An interview with Julian Opie for Architectural Digest, on the occasion of his exhibition at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai.
Q: How many days did it take to set up this exhibition here in Shanghai?
A: I think we did it in ten days, we wanted twelve and didn’t get those extra two days. So we worked really late.
Q: And you painted on the walls here?
A: My assistant did most of the wall-painting, actually. I met him whilst doing a project for the Tate Gallery, in London. I made some wall paintings in the 90s, and the Tate bought one, so every now and then they do an exhibition where they put this painting up, and I don't want to paint it anymore – I used to do it myself, but I asked them if they could provide some people to paint on the walls, so they found Evan and another person and since then, he's been working for me as a handpainter. He’s very careful.
Q: We heard that you have two commission works here this time, is that correct?
A: ‘Commissioned’ in the sense that they are specifically made for here. Nobody asked for them, I just wanted to make some bigger works on an architectural scale. The only way to do that is to make them directly here, on the wall or fabricated temporarily for the location, like the building sculptures downstairs. I’ve used the idea of painting on walls for many years, but I’ve never really built a sculpture onsite before, so those office buildings downstairs are a bit of a first, which was an exciting thing to do. They built the towers for me, and then we put the windows on, which was another heroic task. We spent about three days going up and down the ladder and sticking these things on, being very careful. But I’m happy with the result, I think. I wanted to really utilise the sense of height and space and architecture downstairs, also to reflect the buildings that are outside, across the river and back into the Norman Foster development that we have here. The Heatherwick building is really great for that. Often, museum architects want to build these closed, white spaces for artists that are completely controlled environments and should be perfect for looking at art, but it doesn't work like that. We don’t want perfectly controlled environments, and there’s no such thing anyway. Nothing is neutral, there’s always a style, there’s always a flaw in the ways the walls are made, or the ceiling or the lighting. Whether it’s 70s style or Baroque style, it’s better to allow a little bit of life to come into the space – some windows would be really nice, some sense of the outside world. Usually, I also try to push the work outside of the exhibition space, so there are some works downstairs on the pavement. The idea was to kind of push the exhibition out into the outside space and create a walkthrough experience for the visitor.
Q: You mentioned that there’s no perfectly controlled world or space, and your works are always about seeing. So what’s your personal way of seeing the world?
A: Really, the answer is: this exhibition. This is an expression of my way of seeing the world. I think that’s what artists do, they try to externalise the process of seeing, navigating, living and being. They externalise that into an object, or a visible experience, whether it’s a performance or a film. I prefer to make still objects, even if they have movement involved in them, there’s a certain stillness or solidity about that thing. I don’t like time-based work, I don't like a beginning and an end, I like to make something that exists in the same way, always. I’ve been doing that since I was thirteen, I think, and I’m now fifty-eight, so you do the maths – it’s a long time. It’s a process that comes naturally to me, to look at the world, to draw the world, to process that with what I know, and to then externalise that through technology into an object. I would be doing that wherever I was, whatever I was doing. If I was living in the jungle, I would be doing it with leaves and branches. If I was living on the beach, I’d do it with sand. But I live in the city.
Q: The city has changed so much, no?
A: Shanghai has changed a lot. I don’t feel mine has changed so much.
Q: I’ve heard people talk about the European intellectual crisis, I don’t know if you agree with that?
A: I haven’t heard of that, what does that mean?
Q: It feels like people are more into entertainment these days, the world is becoming more focused on the entertainment industry than before, and people are trying to be like celebrities. They go with these sensational viewpoints to be more entertaining, and people seem to be more interested in those kinds of things now – a more exaggerated way of exploration.
A: I don’t really think like that, I don’t make cultural generalisations about the situation now, I’m not an expert and I spend all my time in the studio working on my own art.
Q: You don’t have much of a connection with the outside world?
