The role of art in society differs for every artist.
The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
I’m as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we’re doing to the world around us.
I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.
You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won’t necessarily help you in making art.
I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.
I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
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.
My grandfather, on my father’s side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.
I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It’s what you learn, what you think. That’s all that counts.
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.
How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It’s more evident now.
For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
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.
I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.
Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don’t want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
To me, the American Dream is being able to follow your own personal calling. To be able to do what you want to do is incredible freedom.