An interview with Julian Opie in connection with his exhibition at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai.

Q: You once said movement is the fourth dimension in your paintings. You said movement is implied, how is that so? By the shadows and different layers?

A: I’m not quite sure what I would've meant at that time. In many cases, movement is not implied, it’s real. In a lot of my work, I do think there is an implication though. Sometimes the dynamic of the composition suggests movement within the picture. I wouldn’t say this is true with everything I draw, sometimes I make very still images of people – especially when it’s a commissioned portrait, because in that case the relationship with the person isn't fleeting; it’s not someone on the street that you saw for a second, it’s more like sitting and looking at someone for a prolonged period. I’m also referring to the history of portraiture where the sitter would sit very still for many hours while the artist made the painting of them – there’s a stillness, and the only movement is the eye contact perhaps between the artist and the viewer. Maybe what I was suggesting was that in the past, artists could only imply movement – there was no other choice. If you look at a lot of art, for example, I often refer to Hiroshige – my favourite Japanese landscape Ukiyo-e artist – there’s merely an implied movement. If you go through a book of his, in every picture there are some people walking up a path or a hill, or there are some birds flying across the picture, or boats coming towards you. This movement gives a sense of travel within the picture that I think helps the eye to look at the image – it helps you to follow the line of view within the scene. That way, your eye travels around the picture and allows you to really take it in. That’s part of the magic, and it’s almost a trick to making an image; to make sure that the eye movement of the viewer is satisfactory, is enjoyable, and working. There are a lot of rules that people learn at college about composition – that your eye should travel down the dress of the woman and back up through the tree and then across the sky. I never learnt any of that, but as a natural thing by looking at other art and making a lot of my own pictures, I realised how important that process is. When I’m working on something, I spend a lot of time looking at it and adjusting, looking and adjusting, trial and error. I work with assistants and they all know that this is the way I work. I tell them, “no, that animation is too fast” and then I come back twenty minutes later and say, “it’s a little bit too slow now.” Slowly, we build up these pictures where, for example, I say, “we need some more sheep, there aren't enough. We need them to walk more often.” But really, what I want is for you to look at it and feel the movement of the sheep without it changing the picture – it’s just an endless thing. There are always sheep in the picture – they come, they go – but you're presented with a still image, in a way, of a view across the fields. The movement could be implied, as it would be in an old fashioned painting, but in this case, I can actually make the sheep move using the computer.

Q: In the work of Hiroshige and all the traditional paintings you mentioned, they are still images; they made people imagine figures or birds moving, but here, they actually move. How does that change it? Does that reduce the sense of charm and spirit of the work?

A: Much of the modern world has taken a similar route: in the past, we would talk with our friends, and you had to make an appointment to meet somewhere at a certain time, you would turn up and if they weren’t there, that was it. Now, we text; we don’t even make an appointment, we just say ‘see you around.’ Things change, and you can resist that, but I think it’s more interesting to see how you can use these changes. The world has altered greatly since the time of Hiroshige – he died in 1858, and I was born 100 years later, in 1958 – there’s a big gap. Yes, there is of course a great loss in the way that things have changed and in the way that humans relate with each other, in the way that television and phones have changed that. I see children on the train sitting together, travelling somewhere, and they’re not talking to each other at all, they’re just all on their phones, speaking to someone else who’s not there. I feel like that’s a loss compared to my childhood, where we just got bored and ended up playing silly games with our fingers. Maybe what they’re doing is more fun, maybe they’re a bit addicted, but we’re all addicted to habits and ways of doing things. The artists of the past did not have this technology. Sometimes I wonder that if Bach had an iPhone, earphones, a Bose sound system and a computer to write on, would he be using a string quartet? Or would he be writing his music digitally, like Philip Glass or Brian Eno? My feeling is that he would probably move with the technology, because he only used violins and harpsichords because that was what they used in the 18th century. If he had been born in the 12th century, he would be using viols and lutes, and maybe a pipe made of bone if he was born in the prehistoric times. We use the technology that is around us because it is our habit, and also because it’s a way to connect with the rest of the world. When I present LCD screens, I think the audience can subconsciously relate them to advertising panels, TV, and information boards in airports and shopping malls. The works make a connection, then, on a number of levels with people, and that’s how I like to go about making art; by finding a way of communicating through the materials and the imagery of the world that’s around me, and what interests me.