A: I have a normal connection with the outside world; I go on holiday, I have friends, I go shopping, but I don’t make overall cultural generalisations about the way I see the world moving. I don’t really feel very engaged by that way of engaging. I engage more in a micro-personal way in my surroundings. I’m not a social journalist. I don’t see the world in that way, I guess that’s a journalistic approach.
Q: What topics are you usually interested in when you talk to your friends or when you have a gathering?
A: In the studio, we quite often compare new technologies. We get excited about Google Translate, and how that might change language-learning and society. People talk about England leaving the common market, Trump, I don’t know. Nothing special, really. If I had my way, I would talk more about art history with other people, but not many people seem so interested, so mostly I write about it and I talk to journalists and bore them instead. I’m very fascinated by art, I love looking at it, it’s very central to me. I suppose I’m a geek in a way. Like a musician might be about discovering music, I feel that way about art. But I don’t talk about it very much, mostly because no one else I know is particularly interested.
Q: But you talk about Google Translation and writing, so that’s another way of exploration, no?
A: Yes, I think about that but I don’t really think about tides of change and changes within society now. I would be more interested to simply look at this society and another society in another time, and art from here and art from there, which I spend quite a lot of time doing. I’m really interested in how language functions, and how we function as animals, and social beings within space and within the environment and our lives.
Q: Does that have anything to do with your artworks? Language changing, human involvement?
A: Yes, I think language is very central to the way that I work, but it’s more a personally developed language, I think. I see making pictures very much as developing a language, and using that language to explore, depict and interpret the world. I need a language to do that, I can’t just plough in there and invent something on the spot, I need to slowly develop a language which I learn, and then I can apply that language to the next thing that I find of interest in order to create the works.
Q: Your works are very simplified. What is the connection between minimalism and your portraiture?
A: Well, minimalism was an art movement in the 70s, and I don’t really have much of a connection with that. It was made by Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Phillip Glass, and a bunch of artists who were really great. I was still at school at that time, so I’m not a minimalist. I also slightly object to the idea of simplification. I think that’s a bit misleading. Levels of detail are simply a decision amongst many, and sometimes it’s necessary to remove one set of details in order to highlight another. This is the way that pictures get made. If you look at any artist’s production, you could call it simplified. You could look at a Giotto painting, or a Hiroshige woodcut print, or a Sol LeWitt drawing – all of these are ‘simple’ in a sense because they have to be made. Compared to reality, which is made of quarks, which are invisibly small and we’re not even sure they’re there, reality is infinitely complex. In order to make a language, in order to make a drawing and to share any kind of process of making art, you need, I suppose, to simplify; you need to draw out of the world. ‘Draw’ in the sense of pulling certain elements out of the world in order to create a language to work with. Having done that, you can then decide on how complex or simple it’s necessary for the work to be. If you look downstairs, there’s a drawing of my daughter, Elena, and her eyes are moving in different directions. In order to make that work, I needed quite a lot of detail so you can see the light in her eyes, and her eyelashes, and the shadows moving across her eyes. If you didn't have that detail, it would be very difficult to make the eye ‘move’. You just end up with a black dot going back and forth – I’ve tried that and it doesn’t really work, it just looks weird, like it’s floating. So, the decision about levels of complexity are really about what will make the picture work. I often find myself putting things in and taking them out. I did a film of walking through the forest, which comes from a real experience of walking through a forest, and really enjoying the balletic movements of the trees, which was produced by my movement. Everybody has experienced this sense that the world moves. Even though the world is still. Because you are moving, the trees move in front of each other – this is not a real movement, the trees don’t move, but we map