The Taiwanese magazine, dpi magazine, recently interviewed me. Here are a couple questions from the interview .. The interview is in Chinese and English .. so if you see it .. buy it :)

Does any culture or artist inspire you to create art works?

By living in a new environment it forces you to beware of your surroundings and not live life on “auto-pilot” .. to do things out of desire instead of routine. Children have such a great state of mind. They think simple things are exciting, they are emotionally honest and they are extremely curious. When you move to a culture that is much different than your own culture you can achieve this state of mind as an adult. Mundane things become interesting because they are done differently than what you are accustomed to and everyday becomes filled with memorable experiences.

In your opinion, what is the definition of creativity?

I think of “creativity” as a mixture of curiosity and appreciation for what’s around you. It’s a way to view the world. A creative person looks at something and wants to know how it works? Why it is the way it is? What is its history? Are there other things like it? Etc. We don’t always have the answer when we want to know .. so we start to think of possible explanations .. in the process we not only answer our initial question but we think of possibilities that can be applied to other things …

Latest art work “Winning with broken hearts and land mines” how do you design the vision of the theme?

I was watching the news/propaganda channel, CNN, and I just found it strange that they brand tragedy like they are selling a product. They repeat the same title over and over and have a consistent visual identity for each tragedy. Then I thought about the way the IRAQ war was presented/sold to the world. The latest sound bite you hear in the US media is “win the hearts and minds of the people” which is very hypocritical to say after invading a country against the will of world under false pretenses, commit horrible acts like the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, imprisoning detainees indefinitely at Guantanamo bay without representation, and in short destabilizing this region and world. So in that piece of artwork I wanted to illustrate the discrepancy between the message and the reality. There is nothing more contradictory than a cute face on a bomb.

When you are painting /drawing the figures, will you put emphasis on faces to show their expression?

I am fascinated with the various forms of communication. Facial expressions and other types of body language is very interesting. I like the idea of using many channels of communication in my work. To say one thing in one channel .. but something contradictory in another channel. For example, I will have a very serious topic, such as war, but will visually create it in cute animals and soft pastel colors. People pick up on the discrepancy between the harsh subject matter and the cute execution which makes them explore the piece more, because the intended message is not super clear so they have to think to make the connection between the two and come up with their own conclusion. A lot of the time what people see in my work is more about wha’s in their brain and how they feel about an issue. Similar to a Rorschach Test .. my artwork is just a tool to explore yourself.

On November, you had a show in SID LEE COLLECTIVE, could you share some interesting experience about it?

The Sid Lee collective, a brain child of the advertising agency SID LEE, invited me to Montreal, Canada for an entire week. I created images on 25 huge blackboards around their offices, met some great people from SID LEE, explored Montreal, had a amazing art show, gave a lecture about my work to local illustrators, sold some silkscreen prints and met a ton of people at EXPOZINE (Montreal’s Annual Small Press, Comic and Zine Fair) I am very grateful to Sid Lee for providing with such an amazing experience .. a very cool agency.

Posted in Interview