I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.

I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.

Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.

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.

I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.

My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.