it, and it becomes something very human, I think. Only we can see that – you would never see that if you were a worm, or you didn’t move. This feels like a slightly magical movement to pull out of the world. I ended up making this film by holding my phone camera up whilst I walked. The first simplification was to get my assistants to stabilise the film to stop the visuals going up and down, making it all a flat movement. The second process was for me to draw the trees, and I drew maybe a hundred of them. My assistants then put the trees on a programme that runs them across the screen. The smaller trees move slower, and the big ones faster, and this creates the illusion of movement. I did all of that and it seemed quite exciting and black and white, but it didn’t really work. I put it aside, and then I decided, if I put the little branches in, the feeling of recognition of the trees comes back in. So, it went from really simple – just black lines – to a little bit less simple, but it was a decision, and it wasn’t about simplification, it was about making it more complex in order to make it work. Before, it looked just like mathematical lines, but as soon as you put the branches in, it becomes immediately recognisable. ‘Simplification’ suggests that we start with a photograph and then move towards a drawing, but for me it isn’t really like that. I start with an observation of reality and I use photography as a process in order to gather that material, that information, and then I draw. The drawing isn’t really about simplification, it’s about an understanding of the world and an engagement with it. When I was young, I would be in the car with my parents, and we didn’t have phones, and I couldn’t read because it made me feel carsick, so it was really boring. Cars were the ultimate boring thing for children – long journeys. So one of the things I used to do was that I’d look out of the window and I imagined that my eye was making a line that moved around everything that you see: around the power station, around the tree, around the building, making a kind of drawing from my home to the seaside, where we went for the holiday. That process of seeing a line describing the world allowed me to travel and to make a drawing of the entire journey. That mental process I can do without a pencil is expressed in all of these works, as I travel around the world and through my life.
Q: Have there been any artists or art movements in art history that have given you inspiration?
A: Yes, many. When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time looking at early Renaissance painting. I love the almost mathematical approach. They learnt perspective around that time, and they would use the lines of perspective in order to create architectural spaces, and then they would put people inside. They would construct the painting a little bit like a computer game. I was looking at these paintings around the time when computer games were just beginning, where you walk around as Lara Croft from ‘Tomb Raider’ or any first-person narrative computer game. These kinds of games were just being developed in the early 90s, I think. So, anyway, when I was young Renaissance art was very influential for me. When I was even younger than that, the most art that I was aware of was Impressionism. I don’t know why but, in Europe that was what art was, up until Picasso. I love art from that period. It’s made a very strong sense in my head of what art ‘looks’ like. I remember when I was young, I’d go into a museum and see walls full of brown paintings with heads in them, thinking ‘I don’t actually want to go and look at every painting, I just like standing in the door and seeing these fantastic brown squares with gold around the outside and dark faces looking out into the space’. I’ve held that sense of what historical art ‘looks’ like, and I’ve used that a great deal in my work. As I get older and learn more, I actually buy a lot of paintings that are like that, and they’re mostly 17th and 18th century European paintings. They’re not really brown, they’re brown because they’re old and need to be cleaned – a lot of them are actually a lot more brightly coloured than that. But that sense of ‘a classic portrait’ that you know from museums is very powerful to me. You also see it in horror movies, and in ‘Harry Potter’ – you have a standard painting hanging on the wall but the person is moving around inside. That has informed a lot of the pictures that I’ve made – not that I’m copying ‘Harry Potter’, but I see a connection between those things. For us pre-’Harry Potter’ artists, it was more the idea of the haunted house where the eyes on the painting would follow you along, which feels a bit like a security camera. With computers, I can actually make portraits with eyes that move and heads that turn.
