On the occasion of his exhibition at Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, Julian Opie talks to Elle Magazine.

Q: What do you think of the layout of the exhibition here?

A: This is the first time I’ve done anything like this and I feel quite happy with the result. Normally, I look at an exhibition space and I try to keep the architecture exactly how I found it; I don’t add anything. In fact, sometimes I ask people to take away anything false, to open the windows and take away the temporary walls. But when I came to this space, although it’s a very beautiful space and I liked it immediately, I felt it was adaptable and I wanted to design the space to fit my work. I’ve been making exhibitions for about 35 years and you learn things bit by bit. It's not so easy to make them. You’ve to go to a space that is not your own, it's new. You have to try to make your works come together, and it has to look good and interesting. But they don't belong together particularly; it’s not a group of work – each one is conceived individually, so it's a challenge. However I’ve learnt many things and I’ve tried various things, and at the moment I'm working with this new idea where I design a space, almost like a big sculpture, to put the works inside. I think about where the door is – where you come into the space – and I think about the voyage of the visitor, up the lift and then the doors open… What will be the first thing you see? And then, what will be the unfolding rhythm of understanding and learning about the work? I think about the exhibitions I have seen, and those I’ve done, and I try to make it a little bit like a movie: the first room is quite quick, it has portraits, it’s fast, they're simple – there are just six pictures and they're not big, so you don't need to stay for too long. I think it's a mistake to have something complicated in the first room. People have energy, they want to go, they want to see the show, they don't want to sit there reading a lot or looking at early work that isn’t very good – which museums often do. In the middle of the space I've built a model city, and that’s a sculpture but it's also an architectural engagement of the space. So, in order to continue seeing the space, you have to walk through the city.

Q: So you designed the buildings for this space? It's new work?

A: I did, and it is new work, but I’ve made similar pieces before, for example in the 90s, that were much smaller and usually made from wood or steel. I exhibited them in many places around the world. They were black and white and not as realistic. I put that aside in the 90s and made many other things, but then I started to get more interested and engaged with them. I don't know why, I’m sure there was a reason at the time, but it seemed like something useful and when I came to look at this exhibition and a few others I’m working on at the same time (one in Seoul, Korea, and one in Melbourne, Australia), I started to think about building something very big on site, building a kind of city to walk though, to change from the real city – from Shanghai – that you’ve just come through. In here, it’s like I'm inviting you to re-enter that experience but in my language, and on the scale of the room; to echo the experience of the viewer and lead them into the exhibition. As you go through the show, you have to pass back and forth, and that movement becomes part of the story, not just your feet clicking on the ground.

Q: So in this exhibition, you are mainly interested in city life, but there are also some works here of countryside landscapes and sheep. What do you think of that, as it’s not your signature artwork style?

A: I live in the city, and I spend all my free time in the countryside, so there’s a duality in my life, and maybe in everybody’s life. Even if we live in the city, we have a strong idea of the countryside; maybe just to visit occasionally or maybe often. If we live in the countryside, we have an idea of the city, so I think humans now have this dual understanding of life, these two possibilities. I've always drawn landscapes, since I was young, as well as drawing the city, cars, people and animals. Personally, I don't have a hierarchy of which is more important. Landscapes offer a very different set of possibilities for working – it’s more like a window. All of these landscapes, these views, your brain can enter into. But [with portraits], this doesn't happen. Your brain doesn't go into the picture, the picture comes out at you. It's more of a dynamic quality that portraits and images of people have – they come out of the picture and join you in your world, whereas in the landscapes, which allow you to be smaller sometimes, your brain and your eyes are going into the picture – the lights and the roads take you in. Artists use many tricks with composition, for example this line of boats takes your imagination and your eye into the back of the picture, where you’ll see there is a ferry which soon will move across to the other side of the river.

Q: So are you the kind of person who is very into city life?

A: I am. I think it would be very sad not to be interested in life because that’s all we have. But city life? No more than any other life. I’m interested in what’s around me. I’ve been on holiday sometimes, and after a while I've had enough of sitting on the beach and swimming, and I start to make sculptures in the sand. Soon I have people coming up and taking photographs of the sand sculptures. Someone came up and said, “you should be an artist!”

I think if I was living in Antarctica, I would start to make sculptures from the snow. That’s just the way I deal with the world – I take what is around me and I play with it visually. I live in the city so I use the language of the city. It’s just natural to me, it's not that I'm saying the city is either good or bad, it’s simply natural – my nature.

