When did you first
become interested in drawing?
When I was two years old, according to my mother, I began drawing Coby,
the mascot of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. I eventually received classical
training, but as a teen, my interests switched to comics, particularly manga.
Not limited to only art, which people
and works have influenced the development of your sensibilities and taste?
Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows had a big impression on me. I got it as a gift from a mentor when I was 21
years old. It gave me confidence in the value of mystery and poetry in art,
wherein hinting at something rather than outright exposing it has a greater
impact since it allows the viewer to become personally involved and form a
deeper bond with the work.
I read in your
interview about 10 years ago that you were working as a graphic designer during
the day and doing illustration work at night after coming home. You then
quickly became successful in the field of fashion illustration. How did you
feel about the dramatic change in situation?
To be completely honest, I still have no idea how it happened. I never
imagined I could support myself with my talent, and I still try to not take it
for granted. It all happened organically because I was so frustrated with my
day job that I poured all that energy into the work I did at night and
eventually it took off. Ironically, there are occasions when spite can lead to
wonderful things.
We first saw your
work in Gucci campaigns and were shocked to learn that they were drawn in
digital format. We were also surprised by the sheer number of works in Gucci’s gift-giving catalog. How did you
develop your own unique style and skills of digital paintings?
Practice
makes perfect. In order to purge the bad ideas from my system, I had to paint a
lot of them first. Eventually, though, like in Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the best and most intriguing
solutions win out and became a signature, which inevitably develops into a
style. I’m intrigued to see how far I can push it by
doing things that are very different from each other yet unmistakably
belong together.