In recent years, I’ve become very interested in Japanese Ukiyo-e painting. I started finding that it was possible, even with a small budget, to collect these works – which are some of the greatest artworks in the world. But because they were made in the 1000’s, you can actually buy them. I started with Hiroshige, and moved on to Utamaro – there are a few other artists in that movement but those are my two main loves. Utamaro is really the king of portraiture and I’ve spent a lot of time studying his works, collecting them, and copying them to a certain degree – updating them, in a sense, to depict contemporary people. For example, I did a series of a woman smoking, which Utamaro did as well, except they were smoking differently in those days. Even other things like reading a letter, or holding a veil up in front of their face, holding a fan, etc. He would depict people very close up, sometimes with just the head, which was quite radical in that period, even politically quite problematic to depict people in that way, but he did, and they’re fantastic. Hiroshige is a landscape painter, I could talk about his work for hours, and a lot of my pictures are influenced by the way he would make a landscape where your eye travels down through the sparkling water, and then catches the birds, which allows you to go back up around and through the landscape in this constant loop. He would nearly always have some birds flying across his work, and usually someone pushing a boat back across the water in the other direction – maybe some people walking up the hillside. I use that loop method, and I actually consciously flick through books of his work, looking for ideas. I also collect a lot of Japanese Manga from Studio Ghibli films and other TV shows. From those, I’ve learnt a lot about how to draw people in action. It’s very different to draw somebody still, or to draw someone walking past – there’s a very different mood and feeling. Manga tends to be really dynamic and narrative with a lot of action-building. I also collect a lot of Egyptian art, and ancient Roman and Greek art. I suppose they form a large part of the basis of European imagery and consciousness and way of drawing: from hieroglyphics to the way people are drawn later. Again, I constantly use the way that pictures were made in that period; with mosaic marble squares, or with engraved stone which was then painted. I often translate those processes into my own, and see how that would function in a modern language.
Q: You mentioned you were very interested in technology, so what kinds of technologies attract you the most at the moment? Are you a digital person, and active on the social network?
A: Technology really means to manipulate the world into a functioning machine, and that can be done through weaving, or mosaic, or the carving of stone, or through electronics. I think you probably mean electronic technology. There isn’t really an intrinsic difference between electronics and other forms of technology. Having said that, I think the electronic revolution has taken us on a journey that’s quite separate and different from anything that we’ve seen before. People call it the next revolution after the Industrial Revolution – it does seem to be changing lifestyles in a similar way that the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution did. So really, I’m as much a digital person as anybody. I go through periods where I want to put my phone away. At mealtimes I try to get people to put their phones down in the family; it makes me sad when I see a table where people are all looking at their phones whilst they eat – it feels like a kind of loss, in a way. But I do understand the excitement of the communication that’s possible there. There’s something very human about the desire to distance ourselves from the world, there’s something very exciting about that – to become an avatar in a computer game is more exciting, even if you play ‘Sims’ which is all about doing the washing up and getting a job – what’s that about? I hate washing up! But when it’s in a computer game it becomes fun and exciting, you get to earn coins and things like that. I think that process of distancing is very interesting and it’s very human, and it’s something to do with art. I could go on for hours about that but I won’t. Digital technology has allowed me to make artworks that move, and that’s new and something very exciting. It was possible to make artworks move before, but it was very difficult to do it in a calm, discreet way. Now, I can put moving images outdoors and things like that. Without current digital technology, how would that be possible? It wouldn’t be, really. You’d be stuck carving into stone and painting it, which is cool too, up to a certain scale, although there are things like Mount Rushmore – it can be done. That appeals to me a lot but at the same time it’s quite bombastic and political, whereas, I think, the skin of a contemporary building avoids that problem because of its ephemeral quality.
I don’t do Facebook and those kinds of things – I tease my children about it. It’s moving very fast. I don’t really have many friends anyway and I prefer to talk to them in person. I do text quite a lot to keep in touch with my family when I’m travelling, and I like email. Email reminds me a little of fishing – or at least what I imagine fishing is like – where you have a big net and you throw the net out in the morning and you drive the boat, and then you pull the net in and see, ‘oh! I have a dolphin and I have a carp!’ – I never know what I’m going to get in my email, and that’s part of the excitement, that feeling that you have a network out into the world. I could get an offer to do a commission in Chicago, or a request from a child to look at their drawings done in my style, or annoying advertising, or I can get an exhibition proposal from somewhere; it’s very exciting. In the old days, you just got letters – I never liked them very much – but there was the same excitement, I suppose, when letters came through the door. Usually it’s a bill, really. Whereas email gives you that sense of possibility, which I enjoy. I draw, and then I check my inbox to see what’s coming in from the Lisson Gallery, or the latest news on what’s happening with an exhibition. It allows me to work really fast. I have twelve or thirteen assistants in the studio and I try not to email them – I try to walk down and talk to them, chat a bit – but I also have factories in Seoul, in Belgium, many in London. If they were all in one building, it would be quite a lot, so I prefer to have these connections via email. The younger generations may not remember what it was like, but you used to do a drawing, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and put it in the letterbox, and a week later you might get a reply. Then there was the fax, which was amazing – I love faxes. You could do a drawing but it wouldn’t last for more than a week. Now, I can send my drawings, I can send films to everybody. Here, I was sending out complete digital walkthroughs of the exhibition, a notion that was unthinkable a short period of time ago. Soon, I’ll put models of the works on my website so you can go on there and virtually walk through the exhibition if you can’t make it to Shanghai. I don’t see it as a replacement, more of an additional quality, like a catalogue can be an addition to an exhibition; a walkthrough could be another aspect to that.
