, the great master of this is Jacob Van Ruisdael, he's fantastic. He was a 17th century Dutch painter, and Holland was the height of European culture at that time. They put forward this idea of not just depicting portraits of the king, but more of normal people – portraits of families, sometimes just anybody, and many landscapes of the sea. Our idea of hanging paintings in the house comes from this period, from the Dutch. Jacob Van Ruisdael, and others, would often use the trick that in the landscape, there would be a road that would lead your eye and your mind into the picture, and I really like this idea of taking your mind for a walk into the picture. In a way, it’s a kind of escape. I have many ideas about how you exist inside your head, and everything out of it is only something that you can try to understand, try to feel, but we only have some information. Sight, smell, touch, some images of light bouncing on our retinas, upside down on our brain. But this isn’t really reality, it’s just information. Our brain interprets this information to give us a feeling of existing in the world. For me, making art has a lot to do with investigating this process and feeling, and trying to evoke those moments where you feel it very strongly. Sometimes, maybe when you’re travelling, you feel this more strongly, I think. When you’re on a train and you look out of the window, maybe you're a little bit bored, or when you’re driving on a long road, you feel this connection between the outside world and your inner world. When you’re busy, it’s not so important; we don’t know what is around us, for example, there is someone over there but I’m not really thinking about it. Certain moments, though, you feel strong emotions and connections. These special moments, moments where maybe I see some sheep moving across the green field making an abstract picture, usually I take a photo, I don’t know why, maybe I make a drawing, or I at least remember the visual, and then I start to work with my assistants. We look at sheep, I film more of them, we try different ways of making them move, and we start a project. All of my artworks are projects that stem from that one moment of observation and recognition.

Q: When I look at your paintings and your work, I feel that inner peace.

A: Thank you, that’s nice.

Q: How did you mainly discover your style? Did it come from a certain aspect of culture or another artist?

A: That’s also a big question! I don’t know what the main thing would be, I’m not very good at picking one, my mind doesn’t work like that.

Q: How about Michael Craig-Martin?

A: Yes, he’s an important figure for me. He was my teacher at school, and I was also his assistant. I definitely learnt a great deal from Michael, particularly the way to work. I think, for young artists, one of the most important things to get through art school is not so much to learn what to make, but how to make. In many ways, it’s natural to me to make art; it’s something I do without feeling like it’s a job or hard work, it’s just what I feel like doing. I would do it anyway, anywhere, in any situation, I think. But Michael helped me understand my own way of working, and this was why he was such a good teacher. He didn’t really impose his ideas on you, he drew out your own way of working and helped you on that way. Maybe there’s a close parallel in the way that we create, although we have different studio practices – he works alone with one assistant, I work with many assistants, I work in many different materials, he tends to work with just a few, and he is from a different generation and a different country, so there are many differences along with some similarities. Part of the reason I became his assistant and we were close was because I think our outlook is quite similar, not so much taken from each other, but just by chance quite similar. We are both colourblind as well, for what that’s worth. I struggle particularly with blues and purples, and greens compared to browns. My assistants say I’m really good with colour, better than them, but in a different way. I don’t know names of colours sometimes – if you show me a colour, I wouldn’t necessarily know. Blue? Purple? I’m not sure, but I can see the tiny differences between these colours better than my assistants, so it’s a strange quality. In the war, they used people with colour-blindness to become bomber pilots because they can see different tones better in the landscape compared to others. They could make out guns in the dark and they could see past the camouflaged uniforms. That’s not really important, but, the reason I hesitate with style is that I think there are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings around the idea of ‘style.’ I think it’s an old-fashioned idea. I remember when I was young, when you said you were an artist, people would ask, “what style do you paint in?” I don’t paint in a style – I’m not an Impressionist or a Pop artist or a Fauvist, that’s a way of understanding that you learn in school, a way of distinguishing the history of art, but it’s problematic. Art is not about Fauvism and Impressionism, it’s about Monet and Duchamp and Warhol, these are the people who make the art. It’s not about a movement or an interpretation or a grouping, those are additional things that come after. That’s one way to answer, but also, in the 1980s there was a change in the approach to culture. Something that was generally called Postmodernism. I’m not a historian, but Modernism saw this idea of history progressing in a straight line and moving towards some kind of progressive culture where painting is thrown away and we just keep the raw materials for minimalism and conceptualism. My generation saw things a little bit differently. For instance in music, up to that period, we had people like Philip Glass and Steve Reich – we had minimalist music and a rejection, perhaps, of classical music. Then we had punk music, and a sense of postmodern inclusivity that you can make all sorts of styles which are equal and balanced and not your style – it’s something you choose. So, in the 80s, we started to see ‘style’ as something like colour: if you want a red painting, or a blue painting, an impressionist painting or a 1950s-style painting, you could do that. We began to pick styles like colour. This was really radical and against the ideas held by the older generations, and it’s called Postmodernism. So I never saw myself as having a style, I saw myself as using it as part of the work, almost as a reference from the world. Having said that, I recognise that when I finish this exhibition and I walk around, it’s kind of all the same. Every exhibition I make is kind of the same. It looks like me, it’s my inner feeling and my inner world, and in a way we are stuck with that, and the older you get, the more you’re used to it and, in a way, the more invisible it is to you. I really feel that when I finish an exhibition. In some ways, I would like to be somebody else. I would like to make different kinds of work and not always replicate this ‘look’ of things, but I think it’s probably better to accept the way you work and the way you are instead of always fighting it. In a way, when I finish a piece, I’m always pushing – like a big ship that goes one way and you push the engine in a new direction because you’re fed up with where it’s been going. For a while, you have the energy for a certain direction, you can see I make a lot of work, but next year I’ll probably want to turn a little bit and go in a new direction – to reject last year’s work. After a few years you then think, ‘actually, I’m quite happy with what I did three years ago’ and so maybe you turn back in that direction. That seems to be my method.

