THE ARTIST’S WAY

Books have always been an important part of my life. When I was growing up in the Philippines, my mum had a small room filled with books and magazines; it was dark and cool, which is a treat in a tropical climate, and I’d get lost in there. During boarding school in Washington, DC, the highlight of my weekends was going to a bookshop in Georgetown. By the time I graduated, I’d filled three Billy Baldwin-style étagères. Years later, I’d buy books at the old Rizzoli on Fifth Avenue in New York and at Heywood Hill in London: ones on art and architecture, gardening and food, some fiction and some nonfiction, all linked by my interest in how people live their lives — in every sense. For me, as something of an outsider, books are windows into the worlds that I’m curious about. I’ve never thrown one out.

Today, I think I have over 10,000 books, but I keep very few, maybe only 20 or 30, at my home on Ibiza, Spain. They’re mostly novels and biographies — stories to enjoy on holiday. When I’m here, I tend to read lying down in the courtyard, on the roof terrace or in the former garage that I turned into a guest room and library. And I’m never looking at just one thing. Sometimes, when I read about a dish in a novel — in his 1986 book “Answered Prayers”, for instance, Truman Capote writes about something called soufflé Furstenberg — I’ll track down the recipe. Or maybe a novel describes an atmosphere in a room that makes me think about a home I’m working on or a trip I want to take. I like to daydream without a goal or destination. If I’m starting a new project, I don’t necessarily say, “OK, I’m going to research midcentury Danish design today.” Instead, I just absorb various images, ideas and feelings and let them marinate. Then, when I have meetings with clients — even though I come prepared with samples and references — ideas will suddenly pop up, and we can design in real time together.

But to be able to collaborate like that, I need to make sure my tank is full, and I need downtime to recharge. During the week, I’m too busy, but on the weekends, if I’m on Ibiza, I go hiking in the morning to burn off some energy and then have the whole afternoon for myself. I love to be bursting with excitement and ideas, but reading is also a way to slow myself down. Often, it’s the act itself versus what I’m reading that’s most helpful. Occasionally, though, if I’m still feeling hyperactive or distracted on those afternoons, I start thinking about a room I wish I could create and end up moving my furniture around and experimenting. Friends have teased that even when I’m supposed to be on vacation, I’m always working. And that’s true of when I’m meant to be reading, too.

I don’t really think of what I do as an artistic practice. There are no boundaries or limits. All the ways I fill a day— even if I’m doing nothing at all — are one and the same. I don’t have a studio. I don’t wake up and go to a place where I sit down and make things. I just do what I need or want to do, and throughout that process, I think about possible works. Everything informs everything else.

For the past six years or so, I’ve taught a class at Columbia University called Making Without Objects. It’s an advanced undergraduate sculpture course, but we don’t really produce anything. I’m always looking at what’s going on in the world at large and trying to imagine how a young artist might experience that. The students have made films for YouTube. We’ve done projects on Instagram. Once, I rented a plot of land in the virtual reality game Second Life and had everyone build a sculpture there. I encourage the students to think conceptually and create things in their heads more than in any material sense. Really, the name of the class should’ve been “How Not to Do Anything”, but the university said it sounded counter to the idea of going to college.

Food has featured a lot in my work — I practically grew up in my grandmother’s kitchen in Thailand — so, for several years, I conducted the class in the kitchen of the gallerist Gavin Brown’s house in Harlem. In this photo, I’m teaching my students at his former exhibition space on West 127th Street, which closed in 2020, in a kitchen he built partly for this purpose. Every year I show the class how to make a few recipes, and here we’re cooking pad Thai, a noodle dish and also the name of a piece of mine from 1990 in which I served food to visitors at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York.

