Ancient Egypt is a big influence for me because of Tutankhamun, which, when serving as an artist in residence with the Saatchi Gallery, I researched and produced a multi-media exhibition, “It Wasn't That At All,” in response to the gallery’s exhibit “Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh.” And I am familiar with and been influenced by a canon of work that includes the paintings of Duccio and medieval enluminures. I went recently to the Chateau de Chantilly, and loved the works of Jean Fouquet as well as their three Raphaels!
What inspires you today?
When visiting the Louvre at Abu Dhabi, I was really inspired by the message of peace and that we are all connected. It really blew my mind. And I so loved the “Soulages at the Louvre” series, a tribute exhibition that traced the chronological development of Pierre Soulages work, which I saw at the end of my tour. And there is the treasure of Sainte Foye at Conques Marcillac (see:
https://vimeo.com/482358875)
Music is also very important to me. I am engaged with an ongoing series called “Pop Music is the Only Truth.” My favourite song is DB Boulevard’s “Point of View”: this is what I shall have at my funeral. (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrMK8d9H_GM) found it interesting when my friend Xiaolu Guo was talking the other day about languages getting mixed up and forming new languages. I was listening to
https://open.spotify.com/track/3GCMoKi9KDq7UXmsClqfIQ?si=mEdjKhPDS5OdVkg7qhJaiQ&dd=1, Rooted out my Palm Wine Drunkard by Amos Tutuola. And I love it when people sing to me. (see: Music. https://vimeo.com/746661479)
I also am inspired by and interested in writing and art. I just finished Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. I also liked reading The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk. And I love Peter Doig. I like his paintings so much. I also enjoyed the fact he was rushing to finish his work on the very walls of the show at the Courtauld as it was about to open. And I especially loved the part of the work he did about his friendship with Derek Walcott. This made me want to read Derek Walcott. And in doing so, I found myself loving his elegy for Aimé Cesaire. It made me happy to see how their friendship evolved over the years, how precious it was to both of them, how their joy in being together spread and extended to include the community, music, families, sports – just everything.
Do you see your work pushing the tradition forward, or do you view your work as totally new or unique?
I suppose all the work I do is a mixture of traditional and new; but I like to think that what I am doing is new and unique.
For example, I write letters with a pencil, and do written interventions on the streets with cut out letters applied with rice paste; but, still conveying the same message, we invented a drawing engine to work within the field of digital technology with top programmers from all over the world. The digital work we made with STAIN studio, “The Fifth Order of Chaos,” was so new, so experimental a science film, they put it up at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (MMAM) as part of their biennial. I was proud of this. We took it down, of course, when the war broke out. We had also been scheduled to have a show at the Tretyakov, a gallery in Russia, which would have been a prolongation of the show we had at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), “Wonderchaos,” but now we are talking to an institution much closer to home.
In doing this work, I like to use everything at my disposal. Working with Sir Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov (Kostya), the Langworthy Professor of Physics and Royal Society Research Professor at The University of Manchester who is also a Nobel Prize Laureate, we wrote on a flock of sheep and created a new means of creating random numbers. We also used printers that slowly delivered reels of answers asked to a machine with the intervention of the writer who wrote a novel entirely in questions. We’ve made experimental surrealist films (see: wonderchaos.com).
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