Q: Are you working with, or will you work with AR?
A: Augmented Reality? It makes me feel a bit old fashioned, but maybe I will. James Rosenquist, the greatest American pop artist in my opinion – apart from Warhol – said he only used old fashioned imagery. His work was based on billboard advertisements, which used to be painted by hand in the 50s and 60s. He did that as a job and then he took that technology and made his paintings that way. He said he didn’t use modern imagery and modern advertising as a source, he used old fashioned imagery. If you look at Warhol, I think it’s kind of the same – he used contemporary and famous people, but he also used a quite old fashioned silk-screening technique that wasn’t very good. When he was using it, it probably could’ve been better but he liked that ‘not-very-good’ look that was familiar. It’s that thing again of a shared language, of familiarity. I’m more interested in using that shared language than coming up with the latest new thing that isn’t familiar, and therefore it has too strong a taste for itself. With AR, the exciting thing would be the technology and it would be really hard for the art to be interesting in itself and to exist in itself. I’m sure some artists can do it, or they will. But for me, I’m a little bit behind with that.
Q: So, you designed the album cover for the band, Blur. Do you have any other collaborations with bands?
A: I do. My connection to Blur isn’t really an artistic one in the sense that we didn’t used to hang out together and make music, or that kind of thing. They went to art school as it happens, so they’re quite knowledgeable about art. One of the members went to the same art school that I did, I believe, but he’s younger. My connection to them was really a business deal through EMI, the record company, and a design company. But it was very fortuitous for me, I think even for them. I won a design prize for it, and the album seems to be really well known, partly in terms of the cover. Wherever I go in the world, people know this one piece of work, which is really great. The music world has a much bigger audience than the art world, you cannot compete in any way. Growing up, I always loved LPs, they were before CDs, they were bigger. The cover of them was, to young people, sort of like a museum of imagery: the Roxy music albums or The Beatles albums; the covers, often designed by artists, were the imagery, language, and art history of young people. I vividly remember a lot of those album covers, as my whole generation does. Then it moved to CDs, which I still quite like, they’re still square-shaped. Flicking through CDs in a shop is often more rewarding, I think, than going to lots of galleries. The designs are often more functional and immediate and less pretentious than a lot of art, I find. So I was really happy to do a project with a CD cover. I also worked with Bryan Adams. I made a lot of pictures of him, and he wrote me a piece of music to pay me, which was really nice. He played it to me over the telephone, on his guitar, and I had tears running down my face because it was just so exciting. I use that piece of music sometimes with various artworks. There’s also Max Richter, who is the greatest contemporary classical musician at the moment. I did a project with him for a ballet in London called ‘Infra’, which was choreographed by Wayne McGregor, and that was a very happy project for me. I did the stage set for the ballet, and I was involved a little bit in the choreography of the dancers. I drew them a lot, they came to my studio and I drew ballet dancers for about a year. That was a collaboration which was more artistic between Wayne McGregor and myself, giving me some things, and me giving him some things. And then I did a CD cover for Max Richter, who’s a really nice guy, and in return he paid me with a piece of music. Otherwise, ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ is one of my favourite tracks of his.