Q: You’ve designed many human figures, like for Blur and diverse city people. So what kind of people inspire you to make artwork?

A: Generally I would say nobody. I think all people are quite inspiring if you look at them in the right way. Sometimes I'm sitting on the subway, and I look at all the people opposite me – in London, you sit opposite people on the tube. I look at each face and think, ‘each face is fantastic, each face would make such a good picture if I could persuade them to come to my studio or if I could persuade them to take a quick photograph.’ All faces tell a story, they’re all full of life, and in that sense a story about you is just as interesting as a story about anybody else, as long as it’s a good story; well written, honest. So I don’t feel like I want any particular kind of person. In fact, I'm quite careful to balance what I draw and exhibit in some ways because it's a touchy area: are you exhibiting more men or more women? More white people or more black people? There are a lot of issues around humans, we have lots of conflicts. I don't feel like I need to be too involved in that, but you can feel it there when you deal with humans – they’re complicated animals, but they’re different to animals. I draw a lot of animals and because we are not sheep, we tend to think of sheep as all the same. So there's not so much difference in the identity of these different sheep here, but they probably think we all look the same. We feel we all look very different and have different qualities. I enjoy focusing on the people’s differences. Having said that, sometimes people ask me and pay me to do their portrait, which is fine. It means I get more money than if I had just asked a friend, and it means I can meet somebody new who I don't know, who I probably would never have known. Another thing is that I like the history of portraiture. I collect portraits from the past – Old Master portraits – and these were done by commission. It’s interesting that when you look at a portrait, you understand that process; you understand that the King or a prince or a princess paid the artist to paint them. This is part of the dynamic, part of the meaning of the painting. The commission process allows me to draw new, unknown people. Sometimes the people who want their portraits done are famous, and then I think ‘I’m not Andy Warhol’ – I wish I was – but I’m not particularly interested in fame as a subject matter, I don’t seek famous people out, but if they come and ask for their portrait, I start to think it would be stupid to say ‘no, I won't draw you because you’re famous’ – that would seem strange, they’re still people. So I’ve drawn Bryan Adams, I've drawn Sir James Dyson, and Blur and Kate Moss, because those people either asked or their agents asked me to draw them. The King of Spain wanted his portrait done, and I liked the idea of doing that because it meant the portrait would be called ‘Juan Carlos, King’, which is such a cool name for a portrait. Every year in England, the Queen has her portrait done, and I would love to do one. It would be ‘Elizabeth, Queen’ – that would be a great name. It would be a kind of challenge, and it would be interesting to see how that would work, but I don't seek it out, I don't write and ask if I could do it. If it happens, it happens. But Sir Dyson was interesting and fun – I like The National Portrait Gallery, who arranged that in London.

Q: I heard you’re very good friends with Blur and Damien Hirst?

A: No, I don't know where you heard that from! I used to go to the same college as Damien Hirst, but not at the same time – I had already left. I knew him a little bit in the beginning, because I was in London and I was teaching at that same college. I didn't teach him, but I was aware of him and met him a few times but no, I'm not friends with him – not because he’s not nice, I just don't know him. And Blur, I'm not friends with them either. I met them because I had to draw them, so I went to Damon Albarn’s house and I photographed him and he played me some music on the guitar, which was nice. And Alex James, I didn't meet actually but I talk to him sometimes on email. Bryan Adams I met a few times and he wrote me a little piece of music, which I’ve used. That was nice, I like his sound, it's really good. Some other musicians have written music for me, but there’s no music in this exhibition. Sometimes I use music in my work. I have a family, many assistants and very few friends and I just work. I lead quite a quiet life. I have a house in the country and I like to spend time there.

Q: You’ve made portraits of people in Tokyo and London, is that right?

A: Yes. In the beginning, in London, I just went to the next door shop, where I knew the man who sold cigarettes, and I asked to make a portrait of him because it was the quickest person to find with a camera. And that has expanded outwards to photographing people on the street, sometimes I pay people on the street to come into the studio and I photograph them in the studio, sometimes I ask friends – and I’ve explained the commissions. And then I had an exhibition in Seoul,  and I thought it would be interesting to make an exhibition with people drawn there, because they would be different from the people I know. I began to notice that, in general, the people in one part of London look very different to people in another part of London. So people in Hackney have a very different feeling from people in Mayfair. It really shows in their walk, their clothes, their hair, so it gives the painting a different mood and style. So I thought maybe the people in Seoul would give me another feeling and mood. I then repeated this process. I hired a photographer who went on the streets and took many photographs for me and sent them to England, and I then drew from those photographs. I did the same in Mumbai and I have many people in Sarees and in very hot, bright colours and flip flops. Then I did the same process in Australia recently, so again many people wearing clothes for hot weather – shorts and flip flops, and a lot of tattoos. A different kind of mood for different kinds of people. I like that idea. I would love to draw everybody in the world, but it takes too long, and not everybody wants to be drawn, that has to be said.

