Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture. |
The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical. |
When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family. |
The role of art in society differs for every artist. |
Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication. |
Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field. |
I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd. |
My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight. |
Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid. |
I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with. |
I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination. |
I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up. |
To fly we have to have resistance. |
A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time. |
It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level. |
Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next. |
I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist. |
I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me. |
It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it. |
The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning. |