Q: How does this high-technology film technique differentiate from normal video games or digital videos?

A: They’re obviously influenced to some degree by video games, but they’re influenced by a lot of different things, just like everything in life comes from culture in general that is built out of many different elements. Video games are certainly quite influential for me, especially at the beginning. The language of video games felt very familiar to me, the ability to move around within an image was very exciting. When you look at a painting by Giotto, of the annunciation where the angel is coming to Mary — sorry, this is European history – and the angel is outside the building, you can see into the room, and it looks like a video game: it has the same structure, the same kind of mathematical perspective which is not very sophisticated in a way. In the early days of perspective, in the Renaissance, it had that kind of feeling, and I felt that relationship between early Renaissance painting – Duccio and Cimabue too – and computer game imagery. The way that you could walk through the spaces was what I saw in those paintings, although in their case, it was an implied journey that you made. However, quite often you would see John the Baptist coming out of one building and then going for a walk in the desert and then coming back into another building, all within the same painting, like a narrative or cartoon. All of those things are in my mind and in my process of making these pictures. The difference between my digital work and a TV show or a game is that there is no beginning or end. It’s a constant picture. You could say that it’s a landscape taken from within a computer game, or it’s a landscape taken from the world but in a way, it’s the same thing because we see the world through culture, through technology, and we see technology through nature. It’s a combination, this is how humans function, I think, of seeing the world through a shared imagination and conversation about what it is that we know. When we look out and see a view, we also see the history of art – we carry that with us whether we studied art or not, it’s all there; through TV, through film, through books, through culture.

Q: Where did you get your video game inspiration? Do you play them?

A: In the 90s, when I first saw the beginnings of video games, I felt a very strong connection with the way that they function and the way that the images were coming out of that. It made sense to me. I also feel that way when I look at Roman mosaics; the way that the drawing is made out of these squares of marble, which is quite an awkward way to draw – it’s not easy to draw with little pieces of stone – but at the same time, that difficulty, that translation of vision and drawing into an architectural gathering of stones, seems very dynamic and powerful, and quite meaningful and poetic. I think I saw the same thing in LED writing, for example, in buses where you see the name of the next destination coming across, that movement always looked to me like light on water. Kind of beautiful, something you can get lost in and stare at because it makes you feel a sense of calm, and yet you’re being told the time of your aeroplane, so there’s that kind of balance between those two things. When computer games and that kind of imagery came along, I recognised something that was historical and universal, at the same time old and new – a new way of using that imagery, new possibilities. I could suddenly make moving paintings that hung on the wall, which was really difficult before. Before, you had to have a projector in a dark room, with the sound of the film roll turning, and people had to be careful not to knock over the projector – it didn’t work very well, and I did try it when I was young, but I gave up. I also used to make paintings that had an engine behind it – so I put a battery in and some elements of the image would turn or move, like the wheels on a car. It was an easy technology, but what I do now is much more controllable and works in a smoother and better way.

I like the feeling of finding a poetic, meaningful moment somewhere you don't expect it to be. That’s often more powerful than finding it where you do expect it. Maybe when you go to a classical concert, or a library, you expect a meaningful, poetic experience, but when you go to an airport or an underground parking lot, you don’t expect that. But if you can find it there, maybe you can find it anywhere, maybe you can accept and engage with an aspect of the world that is not so easy to engage with. When I was younger, I travelled a bit and I found that my generation’s attitude had a duality of both loving the world, of being engaged with it, but also hating the way it is and rejecting a lot of what has happened to it. I remember driving around Spain in the 80s and some of the beaches were destroyed. The landscapes that were so beautiful were ruined by concrete buildings and the sea would bring in rubbish all the time. If you wanted to take a beautiful photograph, you’d have to really try to crop out office buildings and power stations. We’re all involved in this kind of fantasy of glamourising and imagining the world to be what we want it to be, but so often it isn’t. If one was to make art only about the fantasy and the clean glamour of a shared dream, that would be a lie, because it’s not like that. The world is also dirty and noisy, and it doesn't work, and people are not always having a good time, they’re not always on holiday, they don’t all have good jobs. There’s this other side to life, so I try, in a way, to bring both those elements into the work and to try to embrace both through art, to embrace the carpark and the motorway, and find some kind of meaning and poetry in those experiences as well. But also not to reject other aspects. It would be silly to reject the enjoyment of watching birds flying over a river, because it’s still very valuable to us. I don’t want to be just a negative mirror, but I also want to try to encompass everything.