Q: But you didn’t do that in Shanghai?

A: I didn’t do it in Shanghai. I only had a relatively short amount of time to prepare this exhibition. I came here a year ago to look at the space, but it wasn't clear that I would be making an exhibition until maybe six months ago, and the process of drawing from scratch takes longer than that. Although I have included quite a variety of faces – there are many Korean faces, there are some Chinese faces, some English, some Portuguese, in fact.

Q: There are rumours that some of your inspiration comes from ‘Tintin’, the Belgian comics, is that true?

A: Yes, I’ve been asked that a lot! I grew up with Hergé – I think he was a really great artist, and friends with Andy Warhol. He started during a very dynamic period of European history. I read and re-read his books when I was a child, and maybe it was one of the strongest introductions to drawing I had, as well as to storytelling and making a language through illustration. The way Hergé draws is that he has a language a bit like writing, and he can draw anything and everything and bring that world to life. When you read his stories you become very involved in them; you don't think about each drawing, your eye just moves into and across the pictures, engaging in that world. It’s like a film, like a book, but also neither of those. I like to think that maybe the work that I make has some of those qualities: like a film, like a book, like a story – that it can engage you and take you in through the power of the drawing. But as I grow older, I see that Hergé was clearly influenced by other artists as well, that I am also influenced by. I see a lot of inspiration in Hergé from Hiroshige, who was a great Japanese woodblock artist from the 19th century. And if you look at Hiroshige, his influences are many, from both Korea and China. The history of Chinese painting through to Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock printing is something I’m aware of and love, and am very influenced by. When you look at Japanese landscape paintings, there is very much this quality that you see in Hergé – the picture is very linear, and very graphic, but the way that it’s constructed is that it tells a story and creates a kind of reality that's not to do with photographic detail, it’s to do with the way that, as humans, we engage with a space – that's how we are created, to do this. We don't need much information. If you look at the screen behind you, there’s not much information, but your brain is able to create all of that landscape that’s in a night’s scene of the motorway. When you drive at night, you only have a few lights to tell you what your environment is, but your brain is able to interpret those lights as a space and navigate through it. We are very clever like that. The Chinese landscape paintings are similar to this; they don't give much information, sometimes just a wash, some clouds, a few lines, but you can mentally engage and enter the landscape, and move through the painting, up the hill and through to the little building, there you see maybe a donkey coming down the other side of the hill and your eye follows this, and you’ve been transported from one reality into another that was thousands of years ago. I love this and I see it in Chinese painting, in Korean painting, through to Japanese woodblock printing. Van Gogh used to collect Hiroshige and copy him as well as Whistler and Monet. I grew up with Monet, Van Gogh and Whistler – art is like that; there are many interconnecting influences.

Q: Last question. Most of the time your portraits have no facial expression, or even no face. Why is that?

A: Some do, some don’t. There is a painting of my daughter, Elena, downstairs, and her eyes are moving. So she has many facial expressions I think. This is really her – she has a quality that I think this picture expresses, but she's my daughter so I know that.

Q: That one is very cute!

A: Thank you. So sometimes I use facial expressions, but in order to do this I need different tools; maybe shadows, details… But often, you can tell a lot by just looking at hair, ears, stance, clothes. You can use lots of other pieces of information, and that’s the way I draw faces. They're more like people on the street, the people we see around us – you don't need much information in order to get a feeling from them. I like to draw in both ways, but by drawing the way I described, with just the dots, or no face, it allows me to make a lot of pictures. I can make people walk across a very long painting using LED technology and computers. If I had their eyes, and their eyelashes, and their lips, and their teeth, I couldn't make those films, because it’s too much detail, it would be impossible. That’s what drawing is all about: finding a way to describe the world that works for you, like a poem. You can have a very long poem, or a short poem – if you have a short poem you have to describe the world in big terms, very quickly.