Q: Do you think you’ll ever use new technology like VR?

A: Virtual reality? I was given a pair of VR goggles for Christmas and I quite enjoyed that for about a week. I think a lot of artists feel that the latest technology is quite difficult to use. The problem with using the very latest technology is that it’s too interesting. It takes over the art – instead of looking at the work, you’re looking at the technology, so I’m not really interested in that, I’m interested in what I see in the world. What I see in the world is TV. For 50 years or more, we’ve all seen a lot of TV, LED for information, advertising, information in airports, on motorways, LED is part of our common language of the city. Mosaic is an ancient system of decoration and imagery in architecture from the ancient past. Tapestry is something from Medieval Europe, and it probably has a history in Asia that I don’t know of, but there are also things like silk hangings, etc. I’m always looking at the world for technology, not so much in trade fairs, nor in magazines or online. So that's one aspect of it, the other aspect is that I don’t really like technology that’s too interactive. A lot of people suggest I could make things interactive, so when you walk past a piece of moving birds, they could change direction or something of the sort. When I make work for clients or public commissions, often they feel that they could somehow get a little bit more, but I don’t really like that. It becomes too much like a game, too much like a show or a trick. I think the audience then starts to play with the work like a game, and that takes you away from your dreaming and prevents you from entering into the work.

I think art is quite boring, and this is one of its key strengths – nothing really happens. You go and see a movie, or you watch TV, you read a story and there’s a murder, there are a lot of things happening, you go from beginning to middle to end – even music has this dynamic of having a beginning, a middle movement, a chorus, an end. That’s really powerful and good for film and music, but art isn’t really like that – art just stays there. For some people, this is quite difficult to accept. They think, ‘ok, it’s a picture… What do I do with it?’ But you don’t ‘do’ anything, you just look at it, and this is a quieter relationship, but it's one that I value, and it has a strength. None of my films have a story, none of them end, nothing happens – the birds fly across forever, always the same birds. The road goes forever, you can relax, you don’t have to wait for the end of the journey, it’s always going to be the same. If you own one of my films, you can have it in your house and it would be moving forever. I think that feeling gives you a certain calmness and an ability to just look at the work. If you have VR and you’re moving around the space, you have to be in a queue to wait to put the goggles on – you see that in some art exhibitions; you have to queue outside and then you get given the goggles and you have about 2 minutes to see the work. It’s too theatrical for me, too interesting.

Q: How do you title your work?

A: Titles are interesting. A lot of artists don’t like having them, but then they have to put Untitled, and that always seems like a punch to the audience, a refusal to give some information. I don’t like to do that. In the studio, each piece needs to have a name, like a dog – a dog needs a name so you can call them. It’s a human thing to name things, so for us in the studio, we all know the names of the characters in the exhibition, and all the names of the films. This gives us the ability to find them and pack them and label the files and so on. It’s important, I think, to give a group of work a name. When you put this name on the wall, it completely changes the exhibition. It formalises things, and puts a bit of a difference between the audience and me. The work is really here. It’s part of the building, part of some kind of authority. Although I’m nervous about that, I think it’s also kind of helpful, in a way; it gives a sense that it’s a little bit permanent – it’s not, it’ll be gone in two months, but it feels more solid to have this next to it, this connection to the architecture. I like to give just a little bit of a story, although I said earlier that there’s no story, just a clue for something to think about when you look at the pictures. I always use the truth in my titles. One of the images here, called Temple, is from when I was in Nara, Japan. We arrived a bit late, and got a bit lost. We were feeding deer, and when we arrived at the temple, the monks were closing it and we couldn’t go in, which was a little bit disappointing, but in another way, it gave us the opportunity to turn and look across the valley of Nara. Everybody turned. The sun was setting, and the birds were lifting up off the temple roof, and it was a strong emotional feeling. I didn’t have an idea for a film at the time, I just filmed it – as much of the birds moving as I could. I then took that information back to the studio and started to work on this film, but I felt that keeping the title as Temple in there just gave a sense of the mood and the feeling of that moment.

Q: So you photograph things first and then make them into the final animation?

A: I think photos are slightly dead. I don’t have any real photos anymore, I just have my phone – I don’t ever print the images, so I don't have photos. I think phones are more like mirrors that store the image. It’s not so much ‘a photograph’ anymore. It’s more like a process, if that makes any sense. I don’t really feel like I photograph things so much as I use the process of photography to mirror information from Nara into my studio. I don’t like the idea that my outcomes are based on photographs, they’re not, they’re based on Nara or Cornwall, or Toulouse. They’re based on my observations and reality. Like everybody, I use the camera as a way of transporting and storing that vision and that information.

Q: And what about videos? You mentioned you use them as well to document landscapes and things like that.

A: Yes, I film as much as I photograph because the movement is almost more important than the image itself. I’ve always used movement in my work, even before computers I was using old cine-cameras. It’s only now, with computers, that it’s easy to show a moving image on the wall without darkening the room and making people sit down – none of that is very easy for an artist. Warhol used film a great deal in his work and presented them like paintings, but it was harder in those days because you need a dark room and a projector with cables and plugs everywhere, it’s kind of messy. But with these new Samsung screens I use, it looks pretty much like a painting. It’s a bit thicker, but the technology is here to present them as paintings with no cables.