Waterlilies always come in Buddhist sculpture. The Buddhas all stand on lotus pedestals, because the lotus is grown from the mud. The mud represents the stained world, a dirty world, but growing from the dirt is such a beautiful, pure thing. This is the way the spirit should be.

However fake the subject, once photographed, it's as good as real.

When I wake up I just make it happen. My dreams come true- that is the artistic practice.

It's pre-photography, a fossilization of time, Americans have done the Zen garden to death. I wanted to do something different.

[I'm concerned with] aesthetics and this idea of how the passage between life and death goes. I can visually present that by borrowing this Buddhist statue.

Life is one passage and then you keep moving into another state. It's like you might be reborn, but the process of being born you won't remember - the same way that the dying process is a slow movement from consciousness to unconsciousness.

Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.