As I mixed the sauce and stir-fried the noodles, I explained to the students all the different elements that went into that work — the various influences and layers that could easily be missed. For example, I used an electric wok for the original piece because I’d seen one in a video by the artist Martha Rosler and took that as an inspiration. And the meal was based on a recipe from an American woman, in the ’70s or early ’80s, who substituted ketchup for tamarind paste because pad Thai wasn’t well known in the United States at the time. When I made the work, I was really interested in offering a postcolonial critique. There’s a methodology in the West of isolating objects from other cultures, of putting them in boxes in museums and studying them outside of their context, which, for me, completely misses the point. In contrast, enjoying a meal is a way to really engage with and understand the other, to share time and space and sustenance. Today, I don’t draw a line between the cooking I do for a work and the food preparation I do at home to feed my partner and me. Cooking, making work and teaching are all just living.

I lived in New York for 15 years, so it was meaningful to play here, like a coming-of-age moment as an artist. There were three very important shows for me this past year: one was at the Greek in Los Angeles, which is a big amphitheatre; then the Roundhouse in London, this huge, ornate Victorian hall; and then Terminal 5 in New York, which I call the Death Star.

I hadn’t been here in about six years, and my memory had really inflated how large the space was. You know how when you’re older and you go back to see your middle school, you feel like, “Oh, it’s so much smaller than I remembered”? In my mind, Terminal 5 was this giant room but, as I was walking in, it felt very approachable.

Sound check is the first moment that I get a feel for the space. Every venue is so different, whether it’s an old church or a high-tech, well-outfitted auditorium. My band and I will play through a couple of songs to hear the room. On a technical level, my sound engineer’s trying to figure out what the resonant frequencies are, to avoid any feedback. I also use the time to rehearse moving around: during the actual performance, I often can’t see where the edges of the stage are, since it’s dark and smoky, which can obviously be dangerous. This is my moment to get my bearings.

When you’re on tour, this is also the time to make any adjustments to your set, whether it’s the lights or the projections or the vocal effects. I have to adapt because my voice won’t sound the same in every room. It’s quite different than the creative process of being in a studio, where you’re doing more problem solving or exercising control over the art. Sound check is more like a ritual. You start to imagine what the show is going to be like that night. That’s what being an artist is, as far as I’m concerned: trusting your imagination.

I used to look at creative people and see their output as a kind of weather pattern that was generated by the world — something inherent — but the more I do this, the more I realise that nothing good happens without being imagined in extreme detail. Things don’t happen by accident. Things happen because people believe in them to the fullest degree.

During this sound check, I was actually trying to figure out what I was going to wear that night. I had two outfits that couldn’t have been more different: one was a very strappy black leather look, and the other was an ephemeral gossamer white outfit. I was trying to visualise what might make the most sense. Of course, I went with the black one. It’s New York City.

In 1992, I started making paintings with one brushstroke. It seemed like there was enough going on within a single brushstroke to keep me interested. I wanted it to look blown on, like the pigment used for those hands in cave drawings. It was all about speed, touch, timing. It’s difficult to be precise. When I first started doing these one-brushstroke paintings, if I didn’t like what I’d done, I’d get down on my hands and knees with a can of mineral spirits and a bunch of rags and wipe it off. By the time I’d finished that, I’d lost the kind of muscle memory of what I was trying to do. And it’s very important to the paintings that they be a transference of some accumulation of muscle memories from the body to the brush.

So, I was searching for a way to be able to wipe that slate clean but quickly. And I came up with this method where I prepared the canvas with a surface that was very smooth and tough. And if I don’t like my brushstroke, which is most of the time, I can just squeegee it clean without losing that muscle memory of what my intentions are. The brushstroke itself gets made in a matter of seconds, even if I work on it all day or over a couple of days.

It’s interesting to think about how things have changed since 1992. It sounds almost trite or clever, but I’ve discovered why I create the paintings. Through making them, I’ve not only learned who I am, I’ve learned what’s important to me as an artist. My deepest being is contained within the brushstrokes — in a very unhidden way. It’s all there. Nothing is added or subtracted; it just is what it is, complete with foibles or what have you. I think my trans nature is very much there for all to see. The brushstrokes — they’re strong and delicate at the same time. They’re imprints of my body, transmitted through the hand or wrist, coming from my complete being, body and mind. When I revisit some of the older paintings, it seems like my truer nature is still there for all to see. And it’s something quite pleasing for me to look back on now. It’s like I knew myself better than I thought I did.