Q: I think that’s why we need contemporary artists. I have another question about the graphic novel. I read that you are a big fan of The Adventures of Tintin?

A: Hergé is very universal and I’m sure he will continue to be so, but maybe for my generation, before we had phones and stuff, Tintin was really valuable to us. We didn’t have manga, graphic novels were not really available, but Tintin was available, and I lived off it for quite a long time, and constantly went back to those stories. I learnt a lot about how to draw the world and how to find a visual language that would cover everything. Hergé could draw the moon, a rocket, a bottle, a face, a mountain, an animal, all in the same way. It was as if his method of drawing was like his own personal camera that could take in anything and make it fit into his language. I felt a really strong connection with that and a desire to mimic it and find a similar way of making a language that would enable me to draw everything that I wanted out of the world. I think he was a kind of genius.

Q: People like to connect your way of drawing faces with the two dots for the eyes and the way Hergé drew.

A: I think there are differences in how we draw eye shapes, and I draw noses as two dots whereas he draws the whole shape in his own simplified way. For the mouth, I usually draw two lines, the bottom line doesn’t really exist but it defines the base of the lip, and so on. There are a lot of similarities there, but there are also some differences. I was really influenced by him, but he was very influenced by Hiroshige. If you look at the faces drawn by Hiroshige, they are quite similar. And then Hiroshige was probably influenced by previous generations, like Utamaro, who was perhaps influenced by the Chinese, and that continues on and on. You can pick something important anywhere in history, then you can also find threads elsewhere, and that’s what education is about. I’ve learnt, as I go along, to follow these lines of interest that have taken me to different areas. At the moment, I’m looking at a lot of Egyptian art, and I also collect it. A lot of my work is based on it. In tombs, you see a lot of figures walking from side on, which is an incredibly dynamic and powerful position, almost a bit intimidating too. They would use those figures in tombs to protect and to engage after death with the afterlife. All the walls would be painted with them, and figures would guard the doors. They would use the dynamics of the space and the lower ceiling that was painted with stars in order to create a kind of walk-in painting. That’s a lot like a computer game, or a Giotto painting. So, I’ve been looking at all of these things and trying my own versions of it.

Q: You combine all of these things into a very simple and neat way.

A: Thank you. I’ve been looking around, and you can see a similar dynamic in the temples here, in China – the way that you are invited into a room that might have a huge sculpture of an ancestor, and then smaller ancestors on the side. You have all this different imagery and this is the way that art can function in more ways than just being a painting on the wall. There are a lot of different ways in which pictures in space can function, which has changed over time. I’ve been trying to use some of those methods to make a contemporary version of that experience, but I still have a lot to learn.

Q: Your work is always instantly readable, you have this universal language. People from all over the world can immediately know what you are saying, what these figures are doing and what you want to express, I think.

A: I hope so, I guess imagery is going to be interpreted differently depending on where you’re from and how you’ve grown up. Your perspective might be different if you live in Ghana compared to if you live in Zurich, because your surroundings are different. I think through modern media, generally, we have a fairly shared knowledge of the world now.

Q: How important is that clarity for your work?

A: I would like to make things clear and logical. If anyone has seen the film, Arrival by Denis Villeneuve, which is a really good film, one of the things that drove me crazy about it is that it’s all about language and how to communicate with aliens. These aliens come down, and the humans hire an expert in linguistics to come and find a way of talking to the aliens, and they spend the entire film using a board, trying to find a connection between words. I kept thinking, “get a pencil! It would be easier to draw something!” Any person, any alien, can see a connection between visuals. Drawing is universal, it’s a galactic language which I think any animal, any alien, any human can share. When I’m here in China, although we now use Google Translate, I can otherwise use drawing as a shared means of communication. Egyptian hieroglyphics developed this idea of using a drawing as words. There were ways of drawing what you wanted to say, which made language, which made words, which became written. Visual language is only useful because it’s universal, that’s how we can communicate. It’s more universal than spoken language, I think.