The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
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.
All my work is much more peaceful than I am.
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.
I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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.
Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.
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 process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.
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.
You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
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 probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
The role of art in society differs for every artist.
I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. I applied almost as a lark. Then, when I got there, I was the dumbest person in your class.
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.
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.
